January 5, 2005 
This
is the view from our car heading back to the apartment from the house
construction site this evening. We usually return via a different road.
Yuck! So the traffic sucked, but on the very cool side, we did get to
enjoy a great sunset (it looked even better when we started fumbling
for the camera).
January 4, 2005 
Ahhhh.....
As I write this I am sipping from a glass of deep red French syrah. I love red
wine, and haven't really tried much syrah. But I'd slowly gone through the
last of the cabernet and cab/merlot bottles that we'd had, so it was
time to buy another bottle or two. We were in the local grocery store
and I was specifically looking for French red wine. Why? Because I want
to support French products. And I like France. We've only been to
France once, but we found the people, food, drink, and general ambiance of
Paris to be wonderful. And the countryside on the way down to Lyon was beautiful. We definitely hope to visit again.
There are so many people who refuse to buy anything French because
France was against the US invading Iraq. Well, I was also against
invading Iraq. Bush fabricated reasons for invading, has massaged the
rationale over the many months and thousands of deaths, and has now
stumbled us into a rather nasty quagmire. That's certainly no reason to
boycott France. Rather, it is time to acknowledge that they who opposed the war were, in fact, quite correct.
So the grocery store had, as far as I could tell, only 3 bottles of
French wine: merlot, syrah, and chardonnay. I'm not a white wine fan
and prefer merlot in a cabernet blend, so syrah it is! And this is a
pretty darn nice glass of French wine indeed :)
Misc January 1, 2005 We are tentatively scheduled to close on our house at the end of the month. Below are a few thumbnail images taken today and over the past few days. Click any image to see the full-size image with some comments.
House January 1, 2005 
We
bid farewell to 2004. Many ups and downs, but overall we have much for
which to be grateful. In about a month we will finally be moving into
our new home, ending a year of apartment living. We're both dragging a
bit today (I didn't drink much last night, but we were up until 1am or
so, which is way past my bedtime)...but we're heading over to
the house site in a moment so I should be posting some pics of the new
house in its current state of construction later today.
When I came to Tampa last year, I left Vancouver Washington after some
of the worst weather we'd had in years (much snow, ice, downed power
lines and trees, etc), and I'm now sitting here in shorts in January
typing this. It is supposed to be 78F (26C) today (!) and feels like a
summer day from the northwest. On the downside, I do miss being able to
pop up to Mt Hood for a day of skiing :-) ...OK, off to the house.
December 25, 2004 
We've
got family up in Washington and Oregon - about 3,000 miles away from us
down here in Tampa (and some more family up in North Dakota). It'd be
great to be able to all be together for Christmas, but that's just a
bit more airfare than we can afford right now. We did, however, decide
to spring for Ben to pop up to the northwest in January to visit family
and friends. But we wanted to do this as economically as possible. Mobissimo
to the rescue. This site allows the user to enter the search criteria
once (where you want to fly from and to and on what dates) and it then
searches 86 sites for you and returns results that you can sort various
ways. I typically will hit several airline and travel sites and try to
find the best deal, but Mobissimo found a better deal than I was able
to! Ben's round trip airfare from Tampa to Portland Oregon next month
totals out at US$305. Given that we had some restrictions on dates and
times, that is incredible. The best deal I'd found
before checking Mobissimo was US$463! Very cool.
Travel