A few easy days and now I am off to Fort Myers for some New Year's Eve fun with coworker and co. Ought to be fun - happy to be headed off for another break. Hopefully Michigan will pull it together tomorrow and complete my New Year's Eve.

posted at 2:40 PM - comments

A great week in the not-so-very-white North, but there were boats by the thousand feet and a ton of skating in the park. Now I'm back and getting stoked to rig up my new shoes to ride this week - exercise crammed in around bowl games and playing with my computer, who's BIOS must be upgraded. What fun!

posted at 12:56 PM - comments

Stayed REAL late last evening to wrap up some work for a client in Dubai. After four years of practice at Webb, staying up until 11:30 hardly seemed like a challenge. Now it's an evening to launder some clothes and pack them carefully into TSA-approved carrying devices for tommorrow's trip north for the holidays. Happy Christmas one and all!

posted at 4:42 PM - comments

What a busy week it has been here! Last night was the MPYD Christmas party at the Alley Cat. Extremely pleasant to just sit and talk and laugh with coworkers and spouses over a very enjoyable meal. Now just a long day and a half of working like a madman to make an invoice point before a week away for Christmas break.

posted at 12:33 PM - comments

Forty miles on Saturday - half into a stiff breeze headed north up LBK and Anna Maria, a brief stop to say hello to Patrizio and Maria, and then 20 miles of easy sailing back down the key - were my excersize this weekend, but the highlights were a party to watch the Christmas boat parade down at the marina aboard Aquarius and then Al Gore ripping up SNL. When he got all gussied up as Trent Lott and started going off I thought I was going to literally burst at the seams. What a character.

posted at 5:28 PM - comments

Yesterday's highlight was definitely seeing the twin-turbine, twin-shaft 46' Tencara "Callan Marine" being loaded onto the trailer after one of the BPM surface drives that carried it to over 200 mph a few weeks ago broke. It's big, it's white, and looks mean as can be with huge turbine exhaust ports in the deck. In other news, the weekend might be dreary, so I'll be at the library stocking up I think.

posted at 12:42 PM - comments

Spent almost all of last night compiling the nearly one hundred email updates that went out from inside the walls of Webb - what a blur those four years seem like now. Also made some rockin' stir-fry, including chicken cut with the knives I got for my birthday. I used to be impressed by the chefs who seemed to slice and dice so effortlessly, but now I know the secret: good knives. I was a whirling dervish around that chicken...hot knives through butter have nothing on cold steel through chicken.

posted at 12:33 PM - comments

Sometimes things pan out the way you expect (Norah Jones blows up on SNL) and sometimes they don't (Robert DeNiro does too...just not in a good way). It was a productive weekend: got my 2000 up to 27.44 mph on the flat pavement of a certain un-named development west of #511 and got my 800 updated with bar ends, a project that has been nearly half a decade in the making. I also cleaned, read, cooked, and changed the battery in my G-Shock. Not bad for somebody coming off a cold.

posted at 12:41 PM - comments

Last night was the Christmas Walk on Palm Avenue, so I got to walk into the stores' opposite Suite 202 who's windows I'm forever staring at. Pretty interesting stuff - one had an original map of New York City and the harbor ($13k) and another had an oil painting the size of a big chest freezer of the rocks off Capri ($18k) and still another had a mahogony Harley ($23k). I didn't buy much, but it was neat to stroll through this small downtown area with the apparently elite of Sarasota.

posted at 12:41 PM - comments

Pretty amazing what a few teaspoons of Robitussin will do for a cough and a drippy nose. Little wonder the drug companies make such a killing - good heavens I'm happy to pay a few bucks to feel better, and now I guess whoever puts that $0.25 worth of syrup in the bottle is probably buying a yacht. What goes around comes around.

posted at 12:56 PM - comments

Feeling a bit under the weather this week - cracky throat and drippy nose. (The really great thing about a blog is that I don't actually have to see the other person's face when I complain. I could rant about the ridiculous problem known as 'slow folks in the fast lane' or gripe about 'this darn cold snap' all day and I wouldn't see a single person grimmacing or wishing they'd slipped in the shower this morning. Ahh progress!) Hopefully some Halls and some Hemmingway tonight will help get me back on my proverbial feet.

posted at 1:01 PM - comments

To Georgia and back over the holiday - had a grand old time seeing folks that I hadn't seen in quite some time and some that I had seen fairly recently. We also ate a few big meals, played some football in the yard, hit the range, and sat and talked. The trips up and down were pretty easy, and I enjoyed the time on the road as much as ever. Lately I'm finding that I don't really just sit at home and listen to "August and Everything" or "The Dance" from top to bottom, but when I get behind the wheel I'll put the whole thing on and let it play. Sunday was somewhat of a reunion with the Counting Crows' first album...I hadn't listened to all of it since studying for finals nearly a year ago.

posted at 12:48 PM - comments