Flyover Blog

Third time's a charm?

I hope everyone had a good xmas and santa got them all that they wanted. This xmas was special for me, I finally presented an engagement ring to Annette. She accepted it :) Around a month ago I had Kenzie help me pick a ring out for Annette. She was very excited to help and did a good job. She also amazed me in keeping it all a secret. Not bad for a 9 year old. We picked a 3 diamond setting with a carat main diamond in the middle. I purchased it from diamond.com so I avoided the sales tax hit. Sticking it to the man! It arrived fairly quickly so the wait was on since Kenzie thought it would be best if I gave it to her on xmas eve when the family was over celebrating. So xmas eve came and I was trying to figure out how to go about surprising her. All evening when I was alone Kenzie snuck up and whispered "when are you gonna give the ring to momma?". Cute. Finally I decided to do it just before the annual xmas eve breakfast was about to be started. It really worked out perfectly too. Lena, Annette's cousin, was showing off her engagement ring and Annette tried it on and yelled "hey Craig doesn't this look good on me?, Brian can hook you up with his dealer". I said "well that's not necessary" and gave her the ring box. She freaked, dropped Lena's ring and burst into tears. Kenzie scrambled for Lena's ring, Annette hugged me in tears and everybody went "oooohhh". Cool moment. Took awhile for Annette to stop crying and finally see if the ring fit her. It did. Lots of hugs from everybody there. The family was very happy that I chose to do it while they were there. A very memorable xmas for them.

Xmas day we opened presents, Kenzie got her normal truckload of fashionable clothes. She loved the "Vote For Pedro" shirt I got her. Annette's mom did a good job finding clothes for me. Even the dog got a present, an argyle sweater that makes him look like a nerd. He likes it when he's outside though, keeps him warm I guess. We headed out to my sister's home at noon to spend xmas with my family. It was great to see my Aunt Ethel again. Her and her husband live on a ranch in North Dakota and I see her once a year. I'm glad she uses the internet so I can stay in touch with her. Kenzie's has always wanted a little brother, pesters her mom all the time. Mom said the closest thing you'll get is Jake the dog..haha. Well Jennifer's two boys, 8 and 3, drove her nuts. She was trying to do a puzzle on the floor and they ran across her puzzle, wrecking it. Messy table manners, etc. I reminded her about her request for a little brother, she's like weeeellll, maybe we can raise him to not be such a slob...haha.

So I've got this whole week off. I plan to try and make some social calls, like have lunch with friends. My friend Lou is in town to take care of his mother's passing. Would like to catch up with him too while he's in town. I've got some work I need to get done on my condo, like a new toilet, front door and some painting. I want to build an office in Annette's basement for myself when I move in. Annette and Kenzie wake up way early in the morning, so I was just gonna include a bed in that office for myself during the week. This has been our first bone of contention already. Need to figure that one out still.

Annette and I just got done watching a rather neat documentary. It's called Long Way Round. It's about two movie actors, Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman who decide to motorcycle around the world and film the experience. They leave their home country of England and journey east. Definitely an adventure since once they leave Europe they run through some pretty rough roads and obstacles. Ewan does whine a lot in the beginning since it is rough going but he comes around and drops the tourist behaviour and becomes a real traveller. If you enjoy motorcycles or globe trotting, I would definitely recommend it.

The end is near

Coming up on the final weeks of the year. Time to be reflective again. Was the year successful? How do you measure success? I'll leave that for a new years day blog.

Had a good time at my company's office party last Friday. I won a 2 GB flash mp3 player as a door prize! Lots of fun. Actually it's one I was thinking buying anyway. Saved me about $140 and I gave my old mp3 player to Kenzie. Like any pre-teen it's become attached to her head :) One of the guys there won but wasn't impressed with anything personally so he grabs a TV-DVD combo and gave it away to a charity here in town. I was reminded about the spirit of xmas then. He also purchased some paintballs over the internet and inside one of the containers was $200 paintball gun that he didn't ordered. Being honest he notified the company of their error, they said ok we'll send a UPS package for you to mail it back in. No thanks, no gratitude, no gift certificate. I told him stop being so damn honest and tell them it was stolen. He's making the rest of look bad! Anyway there were a few people from the office I work there at the party. It was fun to introduce Annette and meet the spouses. The casino experience wasn't too bad though. We left after the party, didn't stick around, Annette wasn't feeling well. I ended up catching her cold today, thank you very much sweetie!

I heard from my friend Lou from college, his mother passed away last week. He was flying in town to arrange things. He said something that rang true. A mother is somebody who has known you all your life and is the main link to your history. She is your moral compass, your sounding board. Very hard to replace. My friend Chris had a lot of difficulty losing his mom, he said he felt guideless, sort of lost for awhile. The anchor was gone. Anyway Lou was hoping his mom had all of her assets in order for him so he would avoid probate court. That was a wake up call to take a trip to mom's on Saturday and go over her assets, where the papers, checkbooks, stocks, other financials are located, whose name does she have them under, etc. She's got it pretty well lined out. Kind of a morbid exercise but one that really should be done.

Saturday night we watch Kenzie's Uncle Paul's (her godfather really) two little kids. I have no idea why Annette and Kenzie enjoy this. They cried the whole time they were awake. It was quite a handful. Usually Paul and Marcy hand their kids off and go over a rule sheet with Annette, kids eat at 5:45 pm, they like this song to played to go to sleep, make sure he sleeps with his bear toy, etc. Kind of funny really, reminds me of a software program. They arrived Saturday with the kids, no rules, just keep them alive and they bolted. Annette and I got a good laugh. New parents are funny to watch.

Sunday I updated my sister's business website -- http://creativedesignstudio.no-ip.com/ . I made it fancier with the new additions she had for it, moved it over to asp.net. Looks nice. She's got a lot more coming, so it'll grow. She's hoping some of the search engines take hold and index it high. She needs to find some online business directories to put her url.

Tonite I think I will need to skip the gym and drink a half gallon of orange juice and sit and watch some of the shows I recorded on my pvr. Starting to feel feverish. Bloody hell.

Oh Christmas Tree

Today we picked up our xmas tree. It's smaller than what we normally get, but it seems the prices of live trees have gone up. I tried to convince Annette to go to an artificial tree instead but she wouldn't hear it. Fake trees are so much easier to work with, they don't fall over, they don't need watering, they don't have an annual fee, etc.

Annette and I went to our first xmas party last Friday night. My old company, Epic, who I now work side jobs for invited me. It was a fun evening. They handed out xmas bonuses and had each person come up front and then the owners would tell a story about that person. My turn came and since I was their first employee they had to tell the story of how they hired me. They took me to a local Mexican resturaunt and fed me margaritas and tried to sell me on being their first employee, even though they were working on milk crates. I had already decided beforehand that I wanted to work for them so it was a no sell for me. But I didn't know at the time they were having a hard time convincing people they were for real. Ha! I enjoyed working for them but I left them to pursue a life in Cincinnati (long story, leave that for another blog). I'm glad I stayed in contact with them, thank god for email!

We also went to Annette's Aunt Betty's xmas party on Saturday night. Aunt Betty is well to do so she usually does something special each xmas. This year she hired a girl to play xmas songs on the flute. Really cool. The party was downstairs and you entered from upstairs which is where the flute player sat. Since I didn't feel conversational I decided to hang out upstairs and listen to the free concert. Meanwhile Annette had a small world moment. One of Aunt Betty's friends is someone Annette went to high school with in Maplewood. Maplewood use to be a bad neighborhood, so it's referred to as Maplehood. It's funny to eavsdrop on a Maplehood conversation -- “oh he's in prison”, “he was caught selling drugs”, “she had his baby but lives with his brother instead”, “I really didn't know he was my kid”. Ah the good ol days.

I took Friday off to take care of some dental work. I had a filling that had partially fallen out and over the years had cracked part of my molar. As usual this dentist's novacaine sucks, doesn't work on me even after 6 shots of it. So I endured the pain and he replaced the piece of tooth he milled off with a porcelain piece. Went to pay the bill, $900!! Geez. I need to find a new dentist. I could have gotten a crown for that price. At least my dental insurance kicked in 50% of that bill. So my December bills jumped a lot higher than I expected. I did a little xmas shopping afterwards but the novacaine wore off and then I felt the pain. The day sucked until the xmas party that night.

I've been listening to an audio book on contemporary economic issues. It sounds pretty dry but it's interesting. So far they've covered the recent pullback of goverment regulation at least in the US. Certain ideas like deregulation and tax incentives seem so simple yet there is a lot of planning and decision making that goes on behind the scenes to make those big ideas happen. They are in reality macro level experiments that are impossible to reproduce in micro or laboratory conditions. So many variables yet every law or tax put into effect is just a best guess.

Snowy days

Tonite we are supposed to get around 3” of snow. Yay! We've been going through a cold spell like much of the country and well heck it'd be nice to get something for all of this shivering.

I've been trying to get my xmas shopping done this week. Started last night and tried to do the worst of it, at the mall. I hate malls by the way. Anyway got there and the store I wanted to go to was gone! A simple toy store that sold games that I was gonna buy for Kenzie. You think they could have lasted until xmas. I guess I'll have to try and equally oppressive place called Toys R Us. The rest of the gifts are easy to get --  gift cards. That's corporate America's gift to all the men at xmas.

I've been working on a web page for my sister (http://creativedesignstudio.no-ip.com/) to help her boost her business. Since interest rates have been going up, the housing market has been hurt. She provides architectural services for custom homes in the area she lives in. She does very well with it and has many happy customers. In fact for many years she never had to advertise since her work all came as word of mouth. Hopefully the search engine spiders will gobble it up and after xmas the website will be indexed. It's been fun pushing my artistic side which I've never been very strong in. She's happy with it and I think it looks better than I thought I could do.

My mom's surgery last week went well. She had her gall bladder removed. The next day she was up and around feeling no pain. What a trooper. The doctor was amazed at her recovery. For several years now she's been getting ready to die. Quite morbid but she claims “she doesn't want to leave us kids with expenses and a mess”. I told her she'll live into her 90s as healthy as she is. Her opinion on life is interesting, she feels like she's done everything she's ever wanted to do, has lived a full life. What else is there? Been there done that kind of attitude. I've often wondered what it would be like if we could suddenly live to 500 years with the physique of a 30 year old. Would we get bored with life? Would all of those wonderful hard wired joys like food, sex, discovery and parenting finally get worn down like an old LP? Perhaps knowing that we can live to 500 we wouldn't rush so much of life, but slow down. Have children at 100, totally switch careers, marry different people, be more apt to travel. Or would we just put off enjoying life more so than we do now?

This Friday Annette and I are going to my company's xmas party. They are having it at one of the casinos (Harrah's) like they do every year. This is my contract company's party, not Anheuser-Busch. It's a nice get together, open bar, appetizers, door prizes. There's a few people here that work for the same contract company that will be going. One new person, Shelly, will be going. Her and Annette will get along well I think, they both like to talk a lot :) This is the only time I find myself in a casino, in Missouri. I love to people watch there. Like any name brand casino it's extravagent. The majority of people that go and blow their money are usually from the lower income class. Why is that? Usually overweight with polyester jumpsuits. I'm not putting them down, hey every nancy to their fancy, whatever makes your day. But it is fascinating to see a common thread of people. I've never had any gambling compulsions so I can never understand why anyone would want to willingly go and throw their money away. Well I'm sure I could narrow it down to a few satisfactory reasons but I enjoy the mystery more.