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I found a few great little items, the PicoPad and the Utilikey.

The PicoPad is a pen and paper that fit in your wallet. I’ve always wished I had a writing utensil on my, but I can’t stand trying to carry a full sized on around. I’ve already found it useful a few times, but it’s hard for me to remember that I have it since I’m so used to just being without pen and paper wherever I go.

The Utilikey isn’t as cool as I had hoped since it’s hard to open, but it is nice that when it opens it detaches from the keychain easily, which is a must when trying to use the screwdriver in hard to reach places. It’s just nothing compared to my leatherman micra, whose only fault is a crappy bottle opener.

I already carry around my keys, wallet and cellphone, and I think that’s too much already, but if something can fit in my wallet, like the PicoPad, or on my keychain, like the Utilikey, it might be useful to me.

Nathan convinced Kim and I to go climbing at Vantage on Sunday. We were skeptical that it would be cold and miserable, but it turned out great. It was a bit cold, but not so much that climbing wasn’t fun. I was totally out of shape for climbing after not having done it for so long, and my arms were pumped after 3 climbs. We didn’t even start until 2 PM and I thought that we weren’t going to get enough in before dark, but I was about finished after the second route. My poor forearms.

• Reading: Getting Things Done by David Allen

Coming over the pass Wednesday night wasn’t bad at all despite the lane closures. Kim drove all the way from Seattle to Spokane too since she was so in the groove. We got to my parents house and we all watched “The Way Things Go”.

Thursday morning Kim cooked her tofurkey in the morning and we all left around noon. All the family in the area was at Gwenda’s except Joyce who wasn’t feeling well. Bill and Rosemary even came in for Thanksgiving. Everyone caught up with everyone else, looked at a lot of pictures and sang songs. Mike is getting really good at the piano so he played a little concert for us, and his cousin Amber was good enough to play some music that everyone could sing along to.

There was plenty of food as always, but there wasn’t any stuffing except for in Kim’s tofurkey so it was a pretty big hit. Gwenda was planning on just having ham, but that didn’t go over too well with some people so there was turkey too. Then there was pie. Apple, pumpkin and raspberry. Mmmmmm. Pie.

During dinner Kim and I announced our official wedding date and location, Sept 30th in Bristol Vermont, and after dinner we asked Bill and Rosemary to perform the ceremony. They were excited to and we’re excited to have them. They did the ceremonies for Joyce, Gwenda and my parents, so it’s somewhat of a family tradition that we’re looking forward to carrying on.

Dave, Sue, Mike and Amber and the older generation left and then the remaining people decided to play Taboo. Kim got an impressive 7 words in one round and Sierra is almost as good as the adults. I gave Larry the wooden puzzle that I’ve been passing around and he solved it in a very novel way.

The next day we went into Spokane to Grandma’s house to hang out with family some more and watch Dad’s slide shows of Africa pictures. Joyce was feeling well enough to hang out for a little while.

Today we’re just taking it easy and gonna play some cards.

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Kim, Amanda, Art and I went up to Snoqualmie pass this Saturday to snowshoe around. I started to get worried on the drive up that there would be no snow, but fortunately there was just above the pass elevation level. (more…)

• Reading: Modern Database Management, Seventh Edition

I’ve just completed my first batch of Mr Beer. I’m a little disappointed with the taste of the beer, but I realize that the West Coast Pale Ale beer included with the kit that I bought isn’t the kind of beer I normally like. I like something a little richer and darker. It basically tastes like Coors Light, although after drinking a bottle I like it better than Coors Light. It’s got a nice, light, flavor and the aftertaste is very slight. (more…)

For my birthday, Kim got me a trip by train to Portland to see the Decemberists. (more…)

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Let me just say, I make a darned cool lion. Unfortunately I forgot to put my memory card in my camera before I left for the party, so I didn’t get any pictures. Kim went as an anime warrior, which involves a long Chinese dress, a cool, foamy, pink hair piece, and some nunchucks, which Gabe just happened to have lying around. (more…)

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I haven’t made a cent since the first day. If anything this AdSense experiment has shown me that writing almost completely for myself, unless I have people reading this using RSS feeds that don’t register as a page view in the AdSense stats. Of course, I started of mostly writing this blog for myself, followed by friends and family, so I’m not surprised that my traffic is so low.

I think to make AdSense worthwhile and effective I would need a blog about a specific topic, and then I would have to do some work to get links to the blog, join networks, maybe have some sort of marketing campaign. In other words a lot of work.

You can get an interesting comparative sort of idea of how much your blog might be worth in advertising based on some numbers from AOL’s purchase of the Weblogs, Inc blog network. I was surprised that my former political blog www.ministryotruth.com was worth about $5000 according to them. Of course, it really isn’t worth that if nobody will pay me for it, but it goes to show me that I had a few more links than I thought. It was too much work though and it didn’t turn out to be as collaborative as I had hoped.

• Reading: Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such thing As Hypnosis by Steven Heller & Terry Steele

I never wanted to have ads on my website, but I’ve become a big fan of Google’s AdSense ads. I’ve actually found the targeted advertising to be sometimes useful instead of being a distraction – like advertising normally is. (more…)

• Reading: Truman by David McCullough

The pumpkins that we got last weekend needed some carving so we invited a bunch of people over to carve with us. We got some really, really cool pumpkins out of the deal thanks in large part to Art, Amanda’s boyfriend, bringing a pumpkin carving kit of little saws and stencil designs. Thao and Thai and some of their friends showed up for a little while just to say hi but didn’t carve pumpkins. Brian and Bridgid carved theirs without stencils and had to leave a bit early to get up the next day and run a race in costumes. Jesse and Deborah also did their own designs, Jesse carving 4 faces into his pumpkin, one on each side. Art made an amazing pumpkin with the face of their new puppy in it, his own design. Jessie (sp?) carved a cute pumpkin with freckles. Kim, Amanda and I all used stencils and I’m a big fan. I’ve never used them before and it makes me want to do it more often, or even better, design my own. Jacob finished his pumpkin carving of the symbol for pi late as can be expected of Jacob.

Kim made and awesome pumpkin pie where everything was from scratch except the crust. I was just sorry she was nice enough to share it with everyone because I only got one piece :-( We roasted everyone’s pumpkin seeds too, so we made out good on that deal. Mmmmm, pumpkin seeds.

Art and Amanda slept over rather than going back to Bremerton late, and today we went to the farmer’s market in the U-District. It was a gorgeous sunny day for it and I wore shorts and a t-shirt. After filling up on samples at the market we went to the dog park at Magnuson Park to give Art and Amanda’s puppy Gretchan some exercise and social interaction. I’ve never been to a dog park and it was a blast. It was really fun watching all the dog – dog, dog – people, and people – people interactions. I’m frequently surprised that dogs even recognize each other as the same species since so many of them look soooo different from each other. The park is really big and goes all the way to the water where dogs chase all kinds of toys into the water to retrieve them.

Art and Amanda went back to Bremerton and Kim is off tonight doing volunteer work at some cooking event to satisfy her community service requirement for her culinary program. So I’m writing, researching and programming. Weekends need to be longer cause I get so much more done than I do during the week.

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