Christmas Eve is always the day we spend with my Dad’s side of the family. So my parents, my grandfather, my brother and myself hopped in my 4Runner and made the trip up to Hereford for Wednesday night. My cousin’s baby is 15 months now and he is absolutely adorable to watch. So we spent a large part of the evening watching him run around and interact with everyone. The most entertaining thing that happened that night involved my grandfather.

So my grandfather and I are standing there looking over the horderves and I see him start picking through the potpourri. He takes a piece out and sniffs it and I turn to him and say, “Pop, I think that is potpourri”, just as he pops a piece in his mouth. He makes a face and then takes it out and looks at it and I just start laughing. The rest of the night if things got too quiet I would get an image of Pop eating the potpourri and just start laughing.

Christmas Day we spent with my mother’s side of the family, and it was pretty much uneventful.

So it’s Christmas Eve, woo-hoo! Got SDO Hot Breakfast action today and Aunt Kathy’s Hot Dinner action tonight. Should be a good day. Just got done my Tae Bo, so I am sure I will have gobs of energy to get me through the day. We usually open presents tonight now that my brother doesn’t live with us. Even the fact that work woke me up at 8 this morning because someone made a field a character too large can’t ruin the mood I am in today 🙂

See the link towards the bottom on the right? Yeah, that one. Click it. I know the button says IntrusiveThoughts.com, but it actually points to Riley23.com. Hopefully the visual appearance of the button will be fixed soon, but in the meantime just ignore the appearance and click it. That is my brother’s new and improved website. He did all the art work and I did the coding. I am going to go back soon and make the art pages PHP and hook him up with greymatter, but in the mean time there is a lot of good stuff to see up there.

Speaking of PHP. I have continued to work away with it and see if I can figure out the in’s and out’s. As a result SDO now has a PHP portal. I am still working on making it look as close to the original pages as possible. To do that I need to jump into Photoshop and play around with some fonts, so it may be a little longer before the page actually looks the way I want it to. Bear with, I promise it will done by the time I go back to school.

So today I go to pick up my new bike. I couldn’t ask for a more perfect December day to do that. It is sunny today with a high of 56 degrees in Towson. So my plans are to go for a small ride when I get home today with my new bike. Merry Christmas to me 🙂

I decided to try my hand at a little PHP coding. I really want to learn it and I also wanted to make my life easier when it came to updating my cam pics. Previously I would have to open up the page in html and manually add the option for the newest cam pic. Now I just have to save the new picture to my webspace and PHP will do the rest. It is a little slow to load at first, but after that it is just as easy to browse the archives as it was before. Take a look by clicking on my cam pic on the left.

So I ended up releasing the new site a little early. My free web-space at Comcast has just become too unstable. So if you are here for the first time, welcome to my new home. I hope to have things finished up here soon.

In other news: I took off work today. I was hoping to have a nice relaxing morning. I was going to sleep in, work out, shower and eat some food. However, work had a different plan for me. It is 8 AM, and I am all nice and warm in my bed when Dad pops his head in my door and I hear the words, “The phone is for you.” The only people who would call me at that hour would be work. So I drag myself out of bed and go to the phone. This happens to me every time I try to take a day off. I need to not stay at my own house next time. I ended up talking to the office 4 times today. However, Mom’s office Christmas lunch provided me with some good energy to go do something I had never done before…

So the night that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets opened we went and saw it. I liked what I saw, but found it very distracting to be there when the movie was so crowded. I like to get really involved when I am watching movies, especially ones where I have an idea of what is going to happen. It always seems that right when you get to that moment, where you are sitting on the edge of your chair in suspense, that your seat gets kicked and you end up missing the something big because you are busy giving the person behind you a dirty look. Since I was off, and the HP movie had been out for a while I thought going by myself to a Matinee was perfect. This probably doesn’t sound that exciting to most people, but it was a really big deal to me to go to the movies by myself. I am one of those people that never likes to do anything by myself. No matter if I am just buying gas or going to the bank machine, I always like to take someone along. I just always have been that way, so today was a pretty big step for me. I can’t help but to be proud 🙂