This evening while I was upstairs being a geek...

...my wife was out front playing in the snow (I thought she'd been reading!). When she called me outside around midnight, here's what she'd built:



Very awesome. Note the attention to detail: sculpted eyebrows, apples for eyes, and a banana for the smile :-)

So scary I had to post it

Gift from customers

My coworker, Bill, has done some programming for a group of folks at work. To thank Bill for his efforts, they gave him this cute little toy sheep, complete with Santa hat. You can see the sheep doing its trick by watching this short movie.

Always time for espresso

My son, Ben, is home from college for a few weeks, so we went up to Timberline at Mt Hood for some snowboarding (Ben), skiing (Joe), and ski-boarding (both of us). Well, the skies never did clear up as we'd hoped, but it was still a great time. After an hour or two, it was time to refuel with some espresso:



Yup, I brewed some espresso before we left home, and had a thermos and cup in my backpack :-)

...and even though the clouds hung around, it was still beautiful:



But this being our first ski trip this season, our legs could only hold out for about half the day. Man, we're going to feel this tomorrow! :-)

Mechanical Karma

Why is it that whenever I work on a car, it takes 2 to 3 times the amount of time I expect? I must have some nasty mechanical karma. Maybe I was a beater car in a prior existence and refused to start for my owner. I don't know, but geez there seems to be a pattern! :-)

Well my son's coming home from college for winter break soon. He's had his car for sale, but since we still have it, he's looking forward to using it and enjoying the subwoofer. We'd taken the subwoofer out a while back for a minor repair, so I reinstalled it today. I figured it would be about a 15 minute job. Wrong. Aside from a few miscellaneous delays - and reading through the manual to figure out which wire goes where - when it looked all ready, I turned the ignition key, fired up the stereo and went to the trunk to listen to...nothing. After spending way too much time tracing wires, I found the problem: a blown fuse in the engine compartment. Ugh! OK, so it took 2 hours instead of 15 minutes :-)