Yesterday we went to the Auto Show here in town. There were plenty of choices for the next car in our driveway. Drake had a blast. He had to climb into every car.
After the show we went out to dinner with the whole family where Drake was showing off his picture taking talent. This is just a small selection, more can be seen in the Drake the Photographer set on Flickr.
Tags: Christmas went well. There were lots of gifts exchanged, lots of food eaten, and lots of yelling because the dogs were near. Yes, Drake had a fit in Wisconsin with the dogs. However, as the weekend went on he got more comfortable with them.
New Years Eve was nice. The Grand Rapids Griffins game was fun. The team had nice black jerseys on. I know there are a lot of teams that have black third jerseys that people don’t like, but I do. One this is that if they were to wear these black jerseys on a regular basis they will need to get black helmets. The Griffins normal helmets are a dark blue, but they still looked good with the black. We did not stay for the indoor fireworks, Drake was tired and I wanted to get over to Brooke’s place.
Drake went home with Grandma and Grandpa, and Theresa and I went to Brooke and Rob’s apartment. My other sister Megan and Brooke’s friend Katie was there as well. Nothing too fancy, we just played some Apples to Apples and watched Dick Clark stumble through the night. I think it was about 2am when Theresa and I made it home.
New Year Day was Christmas all over again. We had waited to have Christmas for my immediate family until then for a number of reasons. One thing that worked out well was that the Winter Classic II was on NBC. We opened more presents and watched the Red Wings win over the Blackhawks in classic fashion. It seems strange that last season Detroit could not beat Chicago.
After the game I helped Eric change the serpentine belt on Theresa’s Alero. Funny thing, you have to take off a motor mount to get the belt off and on. It didn’t take too long to do, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it by myself.
On our way home we stopped by Theresa’s sisters house to say hi and check on our niece. She had swallowed something earlier in the day and made a hospital visit. She’s fine now, but she still has not passed whatever she ingested.
Once we got home we made a Best Buy run. I had accumulated enough gift card money to purchase an Asus Eee PC 1000H for $5.99. My mom had picked one up a few days ago and I didn’t think about it when she bought it, but there is no dial modem in these. My mom’s house currently only has dial up internet, so now she is waiting for a usb modem to be delivered. They are thinking about getting a connection card from Sprint for their internet, which might even save them money if they were to drop their land line. The only problem with that is they would lose the phone number that I grew up with, and is the only number of theirs that I can remember off the top of my head.
Moving on… the Eee PC that I bought does not have the new fancy Atom processor in it. In fact it only has a 900mhz processor in it. That has yet to bother me though. There is 1GB of ram in the little thing which helps. The real test is going to be installing the Sling player. If It can handle that then I’m all set. I don’t plan on doing anything more intensive then that on the little guy. Surfing the web, checking the email, playing Pogo.com, and watching TV via Sling, that about it.
The software success come in the form of getting the HP On-Screen Cap/Num/Scroll Lock Indicator software 
extracted from my computer at work so I can put it on my Eee PC. There is no light or on screen notification for caps lock on the Eee PC, which bugs me. I set a router password in reverse case because I didn’t know the caps lock key was on. This program will help out tremendously. The other thing I did was remap the up arrow and right shift key. I made them trade places because my right pinky kept hitting up when I wanted shift.
Drake and I went to Wisconsin for one of our Christmas gatherings. Theresa had to work Friday and Saturday, which meant that she got some time to herself while we were gone. Drake did a very good job with the two 7 hour trips. The drive there was far worse then the drive home. I-94 in Indiana was a total mess. Plenty of semi trucks were off the road. We even saw two, or it might have been three, cars on their tops.
I didn’t get too many pictures during the weekend. There were not that many good picture taking opportunities. We did take a family picture that I am sure my aunt will distribute soon.
(click for larger views)
On Friday Theresa and I took Drake out to do a little Trick-or-Treating. We ended up going to some family houses for his first real Halloween. He was so cute and adorable. He wouldn’t say ‘Trick-or-Treat,’ but he did say ‘Please?’ at every house. He was also real good with saying ‘Thank You’ to everyone.
Saturday night the Grand Rapids Griffins suffered their first regulation loss against the Milwaukee Admirals. Drake spent most of the game on my lap leaning back and just watching the game. I’m not sure what was up, but it took him until about half way through the third period before he started applauding and really reacting to the game.
The game started real bad for Daniel Larsson. He only stopped 3 shots out of the 7 he faced. Which did get him replaced by Jimmy Howard. After the 5th Admiral goal I don’t think Larsson even needed to look at the bench to see that Curt Fraser was taking him out. The good news is that the Griffins were able to get four of those five back, but just couldn’t get it done in the last moments of the game.
November 1, Griffinshockey.com: Tom Galvin’s first goal of the campaign gave the Griffins a short-lived lead during a 4-on-4 only 2:15 into the contest. Backpedaling with the puck above the left circle, he found the top of [Drew] MacIntyre’s net with a seeing-eye wrister. [Read More]
Curt Fraser made this comment to the Grand Rapids Press:
November 2, Grand Rapids Press: “There’s nobody in the building that feels worse than him,” Fraser said. “He’s a proud kid, and takes a lot of pride in what he’s built up and accomplished over in Sweden, being the best goaltender there. To have something like this happen is totally out of character. But all of us make mistakes, and he made a few tonight, but his teammates tried to take care of him.”
Sunday was a nice relaxing day at home. Drake and I got some serious play time in. In the afternoon I noticed that Tetris Party was out and available. I went to download it and first needed to buy more Wii Points. I then needed to make room on my Wii. Once it was down and installed Theresa and I had quite a fun time playing around with it. I foresee many hours of Tetris playing in my future. I think yesterday the Wii logged us at about 3 hours of Tetris playing.
