Been a while, hasn't it?

Man, have I been busy! Still working on the house, and traveling like a fool. Not by choice, of course.

First and foremost, I'm sad to say that we've lost another furry friend. Sunny, a longtime family pet (and when I say longtime, I mean, like 20 years or so), crossed the rainbow bridge while my dad was visiting us in Jax. Funny how they always seem to go when you're not looking. I'm convinced it's them being kind to us - they really do prefer to pass in private. That's why many of them run away just prior, or hide. We're all very sad to see Sunny go, but glad that she had such a long, happy life and that this winter will not be so rough on her old bones. I know we'll all miss her - my sister used to tote her around just before bedtime and ask each of us to give Sunny her nightly "tail pet" before she went to bed. Rest in Peace, sweet Sunshine, we all loved you.

Well, back to work for me now. I have one more marathon-like roadtrip for work this week, then things should be relatively calm over the holidays. Lucky for me, my employer basically shuts down for two weeks around the holidays and allows us to catch up on life a bit.

In other exciting news, we've finished the hardwood floors in the house. And by finished, I mean, completed the parts that everybody can see. We still have some closets to finish. No big deal, just one more little detail nagging at the back of my head. Oh, and must stain and replace all the baseboards we removed in the process. Then the painting of the walls can begin...

We have also decided to hire a professional to install the slate tile on the fireplace and in the foyer. We realized that the investment we had made in the stone was too much to risk messing up due to our inexperience. And, slate is finicky. A lot can go wrong on a 12-foot high fireplace. I'm going to hire the best worker we can afford, and that way anything that goes wrong is his fault, not ours. :) I think it will be worth it in the end; I can imagine sitting in the living room in front of a crackling fire, absolutely fixated on a crooked tile I installed. Or worse, sitting under a pile of fallen slate tiles because I didn't know what I was doing, and gravity won. I'd rather not do that, so tomorrow more folks will show up to give us quotes on the job.

I just invested in a piece of home fitness equipment - a Schwinn 460 Elliptical trainer. I'm pretty excited because it's a new type of elliptical that lets you run, walk, sprint, or climb/step, all on the same machine. I hope it's worth the money AND the space it's going to take up in my office. Hopefully the other half will assemble it this week and I can start using it when I get back.

I also just bought a new external hard drive, a half of a terabyte. Wow. Add that to my other external 240G, plus my hard drive, and I'm pretty sure NASA might be calling me any minute now to borrow storage space for their rocket-launching programs. Hey, it could happen. My 50-mintues worth of VMWare files that I'm copying have just about finished, so it's back to work for me...I have a week's worth of demos to prepare for and haven't even started.

Sigh.