LOST

Lost is now in it's 3rd season, and I am still enjoying the show quite a bit. The first two seasons, they would have periodic breaks between new episodes which would definitely grate on my nerves, but it was understandable. They decided to change things up a bit this season and air the first 6 episodes, then take something like a 13 week break!! I guess it is good that they are going to end the season with all new episodes, but 13 weeks? But to try and appease the audience, the folks at ABC have put in an entire new series in it's place while Lost is on hiatus. I don't think I will be watching the new show.

A trip to Florida

What's that??? A manatee!!!

No, that's just Ed.

Last weekend, Tammy and I were able to get away and take a trip to Florida to see one of our friends get married. The shot you see here is of Ed getting into the water to swim to the '3 sisters' which is an area that has a natural spring and a beautiful place to see. We were at a town called Crystal River, which is about a 1.5 hour drive from Tampa.

One of the things they are known for is the manatee population. We were fortunate enough to have some time to take a couple of kayaks into the water and do some manatee searching. During our time out, we saw 4 manatees. 3 up close, and another one about 40 feet away. The ones we were able to see up close were right on us. So close I was afraid one may tip our kayak. Tammy wanted to get out of the kayak so bad and swim with them, but that never happened.

It was a very fun experience though to interact with such docile creatures like that. There are a bunch of rules you have to follow in regards to the manatees. If these rules weren't in place, there is no telling what the manatee population would be like in the area. Probably population of 0.

It was great to get away for a weekend (Thanks Mike and Sherry for watching the kids), just to give us a bit of a recharge before the holiday season hits. Not much longer until Thanksgiving is upon us!!!

The horrors of wiring...

My wife decided it was time to finally paint the entertainment center to match the paint in the rest of the room. In this picture (before) you can see the new paint color on the right wall.

I knew from the get go that this was going to be quite a task to take out the existing components so she could paint the entertainment center and put them back to their original state. Of course, taking them out is easy. Just unplug the plethora of wires and pull the components out. I guess I got it kind of easy though, as I was able to persuade Tammy to work around the wires in the entertainment center. This way I didn't have to fish all of the wires through the conduits in the entertainment center again.

After a few days, the painting was finally done (with the exception of a couple of shelves) but I was able to try and get things back in it's place. It all started with just putting the speakers back into the receiver. Not so easy. The labels that I have on the wires were no longer there, so I had to rig up a contraption to find out which wire went to which speaker. After that, things weren't too bad. I wired up the receiver first, the proceeded with the VCR, DVD, DVR, TV and power center. After turning everything on and making sure the basics worked, I wired up the Xbox360 and Xbox. Took me a good 3 hours to get everything done. Well, with some breaks to munch on some candy and down a beer of course. I'm glad that I have done this a number of times, or I would have been at it for quite a while.

Halloween has come and gone.

This year we did the same things that we did last year. Carve pumpkins, go trick-or-treating and gorge ourselves with candy. Well, there was a slight difference between this year and last year in the fact that Briana went to a friends house for trick-or-treating while Josh visited everybody local to our neighborhood.

The pumpkin carving didn't go as well as we would have liked. From all the years of carving pumpkins, we have acquired a number of carving utensils. Unfortunately, we don't know where any of them are and we had to resort to larger and clunky knives that we have at the house. I even went to the local grocery store to see if I could find a carving set, but to no avail. They already were stocking the shelves with Christmas!?! stuff. We were able to get some decent carvings done anyway and placed them outside for everybody's viewing pleasure.

Josh had a great time trick-or-treating around the neighborhood and score a pretty good amount of candy. Briana didn't do too bad herself. We are now enjoying the immense amounts of candy. Mmmm