Where to begin? It has been a while since I have had the time to sit down and write a blog entry. With the holidays and work, not to mention that I got Madden 2008 for Xbox over Christmas and have been playing that at night instead of poking around on the internet, I have had a lot of excuses.

Christmas went fairly well. It bit a little for me the way it worked out with vacation and the day of the week that Christmas was on this year. I chose to use all my vacation this last summer when we went to Greece. But that meant that I had to work the three days following Christmas when pretty much everyone else was able to take it off. So I did not really have a whole lot of time to spend with the family, and the time I did have, I was more tired than I would have liked. But despite that, it was good to see everyone all together. We did miss Sarah being there, but luckily we were able to chat with her on Skype on Christmas.

Holidays are almost over! We got the tree down yesterday. Everything went by in a blur. Chris and Laura headed back to Missouri this morning. We are going to New Year's eve tomorrow night at the Lodge. I'll write more of an update hopefully on Tuesday. See you in 2008.

PS: Way to go Patriots!

Gmail is pissing me off. It keeps crashing my Firefox. After a little searching, I think it is related to their "new" interface they recently rolled out. Apparently they didn't check it as well as they should. I will just have to be careful. It seems to just crash the whole browser when I navigate away from a gmail page. I haven't tested all cases, but I read if you have more than one tab open, it won't happen. We will see if that works.

We had a couple of snow storms roll through this weekend. The first one hit on Friday. We got quite a dump of snow and the roads were pretty bad. Phil told us that we were having a "surprise" birthday dinner at the Lodge in Jay for Jaime's mom on Friday night. It took us almost an hour to drive up there because of the roads. Tony was there as well as Phil's son Kevin and his wife Chris. I got some boneless buffalo wings for an appetizer, which were very good. They also make homemade chips there with a pesto dipping sauce which I enjoyed. However, my main meal was not very good. I got a sausage and caramelized onion pizza. I get that sometimes when I go to Lago's and I usually enjoy that. However, the lodge version was not that great. I ended up bringing most of it home in a doggie bag.

On Saturday, Jaime went down to Wal-Mart with Julie so Julie could finish up her Christmas shopping. This worked out well for me because I was able to wrap all my Christmas presents and go buy my stocking stuffers for Jaime. The stores were absolutely mobbed on Saturday. I was going to go to Pick and Shovel to use my Christmas gift certificate I got from work, but after dealing with the lack of parking and all the people that were at Rite-Aid, I didn't feel like wasting any more time. I feel like I didn't get Jaime that much this year, but I think that is because most of the stuff I got was fairly expensive, so it is more quality than quantity. I still tried to wrap everything seperately so she would have the maximum amount of presents to open. She enjoys that!

I messed around on www.simpsonizeme.com on Saturday. It is a marketing thing from the Simpson movie and Burger King. You upload your photo and it turns you into a Simpson. Here's me:

I kept my fatness. I think it is a pretty good likeness! We also messed around with a funny video where you can make yourself into dancing elves. Thanks to Laura for pointing out the site. Here's our video: http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1425093786

Whoa, I just realized I hadn't written a blog update in over a week! It doesn't seem like it has been that long, but time seems to fly this time of year.

Work has been extremely busy. I have started a project where I am writing a program that will be a timekeeping system for our mill. We are going to get time clocks now for employees to clock in for their shifts, and we are going to replace the current paper time cards that we use. We were initially going to purchase a turnkey solution, but it was pretty expensive. One of our other mills created their own system so we got a copy of that to look at. Unfortunately, their method of timekeeping is much different than ours, and their program is not well documented and has a pretty lousy interface in my opinion. So I decided it would probably be better in the long run just to create one from scratch. It will be Microsoft Access based with VBA programming. I ordered four books on VBA and Access programming to assist me on this. I have a little experience, but I wanted to make sure I did things right. So I imagine that this will be quite an undertaking. I am going to try to make it generic enough that we can hopefully reuse it possibly at our other mills if it works well.