Saturday, we went skiing - my first time in Montana! The skiing was great but I was pretty tired out. Then we came home and watched the Patriots game. Yesterday I lounged around most of the the day and then baked a bundt, pound cake to try out my new bundt pan. While I was in the midst of making cake, a friend came over bringing Chinese food and the movie Omega Man (with Charleton Heston) which Mark and I had never seen.

Oh, and before I forget, Kit is trying to raise money for the Special Olympics by jumping into freezing cold water. If you want to donate money, you can do so here, at her fundraising site. I’m hoping to be there to video the event so as to provide incentive to certain folks to donate :D.

Today, I have to work and so does Mark. There are lots of birthdays this time of year. Paul turned 71 on Thursday. Doug is 41 today and Phil, Scott and Scott have birthdays tomorrow.

2007 started out with the sale of our house in Daly City (it was a year ago at about 6:00pm that we packed up the last of things at the house) and now we’re here in Missoula. Happy New Year everyone! Let’s hope 2008 turns out better than I think it will.

After noon, we headed out to my Mom’s place in Huson where there was more eating and gifting. Got some cool stuff for Christmas. One of the really cool things I got was an eco-sphere. It’s a totally enclosed glass ecosystem. There’s little shrimpies swimming around and everything is self-contained. It’s really pretty cool. I think all the gifts we got for people were well received.

After dinner of roast beef and yorkshire pudding, we watched A Christmas Story. It was a very nice afternoon/evening. More pictures are on Flickr.

I hope everyone else had a very Merry Christmas!

I’ve been updating the photos on the genealogy site and I’m finding some cool new features that I couldn’t use or didn’t know about before. I can apply an image map to this photo and have links to the record for each of the people in the photo. Cool. Of course it takes time to do all that :/

The menu and the rest of the pictures are on Flickr.

What the heck is congress doing, banning incandescents???

I get really annoyed and upset when people try to decide my business for me. Apparently I’m too stupid to make my own decisions. On one hand, I’m dumbfounded that congress would do something like this. On the other hand, I guess it’s just me not wanting to believe the country is already socialist.

EDIT: OK… according to visgoth, it’s not as bad as I thought:

“And by the way… At least some of the media are over-simplifying again. Some sources might be getting it right, but others seem to not be. The bill does not ban incandescent light bulbs. It doesn’t specify any technologies. It sets standards for how much illumination has to be produced for a given energy consumption. Those standards are not met by current incandescents. It may be possible to improve incandescent technology to meet the standards.

I’m actually curious to see what happens in the High-Pressure Sodium (HPS) and Metal Halide (MH) arena. HPS are used extensively in indoor plant growing operations[1], and MH are the most effective existing technology[2] for growing corals in captivity. And my interest in where MH lighting is going isn’t only regarding my fish tanks, BTW. Captive grown corals are also being used in a lot of research.

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[1] I’m thinking tomatoes, getting spring plants ready for market, that sort of thing. Not secret rooms in the basement.

[2] Aside from the fusion reactor which could be shut off for eight minutes before anybody realized it.”

EDIT: Got to thank Mark and missbabyblue for pointing out this plugin. I’m still figuring out what I can do with WordPress.