Today is the last day for my intern at work, Matt. He's been a great help on a lot of my projects, so it was a bummer to see him go. I took him out to lunch at Hoagie's for a going away. Unfortunately, he was supposed to be an intern for the whole mill, but no one else took much of an interest in him and I don't think he got everything out of it that he could have. There is only so much time I could give him, but no one else took advantage.

On our way to Hoagie's, I noticed a sign in front of The Great Outdoors stating that they were having a sale on kayaks for 15% off. Jaime has been saving her money and wanted to get us kayaks for our 30th birthday this summer. I was really excited about that when I found out about her plan, so I have been doing a lot of research on them lately and looking forward to it. We didn't really know where to go to get our kayaks. We had heard there was a place down in Lyndonville and a place in Stowe, but we didn't think to look locally for some reason. I had never thought of The Great Outdoors. So we decided to walk down there and check them out after work since it was nice outside.

I wasn't expecting too much, but to my surprise the sales guy in the store was very knowledgeable about all their kayaks and the accessories and such. He also seemed interested in saving us money too, which I thought was good. He wasn't trying to sell us up to stuff we didn't need. Anyway, after pricing them around, and taking his recommendations into consideration, I think we will probably get our kayaks from them. It is good to shop locally too. It seems like a good deal because it is 15% off for the first one and 20% off for the second one, and 15% off any accessories we get at the same time (paddles, life jackets, thingies to put on roof of car, fishing rod holder). I think we are going to go with the Old Town Canoe Dirigo 106 Kayak.

I think this will suit our needs. I wanted a kayak that would be good for fishing, and also somewhat a beginner level kayak, but with a lot of storage space. Also, these are fairly short in length, so they should be light and easy to transport. There was also an "Angler" addition that already came with the rod holder and an anchor, but he said that it was like $100 more and you could add those things separately for less money. We can both get the same one this way too, because they should be good for just paddling around recreationally.

The sale ends in a few days, so we need to make a decision on this now, instead of waiting until our birthdays. Which is good anyway, because we can use them once the ice is off the lake and it warms up a bit and not have to wait until almost July. So I think I am going to go down there on Wednesday and close the deal. Probably the only drawback is that unless we had a roof rack on our cars (which we don't), we can't put them both on the roof at the same time, unless we wanted to invest in a roof rack. So if we want to go somewhere, we need to take both cars. If we were to go down a river, we might need to do that anyway, so we could leave a vehicle the end of the trip to pick up our stuff.

So, I am pretty psyched!

I went in to work again today. I have been working on a program and I seem to get much more done in a long uninterrupted chunk of time that I get on a weekend rather than the normal work week. Jaime went to her cousin Amanda's baby shower today.

Last night we took Phil out for his birthday (which was a month ago) to the Seymour Lake Lodge. The food was excellent as usual. I had a big bourbon soaked steak and also got the fried ice cream for dessert. I know, a real killer for the diet. And I wonder why I have plateaued!

Tomorrow Jaime will be going to visit our friend Lisa and her kids. I am not going, so I will probably get some stuff done around the house.

I was at 203.8 prior to the Superbowl, the next morning, well over 207. I have managed to get back on track and get back down to 204.6 this morning. That isn't too bad considering that I haven't gone to the gym since last week. I did use my treadmill on Monday, but yesterday I wasn't able to get in any exercise.

I went in to work on Saturday. We were supposed to have a meeting that morning, but we got a huge ice storm so it was canceled. I went in anyway and worked on my program. I probably worked about 6 or 7 hours. It is amazing how much more I can get done when I am not being constantly interrupted.

That ice storm was awful. There was probably over an inch of solid ice over everything. The weather did warm up a little and thaw out a little but of the ice. It still took about 20 minutes to chip out my car on Saturday morning.

204.8 this morning. Woohoo! That is less than when I started tracking it last April. I did dip below this before in that time frame, but gained it all back and then some. What I am doing is working.

We bowled last night and won two games. We won a couple last week as well. I have still not been able to get into a good groove. We would be a decent team if we could all get good at the same time. Seems like I have good games when the rest of the team doesn't or vice versa, so we never maximize our score. I do get disappointed that I never seem to improve, and sometimes I wonder why I shell out close to $20 a week just to make myself feel bad.

Jaime's grandfather had a heart attack last Friday. He doesn't have insurance and goes to the VA hospital. So he sat in his living room and endured a heart attack for 3 hours because he knew he couldn't pay to go to the emergency room here. It is a sad state of affairs with our health care system. He went to the VA on Saturday, then they sent him to Dartmouth. Jaime went down there and took Monday off to visit him there as well. They put in some stents into his arteries. He is now back home. While he was in the hospital, his thermostat broke and his oil tank sprung a leak that was not fixable. So he had to get a new thermostat and oil tank, which was not good. I guess bad things happen in threes.

I have been faithful about going to the gym every day. I don't usually go when I bowl that night though. I have found that I bowl a lot worse when I work out first, it must make me tired or dehydrated or something. And I usually meet with my nutritionist on Thursdays, but I didn't have an appointment this week.

Sarah has returned from her trip to Thailand and Vietnam. I have not been on the computer too much lately, so I have not gotten around to checking out her blog and pictures. We were happy to get a post card from her though.

We went to Mom and Dad's for lunch this weekend. I also went in to work for most of Saturday. I am working basically all day this Saturday as well. We have a meeting on Saturday morning that I need to facilitate, and I simply have too much work to do to get it done during the week. I am sure my efforts will go unnoticed and unrecognized as usual, but at least I can work uninterrupted on the weekends.

We are probably going to watch the Superbowl at Julie and Travis's house this weekend. I am trying to convince Chris Sloan to come. He has been traveling a lot lately.

I cranked up the Madden game and it is still kicking my butt. I think I am gradually getting a little better, but I am still having a losing season. It can be frustrating, but I guess the challenge keeps me interested.

Jaime didn't get her W2 again. That's two years in a row. I don't know why they say you have to get it by the end of January. There seems to be no recourse against the employer who doesn't provide it. I think the IRS should fine the employer for every day after the cutoff. It isn't fair because it causes the government to be able to hold onto your money for longer and you are giving them an interest free loan. But alas, Jaime is getting screwed over by her payroll department yet again. She finally got her 2006 social security straightened out after about 10 months of struggling. The social security office said they had never seen anything like it before, what is happening at her school.

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.

You can tell it is getting close to Christmas because there have been non-stop advertisements on TV for Chia pets. Cha cha cha chia! It always reminds me of when I was in basic training. During basic training, we "Basics" were only allowed 7 basic responses (if memory serves me; and also can be Ma'am as well):

• Yes Sir
• No Sir
• Sir I do not know
• Sir I do not understand
• Sir may I ask a question?
• Sir may I make a statement?
• No excuse sir

However, while I was going through Basic, I seemed to always get a 5 o'clock shadow by the end of the day. So I earned the nickname "Chia Pet" from my upperclassmen. I was only allowed one basic response: cha cha cha Chia! No matter what was said to me, that was all I was allowed to say. It was actually kind of funny, especially when people asked me things that were not aware of the fact that I had been ordered to only make that one basic response.

Well, bowling was my all-time career low last night. I think it was even worse than when I was a youth bowler like twenty years ago. I only bowled a 299. Yes, that is a three game series, not a single game. That is unbelievably low. I am so ashamed. If I hadn't even bowled, my absentee score would have netted our team 120 additional points over what I actually got. With my handicap added in, I didn't even hit my average! I am getting to the point where I wonder if I will even bowl at all next year. I can't seem to get out of the rut. I don't know what it is, I never used to be this bad. I think there are several factors that contribute to it besides my inborn suckiness at all things requiring bodily movement.

One thing is that it is consistently extremely hot in the bowling alley. I am the type of person that absolutely cannot function when it is hot. So that stresses me out and just makes a bad situation worse. Also, we bowl on Thursday night. That is usually the point in the week when I am the most tired and burnt out from work. I have usually gotten in about 40 hours by then, and I am fatigued mentally and physically. Probably the last contributing factor is the lanes themselves. They always seem to break or you are waiting on the other team just when you get into the groove, so that messes things up. But probably the majority of the blame for me sucking so bad is just my own fault. I can't blame everything on the excuses!

We got a bit of a snow dump last night. We are expecting a couple more before week's end. I awoke early this morning to the phone ringing for Jaime getting called and told she had a two hour delay. When I had gone to bed last night, it didn't seem like much snow had fallen. But I got up and went outside anyway. There was not much accumulation, but it was warm out and the snow was wet. I imagine that made the roads pretty crappy out in Coventry, so that is why they had a delay. Again, the snowblower worked very well. That was a great purchase. I find it particularly effective for the end of the driveway where the city plows tend to create massive amounts of wet, packed, heavy snow that is a pain to shovel and impossible to drive through.

Today at work was one of those days where I can't believe the variety of different things I worked on. I had to keep switching gears. I guess it is a testament to my job that I have so many different things I am involved in. I started the day working a bit on some of the VBA programming learning with the new books I got, then I had to conduct a job interview for an hourly employee. I worked on a couple of other unrelated projects after that, then had meetings in the afternoon with a couple other work teams. I had to field a couple of requests for help on some Excel spreadsheets for a couple of folks, and was also asked to create a logo for a sticker. Yesterday was just as varied. It keeps things interesting, but it is tiring to switch back and forth so much. I also lament the fact that I really can't go much into depth on any one task without being interrupted and having to handle other things. Multi-tasking can be a good thing, but it can also lead to lower performance on any individual task, at least for me.

Hump-day is through this week.   And it has been a long week already.  Not in a bad way, just busy. 

Work has been pretty long this week.   You know how some weeks there seems like you have more stuff to do than you have hours in the day?  This has been one of them.  I'm not complaining -- in fact, it is much better to have too much to do than to have too little.  It does make the day go by faster.  But sometimes it seems like a little too fast.

I found out today that one of the guys on my bowling team is in jail again.  He went to jail last year because he got drunk and picked a fight with an off-duty police officer outside a bar.  This time, it seems he got drunk and got into a fight with someone and ended up breaking their ankle.  Now, I'm not the type of person that usually associates with many people who spend significant times in jail, but this guy obviously has a drinking problem.  The worst part of it is that he is my next door neighbor as well!  So I called up dad today and asked him if he could sub for bowling on our team for at least the rest of this year.