619 Words About 12 Days

I've been on vacation since Christmas Eve. It's been a nice break. Part of that break was staying off the computer, for the most part, but since I know all six of you are curious about what I've been doing, here's a summary:

Holiday Festivities

We had a really great Christmas. We had fun opening gifts and having breakfast before heading down to Katy's folks for Christmas dinner. As usual, the Ruperts totally went overboard on gift giving - we didn't get all the gifts opened until well after dinner. It's also worth mentioning that this was the Katy's first Christmas morning away from her parents, much to my amazement.

For New Year's Eve we went over to some neighbors and watched East Coast network television until 9 PM, declared it 2003, and took the kids home and put them to bed.

Family Outings

On New Year's Eve day we went to the LA County Museum of Natural History to catch the last day of a touring exhibit from the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I really enjoyed the old baseball-related letters and exhibits, and Cameron liked the bats and balls that were on display. Of course, we all enjoyed the dinosaurs as well. Did you know that you can tell an Allosaurus from a Tyrannosaurus Rex by the number of fingers on their hands? Allosaurus had three, and T. Rex had only two.

We also took the kids to Disneyland last Friday. It was a good day at The Happiest Place - we rode the Autopia cars, the bubble machine on It's a Small World was working, and we got Princess Jasmine's autograph. We were on the freeway home by about 6 PM and the kids fell asleep shortly thereafter. We successfully transferred them to their beds when we got home at 7:30. Katy and I decided that we should put them to bed that early all the time.

Reading List

A lot of my free time was taken up reading George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series. It's planned to be a six-book series, of which three books are written. The second book is just as compelling as the first, and the third is also quite good. If you are a fan of epic fantasy fiction a la Tolkien, it's worth taking a look. I would recommend a notepad to keep all the names and places straight, however.

Other Events

Last Monday I hosted a poker game. Way back in 1990 or so we started having "New Year's Eve Eve" games. It was a good time to get together and play cards without interfering with actual New Year's Eve plans. I don't see the Old Gang much any more but it's still a good time to get a game together.

I always invite ten or twelve people to games, figuring about half will make it. This time, however, everybody seemed to be in town and ready to part with their hard-earned cash. I ended up having Dave rustle up a couple more guys to bring us to a grand total of twelve players. We ended up with two tables running until about 11:30 when the field collapsed to six. We played at that table until about 1 AM - with the final hand producing a pretty spectacular pot, well-documented by Mike here. That nice 6-4-3-2-A low hand you see is mine, and put me nine dollars to the good on the evening.

I've always wanted to have two tables going at once. It was great fun, minus the cigar smoke leaking into the house - which resulted in a 2 AM run to the market for some air freshener.

So now you're caught up.