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| Random | | Date Created: Dec 31, 2005, 12:36 PM |
 There's not much to do today, so I'll just chatter for a while.
My wife, mother-in-law, and I travelled to Chicago a few weeks ago to be at my oldest daughter Becky's graduation from The French Pastry School. She graduated at the top of her class - with honors. Only four out of fifty students achieved this. We're proud of her. She seems to have found her niche. In Chicago we stayed a block south of Michigan Avenue. It was one week before Christmas (Dec. 16-17) so Xmas shopping was in full bloom on the Magnificent Mile. Unlike St. Louis, Chicago is a real city and it's lots of fun to be downtown at night. We ate at Bistro 110 and it was fabulous. Their roasted garlic, spread on bread like butter. . . wow. It oozed out my pores for days (according to my better half). The chefs Becky works with know the head chef at Bistro 110, so we got to meet him. He also sent out a complimentary lobster appetizer that was wonderful. |
 The mail just came with a (late) Xmas present to my wife. I guess this random note gives away my own political commitments. She thought it was a hoot and will wear it proudly when she exercises. Oh, I ordered one for me, too. Christmas was great this year. We didn't overdue it with the kids. We got them each one significant gift. Jeffrey and Lauren both got iPod Nanos - one black and one white. They love them. I wonder how many iPods were sold this Christmas season. Man, Apple sure has a good thing going. |
 These past few days I've been fiddling with my own present - a new Panasonic DVD recorder. I'm sick of sitting through commercials, so I got one with a 100 GB hard drive to capture all those new shows I need to watch starting in January: Lost, Invasion, 24, and Surface. BTW, I've never been "hooked" on more than one TV show at a time. This year, however, I'm in trouble. I don't want to schedule my time around TV shows, so I got the recorder so I can watch what I want late at night after I'm finished working. I'm a late night worker and I can wind down with a 45 minute TV show. Anyway, I was able to download all the new Lost season 2 episodes from my iPod onto the recorder's hard drive and then dub them on DVDs. The technology is pretty amazing these days. I looked into a DVD recorder a year or so ago, but they were so expensive and so difficult (and unreliable) to use that I decided to wait. Glad I did. |
| I guess you can tell that I'm on vacation. I haven't cracked a book, especially a theological book, all week. I've just been hanging around the house, watching TV, going to movies, and goofing off. Saw King Kong. Ho hum. Pretty stupid, if you ask me. |
 My son and I went hunting on Tuesday. Set up for some crows in the morning and successfully called a flock of them to us. But then we were set up in the wrong place to get a shot off. We were well camouflaged, but unable to shoot the crows that we called. Next time we'll bring some decoys and think a little more about our "fields of fire," as we used to call them in the Army. We also set up in the evening for some coyote hunting. Earlier in the day we found a coyote pack's late night dinner spot in one of the grassy fields - lots of possum bones and coyote tracks. We got up in a deer stand and tried to call some to us just before dark. Nothing. At least I'm pretty sure we didn't attract any. You never can tell. They are cagey hunters themselves. While we were waiting I told Jeffrey some stories about Missouri deer hunters getting treed by ravenous coyotes. I didn't realize how much I freaked him out until later. There was no danger of anything like that happening now since the weather hadn't been that bad lately. |
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