This is Trey and I talking to Wild Bill at Brecourt. The sound is kind of low in the beginning, but picks up at the end.

I didn't really have time (or power, in some cases) of writing down my thoughts every night during our trip. It was all very planned out as far as time goes. So I figured I'd spend time in Europe experiencing Europe, not writing about it. Ask Trey about the German disco we went to one night at like midnight. A drunk guy named Bernd (who was hitting on Tracy earlier in the night) convinced us to go. The disco was under a McDonalds. Odd.

I'm putting the , and annotating them with my thoughts. I'm about halfway done.

One thing worth noting is that Tracy and I got our picture taken for a French newspaper. We were featured in the 9/15 edition of Ouest France. We rolled up to the new museum at Dead Man's Corner, and there were all the guys from the press there. Shawn and I were poking around in the gift shop (I bought a pair of boots and a jacket) and this guy from a local newspaper started interviewing Tracy. He said he wanted a picture, and as we were leaving (and getting more than a little grief from Ray the tour guide for making everyone late), he snapped a pic of Tracy and I with Bill Guarnere. It was one of the highlights of my trip. I'm definitely going back to Normandy. I want to poke around the museums more, too.

9/12/2006

Sitting in the motel room in Portsmouth. It's 3:39 AM, and I couldn't sleep anymore, but that's OK as our wake-up call is at 5am this morning. We have to get on the ferry to Bayeaux at 6:45. Went to bed at 9pm (some folks hit the pubs after dinner), but we had to fall out.

The flight over was uneventful. We had a fun time in Philly, even though we weren't there for long. I did get to talk to Babe Heffron for a little while in the airport. Doc really, really should have come on this trip. Uncle John would have liked it too (a few folks are Vietnam vets, and even more are pretty much right in his demographic).

We arrived in London on time, got the rooms at the Strand Palace (a shabby place, BTW), and I forced Trey and Shawn to go see London with what little time we had (we left the hotel around 2pm, and had dinner at 7pm). We managed to get to the London Eye, and then walked around outside Parliament and Westminster Abbey. We stopped at a pub and had a pint as well. Shawn dug it.

Yesterday we headed out at 9am for Aldbourne. If you imagine a quintessential English country village, this was exactly what you'd picture. About 1/4 of the houses even had thatched roofs. It's surrounded by little hedgerows, pastures with sheep grazing, etc. No bugs, either. I guess even the insects are too polite to come out and bite you. I half expected to see Hobbits.

We pulled in around lunchtime, and were met by some very enthusiastic WWII re-enactors. I was initially a little reticent to even bother with this thing. I thought it was a little cheesy at first. But after talking with a few of them, I quickly changed my mind. These dudes were really into it! They were doing it because they felt they owed folks like Bill and Babe their livelihoods! A few of them told me that they can't get enough of the stories and such, as they earnestly felt that with the sacrifices of the GIs, they'd all be speaking German. It was a strange perspective on the war, and the people here still feel it.

The afternoon ended with tour members and re-enactors all hanging out together at the Blue Boar pub (frequented by Easy Company when they were here). It was odd walking into the pub and seeing the entire bar occupied by GIs. It was like stepping into a movie.

Babe held court at the Blue Boar, but Wild Bill stayed at the Crown Palace, which is where we had a ploughman's lunch. Basically, the entire town came by at some point to say thanks to Bill and Babe. They're like rock stars here.

We headed out to Littlecote Manor, which is where the 506th Regimental Headquarters was based. We got to see room where Col. Sink had his office. It's also the place that Wild Bill and the rest of Easy's NCOs turned in their stripes. Bill gave us a little speech about it, too.

We toured the grounds (Henry VIII lived there, and smoozed one of his wives at the place), and saw these really cool Roman ruins. There wasn't much time, since Tracy and I saw the bus pulling away far off in the distance. We had to run back to the manor.

We pulled into Portsmouth, found a pint at a pub, had dinner and crashed.

Pictures to later as I get them uploaded.

We had our choice of activities, and I decided to do tubing on the Google ski trip. My knees aren't that great, and I figured tubing would be low-impact enough.

I was up there doing the tube thing for about 3 1/2 hours, and had a really good time (even if I was by myself). Toward the end I was doing the running leap sort of thing, and that was fun. Though I'm now very, very sore in strange places. My neck hurts, for one, and my shoulders aren't feeling too swell.

All this pain was probably exacerbated from having to walk back up the hill all the time. My cable kept getting unhitched from the tow line about halfway through (there was this little bump in the snow, and it would unhitch then) and I could never manage to connect back on. So I walked. The people managing the area kinda looked at me funny. When they had to go up, they took the tow. I told them I wasn't being macho, I just had a dodgy cable hook thingy. With no other tubes available, I was out of options. Walking up slushy snow at 8,200 feet dragging a big truck inner tube sucks.

All in all I did about 24-30 runs down the little hill. Maybe more, I didn't really count. Towards the end I sat on the tube (vs. my normal "Superman" style of tubing) and took a video with my camera while I went.

I wish the tube run was longer. I'd have been happy going down the entire mountain. I'm going back, and doing skiing this time.

Pictures are going up someplace later.

Well we got to the MySQL Conference in San Jose in one piece. We're at the Doubletree by the airport. The conference is here at the hotel, so it's pretty handy (although expensive: a coffee is $2.45 and a beer is $5; with no other place in walking distance, we're a captive market). It's a good hotel, and we have a nice big room complete with Net access. I remembered to bring that switch and me and Todd are all hooked up to the dub dub dub. Unfortunately, the desk only has one chair, so Toddler has to sit on the luggage rack I found in the closet. Adversity builds the spirit; he'll be in fighting trim in no time.

I attended the database replication talk this morning and learned lots of great stuff in that area. It was hosted by Jeremy Zawodny, the tech lead at Yahoo!. I'm going to set up replication at work to do hot spares, and get a dev server with live data. I'll probably also use it at my mom's store. It's a pretty interesting topic. It's apparently easy to set up, but also easy to break. I also didn't know that MySQL basically replicates queries. It doesn't send actual data across the wire, it sends the update/insert SQL queries to the slaves and then those servers run the statements. Cool stuff.

The free conference lunch line had at least 498 people in it by the time we got there, so after a lovely lunch in the cafe (beef with barley soup and a reuben sandwich; you're welcome, Toddler!) we went to the PHP and MySQL session. It was hosted by none other than Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP and another big wig at Yahoo!. It didn't cover MySQL all that much, but it was a great session. A couple things he said really blew my mind. Like PHP having the shortest "Hello World" program of any programming language: you just put the text "Hello World" in a PHP file and the preprocessor will happily print "Hello World" when you run it. "Try that in Java or Perl or C and see what happens... Why shouldn't PHP just print it if you want it to? Why should it complain about something it doesn't understand?" said Rasmus. There was kind of a quiet moment while the people there (standing room only) digested that one. Then you could see the "I get it now..." feeling wash over the crowd.

He also went over some insane things you can do with PHP. Like opening an image file and then reading it into a Flash object and then spinning it around. Spinning logos in PHP. Weird. Then there was the PHP code he showed that allowed one to set up a complete web site (with hundreds/thousands of pages if you want) with only having one PHP script acting as a 404 error handler for Apache. You basically check what the path in the URL request is and then go open a page there. If none exists, you use the URL path info to make a DB query and then print the file at the requested location and serve it up. Then next person that comes along doesn't hit the 404 error handler (and doesn't execute the PHP program) -- they get the file the previous run created. I wanted to pipe up and ask how he manages preventing people from abusing his server but I didn't. (For the terminaly curious: You could write a 3 line perl program that would ask for any number -- millions if you wanted -- of randomly-named files from a dynamic web site bult on his code from the example. That PHP code would nearly always run, and therefore nearly always create useless dummy files. You'd run out of file descriptors or disk space eventually, and this would be an effective denial of service attack on the web site.) I didn't pipe up because I was sitting way in the back (standing up this time) and I figure he was only showing the code as an example of a possibility, not a complete solution. I'm sure anyone putting that code into action on a live server would have to figure out a way to limit the effects of such an attack.

In other news, the conference made the news. Yes, the dolphin thing is everywhere. No, I don't know why the mascot is a dolphin. Yes, I got a t-shirt and it has the dolphin on it. My first vendor shwag in nearly four years. w00t!

Well that's all for now. There's apparently some meet-and-greet dinner event. Todd and I are going to see if we can score form free food and booze. I'll drag my laptop dowstairs tomorrow and Saturday and make notes as I go. More updates later...

I'm getting ready to go on a cruise ship, my first. I've always wanted to go on a cruise -- I don't know why. The desire could have come from watching Love Boat as a kid (anything to get outta homework, eh?). A group of six of us (me and Tess, brother Shawn and his wife Lauren, my uncle John and brother in-law Zac; Trey and his wife were set to go but might not) are heading out tomorrow.

It's sort of an event, this cruise. We're going to go to Catalina island and see The Ventures play at the Casino, then we sail to Ensenada to see Los Straitjackets in concert at some unamed venue there. I've never seen either band, but I own every CD Los Straitjackets has put out, and I've wanted to see The Ventures since I was a kid. Uncle John has a farily impressive record collection which includes many albums from the 60's (and earlier/later). He has a lot of Ventures albums (has some on reel-to-reel tape even), and I remember listening to one in particular. I don't remember the name of it, but it had a big "The Ventures play only Mosrite guitars" advertisement looking thing on the back cover. We listened to it over and over whenever we were at uncle John's house.

So it's safe to say that we're all fans of the surf guitar, and it doesn't get any better than either The Ventures or Los Straitjackets. The cruise should be a hoot. I mean, seeing The Ventures live has been something I've wanted to do since I was probably 15. Seeing them at the Casino on Catalina is just some super-friggin-cool icing on the cake (a couple years ago, Tess and I saw Dick Dale at the Casino and had an amazing time).

I'm getting everything ready, packing, and right now I'm putting stuff on that old laptop I lugged to England last fall. I put a bigger (4GB -- whew!) hard drive in it, and my plan is that everyone can take a lot of digital pictures and then upload them to the laptop. I'm also hoping that people won't mind writing a note or two about the day's pics while they copy the files (it can't take a couple minutes to read the SmartMedia cards, so they'll be sitting there anyway). That'll give us some nice annotation for the images. I'm also putting a spare Orinoco card in it and installing NetStumbler. I don't know if the cruise ship has 802.11b on it. but I figure it won't hurt to find out, eh?

Anyway, I made a new category for these entries, and I'll likely move the London entries to it as well. I'll probably wind up taking this beater laptop on all my trips and takes notes/pics like I've done. I was thinking the other night that I would have loved to read about our last London trip as it happened, so it's good to have a running account.

Hmmm, just had a thought: What I really need is a real travel laptop, like a Panasonic Toughbook. I can get an old used one on ebay for cheap. Magnesium alloy case, gell-encased hard drive, almost water proof keyboard, moisture/dust port covers, carrying handle... everything you could need. The newer ones even have built-in wireless networking. Yes, very nice. Maybe someday...

11/28/02 - 01:04
Room 121, Gresham Hyde Park Hotel, London

Tuesday night we went to see our play. It was "The History of America, Abrigded" and was put on by three Americans who are part of a troupe called The Reduced Shakespeare Company (and who, to their credit, have been living in London for like 10 years). We saw it at The Criterion theatre in Picadilly (it's literally right outside one of the entrances to the Picadilly tube station). It's a cool theatre; it's underground. The Criterion, by the way, was England's first gaslamp theatre and consequently England's first air conditioned building (they had to vent the carbon monoxide from buring all that natural gas). It was a good show, and I almost missed it.

I was feeling awful that night (just unspecified gastronomic issues; the smell of fried food sort of kept putting me off) and wasn't really up to going to a play. Tracy and I had some time to kill since we thought the play started at 7, when it really started at 8 (and we had taken a cab since we thought we were late). We ducked into a place called Tiger Tiger. It was a meat market, London style. That meant that nobody paid any attention to us (except for that British national pastime "Stare at the Non-Hip Tourists"), which was fine by me. I just wanted to sit where it was warm. I had this Bad Mood settle over me about an hour before we had to leave for the play and sitting was a good thing at that point. While we were there I mentioned to Tracy that I hoped the show wasn't interactive at all since I was feeling more like I had to throw up than be expressive in a large crowd. She said she tought there was some interaction, but she didn't know how much. We figured we'd be fine.

We got to the theatre and found out seats: row A, numbers 12 and 13. That's literally front and center. Nothing to worry about. Plenty of people to choose from, and I can always beg off any public shenanigans. The only problems I had rolling around in my head was that I'd have to look up a lot. Then the stage manager came over and started talking to me.

She said (I think, she had quite the accent and it was kind of loud in the theatre since it was comprised mostly of Americans) that there was a slide projector under my seat and asked if I wouldn't mind being involved in the play. I asked what I had to do, she replied that all I had to do was watch out for when "somone" on stage asked if anyone had a projector, I was to raise my hand and say that I did. And then reach underneath and hand it over, of course. She said that they might ask me something, or that I might have to get involved in some way, and if I could give it a go then I'd then I'd be a sport. Or words to that effect.

I made little gurlging noises for a couple seconds and nothing really came out of my mouth. I was afraid to even burp since I though vomit might come out, and now I had to talk to a the stage manager about interacting with the cast of the play? Now I might have to talk to members of the cast, in front of everyone? Sheer panic set in, because I *knew* that I'd have an uncontrollable gastric urge right at that very minute. I mean, I was surveying exits when I first came in and sat down, wondering if I could climb over people and get to a toilet between the time heaves just started and when they started getting serious about exposing my stomach contents to air. You can hold it for a bit, and you can feel them coming, but a false alarm would ruin the play for a lot of people. (It's a peculiarity of my psyche that I never have to go to the bathroom unless I can't. I never have to throw up unless there's no contingency arranged which would allow me to do so. I'm as regular as clockwork until the only toilet is the nastiest one imaginable. I never have to sneeze loudly until I'm at a crowded table with a mouth full of food. Happens all the time, and I've learned to hold in various urges and fluids with more than a little vigor. Ask Tess about my secret super powers. She can atest to my powers of "incorporation".) Anyway, I mewed around for a bit and she started getting concerned; it was a full house and we'd have to switch seats unless I was game. I realized this eventually and agreed to give up the projector (with, I thought, as little fanfare as I could muster).

As if to cheer me up, as she was leaving she said, with much cheer-up-ness, "Look up now, love... It's your West End debut!". I didn't understand the last part of what she said and just sort of kept on with the gaping mouth sea bass imitation. The word "debut" came out as "DAY-byoo", with a heavy, drawn-out first syllable about three times longer lasting than the second. And I wasn't aware, at that very moment in time, that I was in the West End. I know where the West End is, and I know what it is, and I know we were seeing a play there (although I thought of it more as being in Picadilly Circus, since the theatre is right across the street from all the famous lights), but I didn't connect my having to stand up in front of everyone and throw up as happening in London's West End. But this is how these things happen.

I asked her to repeat what she had said, she leaned in close, and I caught the words. Mostly. It was my debut. I was still trying to decphier the "West End" part, which I asked Tess about (using my best imitation of the stage manager, just in case). Tracy said "Honey, we're in the West End now". All I could say was "Oh". I was thinking of projectile vomiting in front of 500 people and the resulting tube ride home.

I spent the first 30 minutes of the show watching for them to ask for the projector. I figured I'd miss my cueand the only people that would see me throw up was the guy sitting next to me and Tracy. Then I realized that they would probably make a stink about it and I wouldn't have to worry. They did exactly that. Right about in the middle (before the intermission) they did a little skit where they wanted to show people a photographic retrospective of the early 20th century. They set up the screen, and put a little can on stage to set the projector on, then looked around at each other and asked who brought the projector. They scratched their heads and finally looked out towards the audience saying, "Did anyone think to bring a projector with them?" I waited for a couple seconds and then put my hand up.

They did the predictable "Oh great!" and "What luck someone thought to bring a projector..." and such. So I reached underneath my seat and handed it over saying, "Well, I thought this would come in handy". I don't know why I said it, it was like a natural reaction. In fact, I didn't even recall saying it until Tracy said it was a nice ad lib; it just sort of came out. They worked it in, saying how right that was, etc, etc and each one shook my hand (they all had sweaty hands, in case you were curious). When they were shaking my hand, I said "Hey, no trouble" and "You're welcome" and such. To one guy I said "Rock on" and he chuckled and said in this weird Kevin Kline voice "Rock on? Very well... Rock on!" It was pretty funny (to me at least).

The only thing that bothered me was that for some reason I didn't stand up when I gave them the projector. I was glued to my seat and the poor guys had to bend over very far to get the projector and shake hands. It's my nature not to get up in front of everyone during a show. I'm just not mentally wired to obstruct people's views. It all worked though and they set up their gag.

(There never was a slide show. One guy put the projector on the can and then one of them grabbed the cord looking for a place to pug it in. The wound up dragging the unit off the can and it hit the floor, breaking into pieces. I remembered thinking that there was loose things on it when I grabbed it, and I wondered if maybe I had kicked it or something.)

That wasn't my only West End acting moment, however. After the intermission, they stopped the play and asked the audience if anyone had any questions at that point, that it was time for them to clear anything up, go back over anything they glossed over, etc. It was a time for them to do a little ad lib of their own. So after about 30 seconds of nobody in the audience saying anything, I figured since I was already part of the show, I might as well pipe up.

I raised my hand and said "So can you explain to me why it is that if we can send a man to the moon, we can't send a man to the moon?" They looked around and such and weren't real sure what I was talking about, so I said "We sent men to the moon in the 60's but now we've forgotten how to build a rocket. We don't know how to send a man to the moon anymore. Why is that?" One of them said "Well, why would we? There's nothing up there anyway..." and it was pretty funny. Then they all looked at me and one guy said, "But you don't believe that any of that happened, do you?" I figured I play along and said "Well, I know the score, it's all fake. It was all filmed on some Hollywood sound stage. I've seen Capricorn One". They had no idea what I meant and looked at each shaking their heads. I pointed an accusing finger at them and said "You call yourselves geeks and you haven't seen Capricorn One?" (See, the program had bios for everyone and one guy had Star Wars stuff in it, another had some sci-fi thing, so I figured they would know what I meant.) One guy said he knew that REM song and started humming it. I said something like "Oh, singing REM, now that's offsides..." They eventually said there's no reason to go to the moon anymore and then called me a wag and moved on. Someone else asked when vomen were given the vote, and they didn't know (I was guessing 1922, but a British lady in the upper balcony said "It was 1920.") Another fellow then asked something else and the show went on. Someone has to be the first person to speak up I guess.

Anyway, that was my West End stage acting debut. One more thing to tick off the list.

11/26/02 - 10:34
Room 121, Gresham Hyde Park Hotel, London

The best cure for a hangover? Codeine with paracetamol and coffee.

11/25/02 - 18:22
Room 121, Gresham Hyde Park Hotel, London

We're back in the room after a half day at the British Museum, seeing stuff we missed last time. A half day is enough; we both have museum feet. We have no real plans tonight save for dinner at the Leinster Arms, a pub near here.

Tracy's freshening up with a cup of tea now (using a little electric hot pot in our room which makes extremely hot water). I have the laptop out to download pics from the camera. I thought now would be a good time to install AOL. Last Friday, I got a copy of their stub installer from aol.co.uk and after it had downloaded it's main installer (the little 200K one does nothing but grab the real 40MB installer) I had copied it to a temp directory. I just ran it now while I was typing this and AOL is installed.

I figured AOL was the only decent way to get online. The rooms here are being upgraded with "ISDN" (which is really an ethernet jack in the suite that is patched into a pretty standard LAN and fromthere to the Net at large) and may also have dedicated fax/modem jacks. Our room has neither and it's going to cost 34p per minute to get online (that's roughly $35 per hour, but if I'm online more than an hour total this whole week then something's not been right with my vacation). AOL is icky and screws up your PC but it's an easy way to get online when fussing around costs money. Besides, I'm going to re-image this machine when I get back.

AOL said I have to reboot now to finish the install, presumably so it can finishing ruining the poor laptop's registry and TCP/IP stack...

11/25/02 - 21:07
The Swan pub, London

Tracy and I just had dinner here at a pub called The Swan. It's kind of tourist trap, but I'm surprised at how many local Brits there are. We met one of them. His name is Ted. The place was crowded and he asked to sit down at our large table. We said sure, he sat down. He waited until we finished dinner ("roast of the day" -- a leg of pork in this case -- and potatoes with veggies) before striking up a conversation. He is 82 years old, and married to a German woman that he met while in France during World War II, in which he was a diver. British soldiers were paid 14 shillings a week, but divers got three pence (pronounced "threhpence") more and so he signed up for mine de-activation duty. When ever I meet someone that has a "real" history like that, it never ceases to amaze me. Doing what he did only to laugh about it now. I bitch about electric bills being too high, or traffic being bad. He invaded Vichy France and swam with German mines.

Before I forget: London at night in November smells like, in order:

- cold, wet pavement
- wood (hickory?) smoke, from the roasted chestnut carts
- car exhaust
- wet leaves
- old wood
- cooking (all varieties)
- cigarette smoke from passersby

One more temporal note: Tracy's favorite new beer is Kronenbourg. I quite liked John Smith's, although it left a bit of an aftertaste.

Guess what I just discovered? An Orinoco card which is in discovery mode can eat through tiny, circe-1997 laptop batteries in about an hour. My battery has, just now, gone from about 70% to 40% in the 15 minutes I've had the lid open. I had it on batteries last night and ran it for like an hour and a half. Should have at least downloaded Netstumbler before I left the States. I need to find an access point. I could go meander over by it long enough to squirt these up to the web if I did. Maybe I'll try that Internet Cafe near the hotel...

11/24/02 - 15:56
Room 121, Gresham Hyde Park Hotel, London

Well, we're here. I just set the timezone to GMT +0 on the "disposable" laptop I brought and my watch got switched somewhere near Greenland so it's official. The trip was fairly uneventful, with only a few bumps along the way.

We got to LAX a tiny bit late (2 1/2 hours before departure, technically within airline guidelines) and when we made it to the counter, the guy told us that "the computer has run out of seats". He said we had to go to the gate where they'd assign a seat to us. That made me hellaciously nervous. We dutifully went to the counter only to be told, by the snottiest airline employee I've ever met, that "he just made an announcement which said they'd be calling people's names and so would we *please* just have a seat and wait". I didn't hear what he said on the PA, and said so. I felt like spitting on him, but I was nice. We went and sat down like nice sheep. About 15 minutes before actual bording, I got antsy and decided to be the squeeky wheel that got some grease.

As politely as possible, I told the guy (different guy; the assmonkey who "helped" us earlier was doing passport checks in the boarding line) that someone said earlier that our names would be called, but our names have not been among the dozen or so that had already been called. I said I was getting nervous, what with boarding almost over and us with no seats. He was very nice and had a look at what was what. Turns out we'd been fogotten about. Boy Wonder was *supposed* to take our temp, no-seat boarding passes and put them in a queue. When seated people volunteered to give up their seats, he'd assign seats from the queue. They had a bunch of boarding passes all laid out on the gate counter like tarot cards, and he waved ours over them methodically, looking for our names. When they weren't found, he got a very nervous look. A quick phone call, some fervent keyboarding banging and we had seats. We not only got to sit together (I overheard two other groups who were sitting apart), but we also got seats behind the toilet bulkhead. That meant an extra fold out table to put stuff on and about two whole feet of legroom. It was a nice aversion of a near-disaster.

We had another bump due to the need to buy some Immodium before takeoff. Tess got something unsettled and so had a less than pleasant flying experience. Then I got something unsettled. I'm in the room now. Tracy's out at Hyde Park checking out Speaker's Corner. I started feeling really unwell after slamming a Red Bull and I'm staying near a bathroom. I've got that jet-lagged, no sleep dizziness. Every once in a while, the room will start spinning around a bit and then stop. The floor will feel like it's moving up and down just slightly (imagine an elevator right before it comes to a stop). I'm not prone to vomiting, but the queasiness makes me want a restroom close by. Besides, I have to unpack and such.

I've got the laptop out, and I need to make sure the power transformer works. Then I'm going to go see what locals outgoing calls cost so I can try to get online. I just bit the bullet yesterday and downloaded AOL's client from a UK web site. It'll find a new number, dial up and then get online. Picking a screen name will be a hoot.

In fact, I think I need to take a nap, even though 4:00am is really going to suck if I do. I could use like an hour of nap time, though. Besides, it's stormy out (real lightning and thunder) and so seems like the weather gods are telling me to curl up in a blanket.

11/25/02 - 01:38
Room 121, Gresham Hyde Park Hotel, London

So that one hour nap turned into a 7 hour sleep. I napped at and slept for almost exactly the worst time/duration I could have and now I'm doubly screwed: it's 1:30am local time and 5:30pm "internal body". It's too late to do anything locally about my body's perceived need for dinner. And obviously I'm not tired, so boredom makes the lack of options worse.

I decided to admit defeat and wake up for a bit. I turned on Sky News (kind of like an independant CNN; I watched them a lot last time I was here). Sky News has rather somber reporters which put a realistic face on world news that's more refreshing than you'd think. I especially like the part were they hold up the morning's newpapers (which haven't yet hit newstands) and literally show you what the headlines will look like.

After taking in some news and getting over my bleary eyes, I looked around for sleep aids. I couldn't find much except for some codeine left over from recent (and more than little paintful) dentalwork and some Barcardi I bought (10 pounds for a litre bottle) from the duty free cart on board our flight. Sounded like just the ticket. I downed a tab, and poured about a centilitre of rum into a water glass. All I had for a mixer was a sparkling water chaser. It's five o'clock somewhere. At least that's what my internal clock says.

Christmas came and went. New Year's came and went. All in all, everything went rather smoothly. Tracy and I wound up driving over 1300 miles and flying roughly 1500 miles. We spent a lot of time talking, and that was fun. I enjoyed hanging out with her.

Christmas in Oregon was a hoot, as usual. We met up with Tracy's family over at her parents' house. Most surprising was her brother Mark showing up at midnight on Christmas Eve. It settled the folks to know that he was safe, although it was a little weird because fairly often Mark talks when nobody is listening. It's a bit disconcerting sometimes.

We did the usual Christmas thing. Tracy and I hauled our booty up to Oregon in a hard shell suitcase, and it didn't get searched, which is good. Everything was passed out and opened like one would expect. Then we ate turkey and ham and whatnot, just like you're supposed to. Like I said, it was an according to Hoyle Christmas. I think everyone enjoyed their gifts. Tracy's dad seemed to love his MP3 player. (He's a gadget kinda guy.) Tracy and I dug our things.

We did Christmas activity I hadn't done in nearly 25 years: we went sledding. We had gone down their ice-covered street before, but that's not the same as tubing down a snowy hill. We started out going down the short but steep hill in the backyard. As is normally the case, we found a particular run through the juniper and down the side yard which got exclusive use. And as is also normally the case, the whole affair turned into something of a mini civil works project complete with course smoothing and improvements, hole filling, shaping, and even a fairly significant ramp (with a drop of a couple feet). We soon migrated to the neighboring vacant yard because of its pristine condition. By that time, however, we had been at it for a few hours and we were all more than a little cold and tired so we only made a couple dozen runs. The kids seemed fine, but us geezers were a bit torn up. Suzi was sore, and Tracy was too. Pete seemed mostly OK except for a bruise on the leg, and I had a knee swollen and bruised (every time I do something which involves me moving faster than a walking speed usually means that my right knee comes away inflammed and bruised). I'd do it over, though. It was great fun.

We left Oregon for Phoenix on Thursday and had another Christmas that night. It consisted mostly of us ripping open things while people watched. It was awkward at best. I don't like being at the center of attention, and I can't imagine that everyone coming over to my folks' house yet again just to see us open stuff was that entertaining. Maybe. But I had the idea that we would pass out our presents first and then quickly open everything while people were occupied. I think that worked well.

Christmas at my parents' house is always fun. It's sort of like a yuletide rodeo. You just have to go with the flow, and I always enjoy it (even when Springer is in the air). It's lots of activity, lots of family, staying up late, playing with toys, good food, and everything else a growing boy needs. There's always something happening and it's good.

As far as actual loot, I got lots of goodies. The biggest was a Matrix. I've been coveting it for a while now. I've got a Spyder (and which I've written far too much about before in this space) already, but comparing the two is like comparing a 2002 Mercedes SL600 to a 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit (diesel). OK, maybe it's not that bad. More like the Benz and my Toyota truck. And I like my truck, but I'd also like a really fast Mercedes. I'll probably write more about paintball and whatnot sometime soon.