Fon-dos & Fon-don’ts

I had been looking forward to a night of fondu for a while, and last night it all came together. We had swiss/gruyère cheese, oil with steak, chocolate with fruit and pound cake, and finally a new batch of oil for cherry and peach fry pies.

Holy cow, I’m still full. The only problem was not being able to stop myself.

Hospital visit revisted

Christmas night, as I was attempting to go to sleep, a pain I first was introduced to about five years ago made a return visit. It is now clear that Santa brought me a whole slew of kidney stones!

The pain persisted for a while, but eventally went went away and I got to sleep. Then, yesterday, the pain came back around 5 p.m., while I was at work. I continued to work, pretending that it wouldn’t get worse. It did though. I went home around 5:30 p.m. and writhed on the couch for a while until Julie told me I had to go to the hospital.

We were there all night … mostly waiting. I had to get my vitals taken, a blood sample, another sample, and a CT scan with the Siemens Somatom Sensation 64. The results of the scan were that I had already passed the stone that was causing me so much pain, but that there were a bunch more in my kidney.

Fuzzy Couch coffee clatch

Matt, Troy and I met up for lunch today and talked for a couple hours. We tried to patronize Mary’s Cafe, (which I gather has been there for a long time and I don’t remember at all) but it was closed. Instead, we went to the nearby coffee house, Einstein’s. I had a tasty panini, a coffee and sampled a few of soups.

Matt, Troy and Guido

FC for coffee
Originally uploaded by utini.

Here’s a photo from Troy’s camera that one of Einstein’s staff took for us.

The Christmas visitor

I was sitting in the dining room tonight, playing a board game with the family. My chair was facing the living room. I thought I saw some movement in the living room, so I began staring in that direction. I then saw — for the second time, but now more clearly — something fly across the room and back. A bat.

I rushed over and we watched it fly from one corner of the room to another, most likely looking for somewhere to go to get out. Utini noticed it and was ready to try to grab it, if it came close. Someone hearded the dogs into the other room and closed the door, while I was trying to scurry to the front door. It got pretty close to me as I crawled across the room.

I got to the door and swung it open, but as the bat came back across the room, it missed the door and went up into the corner again. It’s pattern then got disrupted by the open door and it fell, landing on my shoulder. Erin later commented on my “manly” scream.

The bat then few over somewhere by the tree. We couldn’t see it at first. Then we noticed it hanging on one of my Christmas presents. Dad slowly picked up the present with bat attached, carried it outside and left it out there … and that was the hartwaming visit we received from the Christmas bat.

No bats were injured in the making of this story.

Introducing … Kennedy

POSTED FOR RYAN:
At 2:05 am Thursday, Dec. 22, Kennedy Joy (the first Fuzzy Couch kid) was born. She weighs 6 lbs 7 oz and is 19 inches long. The doctor decided to do a Cesarean. Mom and baby are healthy and happy and oh so cute. Carrie is getting some much needed and deserved rest and will be home Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.

We’re so thankful to God for adding this precious little girl to our young family and we’re trusting the Lord to give us wisdom for being parents. We want to thank everyone who has been praying for us. We can hardly wait to see the many ways God will work in and through her life.

I’m sure you’ll agree after seeing the photo that Kennedy is THE WORLD’S CUTEST BABY EVER … but then maybe I’m a little biased.

No Streaking

I hear the Chicago Sun-Times is doing away with the Red Streak [link]:

The final edition will be published Thursday. The Sun-Times’ Red Streak launched in October 2002 on the same day as the Tribune’s RedEye tabloid — both attempts to attract young readers through short news stories and a heavy emphasis on local entertainment, sports, fashion and celebrity gossip. RedEye converted to a free paper in October.

Ryan e-mailed about some big news today. More about that later, I assume.

Added a self-portrait to my flickr last night.

Updated the Troyspotting map recently.

FuzzyFrappr!

I created a Fuzzycouch.com Frappr! Map. Add yourself today! And let’s see … I just made it and there are five people signed up already. Sweet! Thanks, you fine dudes and ladies.

Turnout for Ultimate was really disappointing this last Sunday. Ten people said they’d come. Only four showed up. Since we didn’t have enough to play, we just stood around a tossed the disc around for an hour and a half. I couldn’t feel my toes for most of that, plus about 15 minutes into the drive home.

This has to be one of my favorite celebrity quotes of 2005, perhaps more so because it wasn’t supposed to be funny:

“Matt, Matt, you don’t even — you’re glib. You don’t even know what Ritalin is.”

— Tom Cruise, arguing with “Today” show host Matt Lauer

360-less

Still without an XBOX 360. I used the inventory tracker that was put together with leaked inventory numbers for Best Buy’s December 18th flyer. We got up super early and headed to our closest Best Buy on Orange Blossom Trail. When we arrived at 3:45AM, there were 61 in line and according to the data, they only had 50 available.

So next we went to Altamonte Springs, a little further out, but they were supposed to have 52 units. The line wrapped around the building, easily more than 100 people camping out. We found out later, the local news featured the expected availability from this location so that spurred the additional traffic.

Next we headed to Waterford Lakes, where they had 40 units. We arrived there around 4:30 and I started counting the heads… about 30, so we decided to stay. We later discovered many started waiting the night before (at closing on the 17th) and had been given a chance to “sign-in”. It turned out these earlier shoppers were teamed up and taking turns sleeping in their cars in the parking lot. By the time the store opened at 8:00, the line was replenished with the nappers, bringing the total in front of us to 44.

While waiting, we discovered that many of the people in front of us were not gamers at all. They were buying 360s in order to sell them on ebay for double the money. That insanity should be short lived though, I expect it will die down after Christmas when parents don’t feel pressured that they must get one for gifting that morning.

The very first guy in line started his camping on Friday night, I can think of many better ways to spend a weekend!

Pros and conference calls

I’ve been taking part in these big nation-spanning conference calls once a month for the last few months, and I confess that conference call etiquette has, so far, eluded me. The leader of the call asks questions or asks for questions and I don’t know how people keep from all talking at the same time. I kind of wait for a moment of quiet, then as I’m about to talk, someone else chimes in. It’s frustrating. — Plus, there’s the thing where some people are really far from the mic and others are too close. Erk.

The double-egedness of busy

I’ve been so busy all month that I haven’t really had time to sit down and figure out something to post on here. It’s 2:30 a.m. and I’m just going to make myself do it now…

DOCUMENTARY AND DISCUSSION

We went to see “Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost,” the new documentary, the week it came out, but we didn’t account for Veteran’s Day and the DVD didn’t show up in the mail until the next day. So Josh set up a new date and we did get to see the movie last Thursday, Dec. 8. It was pretty good at letting people tell their stories in their own words and not using many (or any?) “talking head” experts.

I would have liked to have seen some of the statistics they give in more context — compared to mom-and-pop stores and compared to other big-box retailers here’s what Wal-Mart does. Instead, the movie seems to tell you “Here’s how Wal-Mart does this. Isn’t that terrible?” And I’m just not sure if it is or not.

THE ESCORT

Since I rolled over 100,000 miles recently on the Escort, I thought I should have it looked over, and I finally had it done last week. Unfortunately, the checkup itself was pretty expensive, and I figured they would find some stuff to fix … which they did … and I ended up having to drop about $500 on a car that’s probably worth $560 to $1,200. And I still need to get the leaky tires looked at sometime.

DINNER AND WINES

After Ultimate today Julie and I headed over to Josh and Amanda’s place. We all had a nice dinner together, then we had a wine-tasting session. Josh (“the winemaster”) led us, as we don’t really know too much about wine (…yet?). He picked out three interesting bottles, two white wines and one red that didn’t use the common varieties of grapes. We swirled and smelled and tasted and took notes, then compared said notes. Interesting, I dare say.

OVERTIME

I went into work and helped out after the wine tasing. I went from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., though it’s my day off. There was just too much to get done, even with my help. We missed deadline by a half-hour, at least.

FREEZING AND THAWING

The weather has been a little annoying the last week or so. It’s been getting down below freezing and snowing — which CAN be fine — but then it gets warm enough for the snow to melt, then drops back down below freezing again. It got up to 40 today, for instance, and now it’s 32 degrees outside. I was sliding all over this evening trying to drive to work and home. It’s kinda fun as long as there aren’t any other cars around.

CHILLY ULTIMATE

We’ve had to cut back on Ultimate a little since Thanksgiving, but we did have enough people to play last Sunday and yesterday. It was pretty cold both Sundays — mid-30s last week and around 40 degrees yesterday. There was snow all over the field yesterday, so we were sliding around a lot and my feet and gloves were soaked. Pretty fun, though. I’m hoping we can continue and I think we will as long as we have at least 10 people willing to play. Three of us threw around on Saturday of last week, but Sunday, Dec. 10, nobody else showed up, so I went into work early (which turned out to be very helpful).

“THE SHIELD”

I’ve been trying to catch as many of the episodes of FX’s “The Shield” since they’ve been showing spurts of them on Saturdays. I think they’ve been showing four or five episodes each Saturday. Julie and I started watching last season when Glen Close joined the cast, but the season before that has been really good too. Last week I made the mistake of sitting down and watching all the episodes that had taped Saturday when I got home from work around 3 a.m. I kept wanting to know what was going to happen next, so I kept watching and watching and watching. I finally ran out of episodes at 5 a.m., but that threw my sleep schedule off for the whole week.

Even though it’s late, I think I’m going to watch an episode right now.

TOP PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR

PC World has an article on The 100 Best Products of 2005 that is pretty interesting, if you like that sort of thing.