Due Date Update!

Today, we went to the doctor for our first detailed sonogram which served several purposes (details and pictures coming soon). One result is that the due date has been moved forward almost a week to 06/07/08. The baby ticker on the main blog page has been updated.

Neptec Christmas Party

Last night was Neptec's Christmas Party at Cafe Annie. We have a pretty big social budget but the only thing we ever do is the Christmas party so it is always at some fancy restaurant and we get dressed up and have a good time. Last night was no different. We had a private room which happened to be the wine room. We shared many appetizers including sea scallops with grilled applewood bacon, 'chicken fried' gulf shrimp with lobster cabbage slaw, tostada of gulf crab meat with avocado relish, wood grilled quail with white cheddar ancho chile relleno, and salad of seared rare tuna with roasted beets and frisee. Wow! This stuff was incredible!

For our dinners, E had wood grilled lamb chops with smoked almond and cocoa recado and I had wood grilled salmon with BBQ quajillo chile sauce. Mine was a perfectly cooked piece of fish (which I ordered medium) and E's was the best lamb I've ever had (also medium). We finished off with pound cake and chocolate cobbler for dessert. Talk about a great meal. Throw in some great service, great company, great wine, and a great atmosphere and you can't ask for much more.

Busy Thanksgiving, continued

In the previous post, I neglected to mention a couple of other noteworthy events of our Thanksgiving week. While we skipped shopping on Friday, we were not idle. In fact, we helped to move my mom's parents into a new place, so we helped pack, transfer stuff, and unpack. It's a little smaller place than where they were, so we had to be creative with the furniture but the staff seem really nice and I think it will be good for them, particularly once my grandmother gets used to the change.

Friday night, we celebrated my birthday with my parents. We had some great (as always) seafood gumbo and a nice time to visit. My birthday isn't until December 19 so we were a little suspicious when they said they wanted to celebrate early so they could give me my gift. I figured they were excited about what they were giving me and E and I are excited about it as well. I got a Nikon D40 Digital SLR camera. E carries her Canon SD800 IS with her all the time for those spontaneous moments, but we've been wanting a really nice camera for events, scenery, and, of course, the baby.

Lastly, during this whole time, I've been dealing with tree issues in our back yard. We had a limb fall into a neighbors yard, fortunately not doing any real damage but it led us to decide to get the trees trimmed including another branch that stuck into our neighbors' yard. In addition, we had our Magnolia removed which we've been planning to do anyway to put in a smaller tree.

Busy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving weekend was pretty busy for E and me. Wednesday, before we left for Shreveport, I finalized the sale of my Trans Am. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest that it got and I was able to sell it in just over a week and got my full asking price. Also, I really like the guy that bought it and his family and think he will take good care of it. He is actually in the Air Force in Oklahoma but his mom, dad, and brother came by to see the car and make the deal.

Thursday, we spent the day preparing and eating, of course. My parents had 20 people for lunch and we had more than enough food. It was fun to see family and friends and of course to stuff ourselves. We skipped out on the Friday shopping (I can't stand crowds) but did a little bit on Saturday at some more obscure, small shops in Shreveport.

We drove back Sunday through nasty weather though it never rained as hard as it did on the trip to Shreveport. Yesterday, we got a tree and decorated the house and today we decorated a tree at the church with some friends. I'm not sure it's going to slow down at all until after the new year with all of the parties and the upcoming Shuttle flight. Oh well...better to be busy than bored, right?

2nd Doctor's Appointment

We went to our 2nd doctor's appointment today. They did another ultrasound, and it was so neat! The baby is now 41mm long, and we got to see it moving! Sorry there's no picture today. It wasn't very clear. We'll be going back in a couple of weeks for the Nuchal Sonogram, so maybe we'll get a better picture then.

Windows Desktop Search killing my disk space

I've been dealing with the "low disk space" warning on my home computer (XP) for a week or two and trying to use the Windows tools to free space with limited success. I had finally decided I just needed to get a bigger drive (although I felt like 80GB should be big enough) but in a last ditch effort to free up space, I started going through the folders on my machine to hunt down the culprit. I finally found that the Windows Desktop Search utility, which I never intended to use but which was automatically installed and configured on my machine, was eating up 25GB of space!

I can't believe that I am the only one to ever see this problem but I couldn't find anything online. I disabled it by telling it to not index anything, manual shut it down with the command prompt command: "net stop wsearch" and then deleted the application data folder. No problems so far but that was a serious pain for something I never wanted to begin with.

New Car! / Trans Am for Sale

I bought a new car yesterday. It's a slate blue 2008 Infiniti G35 sedan. So far, I have loved it. It's fast, fun to drive, and has some cool features. Maybe, I'll talk about it some more later, but the real purpose for this post is to advertise my old car for sale.

Most people that read this will know my car, but for those that want more information, I've listed it on AutoTrader and craiglist. If you or someone you know is interested, email me. I'm asking $8000 which is really a great deal on this car. I've loved driving it for the last 9 years (almost). Just for fun, here's an old picture of the car. You can see new pictures at the links above.