Well, I am almost done with my Christmas shopping. This will be the first time I have ever finished before Christmas Eve. (but don't hold your breath, I still have two gifts to get.) I decided that Jonathan would really love to get a Winnie the Pooh coloring book in his stocking so last night I set out to find one. What a nightmare! First I went to ToysRus because, well duh, a toy store has got to have a good selection of coloring books. Believe it or not, they only had about 10 different books and none of them were Pooh books. So I figured, "Well, Barnes and Noble, a huge book store, has got to have them if ToysRus doesn't." Wrong again. They had an even smaller selection. So I headed home, a lost and bewildered Troy, a why oh why do these things happen to me Troy. And it took the bounce out of me. But them as we were driving past Wal-mart, I decided to give it one more try, and sure enough, there it was. One lone Pooh coloring book.

Yani is 4 months along now. We went to the doctor this morning to have an ultrasound. Yani has always wanted to have a girl. I always wanted to have a boy. Well, I guess we already have a boy. We actually ran into out doctor in the hallway. She thinks that Jonathan is the cutest little kid. (and of course he is) He just sat there with this totally serious look on his face. So we got into the waiting room and Jonathan got his first taste of Dr. Suess. Green Eggs and Ham. He just liked it for the car and train I think. So, we got in to the ultraroom and got hooked up to the ultra machine and we realized that we were supposed to bring a video tape. Bummer, how are we supposed to explain that to her later in life? "Jonathan has one but you don't." I'll let Yani tell her.

A few weeks ago, the company had an asset selloff sale where they getting rid of things that were just taking up storage space. One of my buddies here managed to get into the room about fifteen seconds before me and got hold of a really nice 19 inch monitor for $75.00. By the time I got into the room, everything was gone! Well, he had another monitor at home that wasn't quite as nice so he brought it in to see if he could sell it on Ebay or something. Guess what I have been trying to find a good deal on for months... Um, no. Guess again.... A monitor. Duh. So after explaining the situation to the wife, (we like to keep each other informed on purchases) I got her blessing and I will be bringing my new monitor home today.

Friday night, I had to leave work early. So the Coke man shows up to stalk the machine after I leave and my buddies decide it's time to end the never ending conflict over the amount of Coke and Diet Coke in the machine. Well, turns out that they struck a deal with him, we give him an undisclosed amount of money and he stocks our private fridge chuck full of Coke. Here's the thing, When I left Friday, I was just starting a Coke free period that I like to do from time to time. (mainly just to convince myself that I'm really not addicted) So after my looong weekend of fighting headaches and mentally preparing for the onslaught of temptation (to drink Coke that is) that usually can be found at my place of work, I show up today to find a seemingly endless supply of the life giving stuff. Nice timing huh?

So I finally got things set up to start...(Oh, there's a burnt CD now) to start doing all the leg work for Linux Dirt Cheap. LDC (as we like to call it) is owned by my buddy Grant. He has just got to the point that he is sick of doing all the boring repetitive redundant repeating redundant work. That's where I come in. I post auctions to ebay, fulfill orders and so on. Then we split the profit up to a certain point, after that, I get to keep it all (more or less). We were having problems getting a scsi burner installed on a linux box so we did the unthinkable, we installed Windows XP on that box. Actually, there is not really much I have to complain about winXP yet. Over a week now and it hasn't crashed. What's up with that?

Well my wife Yani wants to call her family like she does quite often. We use a calling card from IDT but unfortunately, we need to charge it up because we have used all our minutes. It is actually quite a good value. There are only a few labels that I will blatantly endorse, Merril, Coke, IDT Phone Cards and of course Willsons Old Fashion Salt Licks (Mmmmmmmmmm good). Every time we need to put more minutes on our card, we just call 1-800-989-4382 for IDT's customer service and put another $25 or so on it. That lasts a few months. (For international calls, that's a really good deal). The bad thing is that we always wait for it to run all the way out in the middle of a call to decide to recharge it.

A friend asked me the other day, "Why don't you have anything personal on here?" I don't really know why actually. So here I sit with Jonathan trying to push me away from the desk so he can put pens on my keyboard. Jonathan would be my son in case you didn't know that. He is almost 20 months old. (That's a little over a year and a half to all you without children) You know, I could never quite figure out why people counted their children's age in months. I still can't really explain it but it seems to make more sense to me now. We are expecting another kid around April. For some reason, pregnant couples count pregnancies in weeks. That one still makes no sense to me.