Throw me back into the computer woes category. After about 3 weeks of computer success, I am back at square 1. It seems that sometime yesterday, my computer was in the hibernation/powerdown mode. When I tried to bring it back to life, It seemed to hang. So I did a warm reboot and when it went through the load up, it started a perpetual reboot. It would get past the Windows logo screen but then a blue screen would flash for a split second and the computer would reboot. I managed to get the computer to stop at the prompt where I can load windows via Safe Mode or some other choices. Well, it got hung on loading one of the drivers. My suspicion is that the video driver has become corrupt and is stopping Windows from loading properly. After a couple of troubleshooting maneuvers, I managed scandisk to run, which it found some errors. I left the computer going through a physical scan of the harddrive and I could see that there were a few bad clusters on the the drive. Hopefully when I get home it will have made any correction and I can get my computer back.

I ran 2.6 miles at a new greenway (to me) in Knoxville. It is really close to my house and is an asphalt greenway around two soccer fields and next to the lake. It was very cold and particularlywindy on one leg of the greenway. I was trying to squeeze some running in between watching Eric and going back to UT for my Physics tutoree.

I have a Physics tutor for this semester on Thursdays. I think that I might pick up a Calculus person here next week. So far I have had no Statistics students… what is up with that.

We go in for our 20 wk Ultrasound. SO, if my computer is fixed by them, maybe I will have some pictures to post. I had been working on photo albums of Eric to update the ancient albums and they are on my dead computer. Woe is Me!

SO what if I had started a blog entry and I accidentally lost it… Ooops

So where was I? I went to the doctor’s yesterday, not because I was sick, but because I was getting a family doctor. Ever since my pediatrician, Dr. Drewry, I have only gone to walk-in clinics. One reason is because I could and I did not know any doctors. Since we have HMO insurance now, we had to get a primary care doctor. So under the recommendation of our neighbor, I chose this one. Most of the check up was fine other than I need to lay off of the caffeine. I will find out about bloodwork today or tomorrow. I am interested to seeing what my fasting cholesterol numbers are. My last non-fasting level (when I gave blood) was just over 200. I’ll be able to compare this fasting test with one that I had in the summer of 2003. Details to follow.

GREAT NEWS! My fraternity brother Capt John Monihan has now left Iraq and is on his was to Kuwait and then back home! Yippee! And he is safe and sound. Need less to say, his wife Kathy is pretty darn happy! I chatted with her over IM this morning and they are planning a weekend getaway shortly after he is back.

Last night I had a calculus student for most of my time in the Math Lab. Now, I do not mind calculus one bit except it was more theory problems than applied. I enjoy theory when I am just learning it, just don’t ask me to prove anything. So we had a bunch of problems with limits that were hurdles but we overcame them with little problems. I am grateful for these sessions because it keeps the theory in my head and it forces me to think about it since I need to explain it in such away that is more understandable than a text book. I might be getting a physics tutoree from the women’s rowing team, do not know exact details yet.

I have not run since Sunday, but I need to get a few miles in today for my 10 mile run on Saturday. My schedule allows for me to exercise on Tuesday nights before Math Lab, but since my Doctors Appt was in Farragut, I went home instead of going straight back to campus. Technically, I should be swimming right now, but maybe tomorrow, my swim bag is not put together yet.

It was a pretty nice weekend around here, if you were a penguin. We were told in the late part of last week that we would have a significant snow even com the weekend. The forecast was a bunch of rain on Satuday that would turn into snow over night and snow on Sunday. Well, we did get rain and snow, but in quantities much, much less than predicted. Even though it was gloomy for most of Saturday, we did not get any rain until the afternoon/evening and then it was not that much. The snow came in a light form over night and we received a dusting of snow. It was the dry powdery kind that stuck to the road and not the grass. By noon, everything was about gone, but some kids still got out today… due to icy road conditions.

I ran 6.6 miles on Friday afternoon, at a 8:13 pace, 8:56 pace and a 10 min pace for 3 loops of 2.2 miles respectively. It was the first time that I did a mid distance run at any significant speed and I was pleased at the results even though they were not consistent. Seeing that I was scheduled to run 18 this week and with what was the forecast and other variables, I decided that a run on Friday and Sunday would suffice. I was not sore on Saturday, but took the day off, anticipating that I would get to run on the treadmill on Sunday. I was able to run the 6.6 loop again on Sunday with Marty. We ran the first 2 loops (4.4 miles) at a 9:45 pace and being within 4 seconds of our split times between laps. Our last lap we blazed at a 8:10 min pace. I think that we are going to try to run 9:30-9:45 min miles at the marathon, at least that is our goal right now… we still have 8 weeks.

New England and Philadelphia are playing in the Superbowl. My prediction is that New England will get another throphy. Comparing the two teams, NE has more of a complete package than Philly. If Brady is having a bad game, there are plenty of other people on the NE team who can make plays and offset Brady’s Mistakes. Philly, on the other hand, is more symbioticwith McNabb, in that, when McNabb is playing poorly so does the rest of the team. The both are good perennial teams and we probably should have seen this combination years ago, but now we see some powerhouses go at it. I imagine that Terrell Owens will provide plenty of sound bites leading up to the big game and I hope he gets to play. I do not know his status, but the Superbowl deserves the Super Players. So it should be a good game. Also, if Kelly Clarkson has a wardrobemalfunction, that’ll be sweet but I digress. I also look forward to the commercials just like everyone else… also what is the deal with Nike commercial with the tribal/urban head gear. Urlacher with a square barbed wire helmet? What the…

I look forward to the balmy 30 weather this week…

But you can sure find a bunch of crap on the internet about them. I am currently updating the numbers for the American Samoa report that I am writing for work. There is a bunch of information on the internet about tuna and tuna accessories. Luckily enough, I only have to concentrate on the Starkist and Chicken of the Sea since they are the canneries in American Samoa. Bumblebee Tuna, of Ace Ventura fame, is canned in Thailand as is most of the other tuna sold in the United States. I have been doing that all day long so now I am taking a break from the fishiness.

We are forecasted to get some snow in the next few days. Saturday is supposed to be rainy and then transform into snow overnight. Seeing that I need to do my long run on Sunday morning, I am just so thrilled! It will be most yucky running the 18 miles that I need to run. Today isn’t very sunny right now, but tonight I will be on the treadmill after Eric is asleep. I can try to get 5 in tonight, but that is 2 more than I like to do on a treadmill.

I currently have a choice to make. On Feb 19th I can either:
1) Run Strawplains
or
2) Be in the Myrtle Beach Marathon and use that as a race rehearsal for Knoxville.

The biggest problem that I see with running MB is that it is 4 weeks out from “The Big Show” and even though I know that it is far enough away from Knoxville to not be a problem, I do not think that I would really benefit from running that far.

I’ve also done MBM before, so it wouldn’t be anything new. But I can’t get out of my head that it would be a nice monitored, water/gel supplied course that I could get a relatively good idea on what to expect in Knoxville.

Jen and I watched American Idol in St. Louis last night. It was typical AI preseason show although I thought they showed the judges extremely mean to some of the contestants (some rightly so) right before them. Not much else to say about that since it is too early and we are watching it to see the “train wrecks” that tried to audition. (I would be one of them)

We then watched Point Pleasant on Fox, which was rather interesting. Without going to the homepage to read the actual discription, it seems like a story about a chick whose dad might be The Man Downstairs born to a mortal woman. She apparently has some effect on other based on her mood, and influences those around her. Much like a Jedi Mind trick, if she is happy everyone else is happy. It’s like a Carrie meets X-files in Kingdom Hospital with a hot younger (and older) cast that only Fox can cast (re: Dark Angel, The OC, X-Files, etc). I am going to try to catch the second episode to see if it is worth watching.

I might have a Physics tutoree, not sure yet but maybe.
Cheers

Yesterday was a really long day and I did not get to see Eric at all. Poohey.

I made it into work at a decent hour yesterday, hopefully I am on schedule again. Seeing that I woke around 5:30 yesterday and today. Although today my eyes were very heavy and I proud that I did not fall back into bed for that extra 5 minutes (read 15 minutes) of sleep. Jen and I have a Free Trade coffee - French Roast in the rotation right now, that helps with the 5:30am sleepiness. Also, Jen earned a FREE under the cabinet CD/Radio player from Mary Kay, so I can now have a radio in the kitchen in the morning. To hear the inane conversation of the local radio stations does help with staying awake in the morning, it’s my daily dose of pop culture.

I started to plan my route for the Mr. Arfns Marathon, which is only a run that I started back in 2001 when my friend Devaney was training for the Marine Corp Marathon (His first). He came down to Knoxville for my birthday which happened to coincide with his Marathon Training, in fact, it was his long long training run. So as an incentive, I told him that I would run with him and so I constructed the Mr. Arfns Marathon that ran from Volunteer Landing to Faragut for a total of 26 miles. I even produced T-shirts for all of the runners, each shirt was unique. Funny thing though: I have yet to wear mine once. Regardless, we had 6 runners at the start and due to schedules, it was just me and Devaney at the end. We did a 4/1 run/walk routine, which is run for 4 minutes and walk for 1 minute and we did this at Devaney’s pace. Despite it being a slow pace for me, I think the experience is what allowed me to achieve my marathon PR time of 4:09 at Richmond that year. Anyway, this past December, one of the runners suggested that I should bring it back which I had been contemplating because I need a long run of 20+ mile for the Knoxville marathon training. So, yesterday, I started downloading jpg off of mappoint.com so that I can construct maps to figure out the actual course. I’ll then use a program called USA photo maps to figure out the distance so that I do not have to drive the course to find out the mileage. Although Knoxville has a strong running community (we have been called “Little New York” by Runner’s World) the roads here are not runner-friendly, hence our extensive but choppy Greenway system. The course is ran on some Greenway, some sidewalks, and some fend-for-yourself roadways but it will get me from one end of the city to the other with stops at convenient stores on the way. In 2001, we actually had a support crew of Jen and Andy that drove to places along the course with water and bagels. I am not sure if I will have that same support this year, so I want the route to run past these places so that I can replenish when it is necessary.

While thinking about my training runs for the marathon, I saw that my Church’s Blood Drive was on the 26th and that the Calhoun’s 10m was on the 29th. Since I wanted Calhoun’s to be a race rehearsal and warm-fuzzy, I have come to realize (the hard way) that when I give blood, I will not perform well at a race a few days after the donation. So that I can still give blood but also race Calhoun’s I decided yesterday that I would stop by Medic before I went to go tutor. It wasn’t a bad experience, although it was not a very good one. First of all, I was not prepared because I had on a long-sleeved tshirt AND a sweater. So I had to take my sweater off, so I was in a Umbro Tshirt and Corduroy pants (goofy lookin’). Next, I had a new employee, which she did a fine job, but when it came to declare that I had been out of the country to American Samoa, it took about 5 minutes to get the correct wording on the paperwork. Good news though, I do not have to mention it again (you usually have to declare leaving the country for 3 years). Next, I am usually a good bleeder. I have easy veins to find, but yesterday, it took me over 12 minutes to donate a pint. In fact, the lady had to come over after about 5 minutes to “fish” for a better connection into the vein. But I finished, I got my Tshirt, Cookies and soda and was off to tutor.

my second job that I have is that I tutor for the athletic department two nights a week. On Tuesdays, I am at the Math Lab and on Thursdays, I have appointments. In the Math Lab we get a variety of different classes. Most of the classes are the basic classes that the student has one or two questions about the homework. I have yet to have a student who is completely hopeless at learning the subject. I really enjoy tutoring and when Jen becomes a Elite Executive Sales Director and I can retire in two/three years, I would love to continue to tutor, it would be a great part time job.

So a new dilemma has arisen. In Feb, Jen is going to Myrtle Beach for a debut of some of her consultants and this falls on the same weekend as the Strawberry Plains Half-marathon. So, do I let Jen take Eric to Myrtle Beach, or do I watch Eric over the weekend and NOT run the race or do I go with them and run the Myrtle Beach Marathon as Dress Rehearsal for Knoxville (it would 4 weeks away, so I could run it slowly and be okay). I have run Myrtle before, so it would not be a new marathon and it would be $65 as opposed to like $12-15 for Strawplains.

Okay, from my last post, I was a few minutes late to check out and get to Lunch. All was okay though. We sat as a Pink Generator unit at Lunch: Janie & Jody, Kim & Dan, Elba, Carina and Jen & Terry. After lunch we went for the closing session of the debut again by Cheryl Warfield. I have pictures which are still embedded in the camera and have yet to be downloaded. Cheryl is a great speaker and was very motivating to everyone in the audience. We said our goodbyes and hopped in the car to travel to Tallahassee.

Sunday, we traveled to New Orleans via Interstate 10. Nothing of monumental interest during our travels to New Orleans. When we got into the city, I took the wrong exit to the hotel. Well, wrong isn’t the correct word, let’s try inconvenient. For those of you who have not been to the Crescent City, the steets that run primarily North/South are two lanes, but those that run East/West are mainly one-way streets. So, if you miss your turn, you may have to drive around a bit to get to back to where you want to be. As was the case for the HI Express. Once we made it there, we valeted our car and brought up our bags. The room we had overlooked Cardonelet Street, which turns into Bourbon Street on the otherside of Canal. For a Holiday Inn Express it was a spacious room, but that has more to due to the fact that the buildings in NO are quite old and larger than today’s standards. We ended up getting a pizza for the night since the places near us were already closed and we didn’t want to venture out into the city that night. When Jen went to register, I found a Wal-mart close to the convention center and you know you are in New Orleans when the Wal-mart has one whole row dedicated to hard alcohol. Not the mixer, but the actual hard stuff, Beam, Bacardi, etc…

Monday morning we walked to the convention center as to avoid getting the car from valet and thereby being obligated to tip. Not that we do not tip, in fact we feel obligated to tip everytime but we don’t want to handover our money right away. So we walked. Eric was in the backpack carrier that we borrowed from Marty & Solange. He loved being in that thing and it made it much easier for walking around and having two hands free. We dropped Mommy off at the convention center and we went to the aquarium. I also have pictures of the aquarium which are also on the camera still. Eric seemed to enjoy the Aquarium but it was more like a play area for him. I think if was a little older he would like the fish as well. After the aquarium, we went down and around the Riverwalk on the Mighty Mississippi. Jen got a ride home and after me going out to find food and the nearby restuarants had closed, we decided to order a pizza and salad… we are in New Orleans and we are eating pizza and not cajun? For SHAME!

Tuesday we got the car and drove Jen to the convention center. Eric and I went to Melairie to go shopping at a running store that I saw back in 2002. It was boring other than fact that they had some B&W candid pictures of Steve Prefontaine. We didn’t really go anywhere else exciting, but back to the hotel. I suited Eric up in the kid carrier and went to the French Quarter. We walked down Bourbon Street and down to Jackson Square back to Canal and then stopped for lunch. I got the Po’Boy that I had wanted… crawfish to boot. That evening we went to Landry’s Seafood Restaurant for dinner, I had another Po’boy and some Abita, so I had a Lousiana dinner. Jen had Oysters and Eric, well, I forgot… he usually eats off of our plate.

Wednesday, Leadership ended and we made it halfway to Orlando. We stayed at Hampton Inn since they had internet and laundry. We had bought Eric 3 new outfits while in New Orleans because the diapers he had kept leaking (Huggies). Despite that we were out of clean clothes for him. Eric had discovered that if he stuck his hand in his mouth far enough, it would cause him to gag. So the clothes he was wearing had vomit all over them plus his carseat. Thursday, we made it back to Orlando and had a 2 hour delay at the airport before arriving in Knoxville very very late.

Friday, I had to go to work. So, I totally slept through the alarms and arrived late. I would have updated this blog then but I was inundated in American Samoa report work, which is what I should be doing now. Friday night, doesn’t seem like we did anything for the evening. Jen did turn it into a date night by putting in the movie Elf. I feel asleep about halfway into the movie after eating a lot of popcorn.

Saturday, in the morning Marty and I ran a little less than 17 miles for our Knoxville Marathon training. The last 5-6 miles where pretty tough, but also the hilliest part of the course we took. At Panera, I was sad that they got rid of their Cinn-ful Crunch Trio combo, but happy that they brought back their Chocolate Chip bagels. I love chocolate and the thought of chocolate bread was (at one time) replusive, same thing with other bread-like substance such as chocolate pancakes. Call me crazy. Well, I am over that now. I make Chocolate Chip/Peanut Butter pancakes now (thanks Gray and Laurie) and I prefer chocolate chip bagels (thanks Jen P) over everything except for Panera’s Cinnamon Crunch bagel. We went to the Pugh’s for dinner that night. The appetizer consisted of Venison poppers which were jalepeno pepper hulls with venison and cream cheese wrapped in bacon. YUMMY! The main course was venison and chicken soft tacos with all the fixins and desert was pumpkin cheesecake. Eric and William are buddies, so there was plenty of mayhem going on in the house. Jen did have an allergic reaction to the Pugh’s cat and had to take a benadyrll that evening, so we knew that Jen might not wake up early the next morning

Sunday, after church, Jen and I started getting our end of the year finances together and making our Quicken actually reflect more of our accounts today. I started to rip all of our audio CDs so that I would have all of them on the computer. This was something that I had started in May while I was still in school. Lately, I have been wanting to make mixed tapes for the Civic, so I thought that if I could burn a CD that was 45 minutes long, I could make a cassette tape much much easier that way. If all I had to do was drag and drop the songs into a CD then I could just play the CD, hit record and walk away. No more changing out CDs or anything. The problem was to get the CDs into MP3 format. The new computer was fast at ripping the CDs. When I did it while in school, I could get a ripping speed of around 6x faster than recording it real time. So a 6 minute song would take 1 minute to rip. Well, the new compter was ripping CDs at speeds excess of 18x which made ripping a whole CD take about a minute or less.

Monday, Martin Luther King Day, No Work for me. Most of the day was spent getting the finances in order so that we can afford to stay in our house. We are moving to an all (or almost all) Cash basis. The credit cards didn’t get us in trouble but they do make our finances must thinner. So this way we allocate what we spend money on and stick to it. Plus, it will curb all the crap that we buy that ends up cluttering the house. I finished with ripping the CD except for like 5 albums and the CD singles that I have. I am not sure that I will rip those, except for a few CD singles that sound better than the album version. One strange incident on Sunday, while Eric and I went to get gas, two cops pulled into the gas station where I was. I watched them from the Xterra as they were talking with a gentleman inside the store. As luck would have it, the gas station ran out of gas while I was filling the Xterra. I can usually get 16-17 gallons into the Xterra unless it is bone dry. After 8.5 gallons, it stopped, completely. So I went went to go get my receipt from the pay at the pump, but nothing came out. So now I was forced to go inside. As I tried to go inside, the cops were having their conversion right in the door way which made it harder to get around. Nothing exciting happened but it was rather weird.

Howdy all from the Sunshine state. We are here in sunny Florida for the Debut of Jen’s National Sales Director, Sylvia Kalicak. Last night was the big debut for Sylvia where some of Mary Kay’s most successful National Sales Directors were there, such names as Cheryl Warfield and Bett Vernon. These ladies make so much money in a month it is ridiculous. Like Cheryl said last night “money doesn’t solve any problems, but it gives you options.” Our goal is for Jen to be a NSD but 2010 and for me, this means that I will be able to retire before 40 and be able to help her most of the time while being able to pursue what I want to do, not sit behind a desk for 8 hours. Imagine having the ability to travel to cities to run marathons? How cool would that be. Plus we could be stay at home parents for Eric and Baby Incognito and not have to sacrifice our happiness for their survival.

We flew down on Independence Air, which is my old airline when I worked and lived near Dulles Airport. The flight was fine. Eric did well, only screaming a couple times. When we got our rental car, Jen asks me “How do they get the new car smell in these used cars?” I thought to myself and then looked at the odometer and the total mileage on the car was 8. Yes, that our car was soooo new, they probably drove it from the car dealership to the airport. How sweet was that? Eric was staying at Carina & eugene, in Gotha while we stay in a Candlewood Suites in Lake Mary. I just looked at the time and will have to continue later… tootles for now.

If you can read this, then you have found out that the links to my website have changed a little bit. This is an embedded blog powered by Livejournal that I am testing out. The advantage that I would have is that I can add to my blog via the Livejournal website instead of using Dreamweaver or trying to edit the HTML code directly. This is more powerful than the latter and more flexible than the former. I invite your comments and suggestions. Since this is a free account, my editing and customizing of the website is limited unless I pay a fee, which I have not decided if I want to pursue that avenue.

This year has been fairly good up to this point. We watched UT beat the socks off of Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl. Sunday, we took down all of the inside Christmas decorations and packaged them away for next year. we broke out all of our scrapbooking material so that she and her consultants could make their Mary Kay goal posters. Only one person made it, Janie and she made a pretty awesome goal poster. Jen didn’t make hers yet, but will in the near future.

As of total I have 6 miles for this year, all on the treadmill. I was supposed to run on Saturday morning, but that feel through and then I was too tired to run on sunday morning. I really really need to get my mileage in. I think that I am going to do a super duper long run the first or second week of February which will be about 6 weeks out from the marathon.

Jen had an appointment on the 5th for Baby Incognito. No pictures this time but the heartbeat was about 130-140 and sounded good. Our next appointment is not until Jan 31st when they do a full blown ultrasound, so we will have new pictures then.

Jen did say that she felt some movement yesterday while driving. With Eric, I felt him on Feb 14th, which almost corresponds to right now with Baby Incognito, so I am hoping that I can feel movement any day now.

tomorrow we are leaving for a week for some Mary Kay fun and excitement. We are first going to Orlando for our National Sales Director Sylvia Kalicak’s debut for becoming a National sales Director. Then on Sunday we are driving from Orlando to New Orleans for Leadership Conference. I am going to watch Eric while we are New Orleans, although I would rather be going to the conference. I can’t complain because any day visiting New Orleans is a good day.

12.27.04 through 12.31.04
Our goal was to leave Loris around 11 am and I knew that we’d never leave until noon at best, which is our plan to say we are leaving early but have a later anticipated departure. During our travels from Loris to Colonial Heights, there was very little excitement. In fact, the only real problem was on Interstate 95, in the middle of North Carolina, we were averaging around 20-30 mph. The reason for this was that a snow storm had hit central NC and the beach area of Va a few days earlier. Now, the roads were fine, but there was snow on the ground. Once you got to the VA state line, however, the snow was gone.

We made it to Colonial Heights and where we saw Great-Grandmother Higgins, Grandpa Higgins and Janet. All waiting to see Eric and the changes since October. For GGma Higgins, this was their first meeting. I think it would have been nice to have been able to bring Eric when he was smaller and less mobil so that she could hold him. Eric is a wild child now and does not sit down very much anymore.

Tuesday (28th) our goal was to find some boots for Jen and for the Xterra to get an oil change. Both were successful. Eric ended up sleeping throughout the oil change and even while Pete and I went to get me a Slurpee…mmmmmm. After dinner, Jason and I arranged for him to come to visit, which was his first time meeting Eric. Jason and his wife Kim are Eric’s godparents. Being that Kim is very near due with thir second child and Jen’s tiredness of being on her feet all day looking for boots, it was just Jaymo and I cruisin’ the Boulevard. We ended up going to Friendly’s which is where we often went when we were in High School. Jason actually worked at that Friendly’s for a while. I got my absolute favorite, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup sundae made with chocolate ice cream. Jaymo and I caught up with what was going on plus reminisced about the good ole days.

Wednesday (29th) we left Colonial Heights and traveled 460W to Roanoke and then down to Knoxville via 81 and then to 40. We stopped in Blacksburg to see on of my UT Stats compadres, David Edwards. He is currently pursuing his Ph. D in statistics from Va Tech and should be finishing in 2007ish. It was good seeing his, unfortunately his wife Beth was at work, but we did spend a while with him at a Wendy’s right off the interstate.

We made it home just fine and I got to feed Spunky. Spunky is our across the street neighbor Sheila and Jim Kohl’s pet gecko. Now, she doesn’t speak like the one that Geico has, but getting to feed her is pretty cool. She gets fed crickets into her aquarium home where she hunts them down and eats them. She pauses like a cat and even her tail wags before she lunges. She is not accurate all the time and sometimes gets a mouthful of sand. Here are a few pictures of her.

New Years Eve we spent with Marty and Solange at their house. we had Ham, potatoes and coleslaw for dinner. After the kids went to bed we watched the movie Dodgeball which was a pretty funny movie.

12.23.04 through 12.26.04
We made it through the stomach bug right before Christmas. In fact, I found what turned out to be liquid gold… Propel. As if water wasn’t already healthy, Gatorade, a few years ago, made “fitness water.” you know, water with a little flavor and few minerals, jack up the price and wah-la. [For those of you who read Dilbert, I also buy bags of soil but not bottles of air... yet.] We feared that Jen had become very dehydrated from the stomach bug that she was unable to drink very much. I had gone to Kroger to get some Powerade and while milling around the beverage isle, I saw Propel. Hmmm, I thought, flavored, but not sweet and it’s not carbonated. So, I gambled about $4.5 that these 4 plastic urns would carry the nectar that Jen’s body and Baby Incognito would desire. [Editors Note: Now that is the 2nd trimester, I might changed the name, maybe]

And it turned out to be a success! Propel was what Jen needed. I knew all that schooling would come in handle to make an educated guess. Anyway, on the 23rd, I had to leave work a little earlier than planned so that we wouldn’t leave too late. After all, Eric is handfull these days. We left around 6pm, I had wanted to get through the mountains before dark because I was worried about ice. There was no need. The only thing that was a real problem was Eric’s ears and the change in elevation. We made it to Loris, very very early on the 24th, around 1am or so.

Now the plan at the Palomares household for Christmas is to stay up late until midnight then a frenzy of focused paper tearing commences as you begin to inventory all the loot that you got. We tried to nap Eric a few times during the day since his schedule was all topsy-turvy from the trip.

Eric was a little tired at midnight, but he did enjoy the mayhem around him. He seemed to like ripping the paper, which was evident from back home where he will tear pieces of paper to very small particles.

Christmas morning I ran around Loris in some colder weather. I put on my “almost tights” since it was sooooo cold, in the mid 30s which is arctic for the Beach area. I mapped out my route that I took and found out that I ran 13.8 miles through out town in a time of 2:16. I guess that time is okay, but I was running for 8 minutes and walking for 1 and my pace was only a 9:53 mile. That puts me at a 4:16 marathon which is depressing. I will have to run again today when Jen gets home.

we saw The Jordans (Kip, Joy, Caleb and Rachel) that even which was my first attempt at a pecan pie. I tried to make it with a graham cracker crust and it was a flop. The filling wasn’t that bad, but the crust just sucked. I will have to use my Grandmother’s secret pie crust recipe. Everyone else in household watched a movie.

We went to the new Tanger outlet malls with Mommy P. Our mission was to look for some boots for Jen P. My mission was to go to the Old Navy Outlet and not blow a wad of cash. I only bought one shirt for 6.99, but my weakness was at the GAP outlet. Since Jen has been in Mary Kay, the outward image is important and needless to say, the first chapter of Dr. Phil’s book essentially says the same thing. Oh yeah, and so does the Fly Lady (Sink Reflections). So, I have been trying to also portray a more professional image when I leave the house, as I am a surrogate consultant, but seriously, I am the CEE of the household. That is Chief (because I have some small percentage american indian - blackfoot tribe - in me) Executive (because we have to have important sounding names, I could think of a few fun ones) Encourager (because as a MK husband, that is my biggest contribution that I can make). “My income is your income” - Jen P. So why wouldn’t I want her to be prosperous?? Anyway, I found nice stuff at the Bass Outlet that I really like.

It’s about time for me to pick up Eric, so I have to end this promptly. Jen is at an organizational workshop with some of the other MK directors. We really hope that we can fine tune our systems to be more efficient. We really need to find a babysitter, Eric is currently over at the neighbors who is always so sweet to watch him at the last moment, but it is not fair to her that we rely on her all the time. Although it is nice to be able to walk across the street to get him. Plus we trust her.

Hopefully my next update will be at the home computer… please wifi work this time…