From the break

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We did. We spent a couple of days in Hendersonville with Christine's folks: good food, lots of football on tv, laying low, had the fire on some. Wil and I came back early friday night because I had a (low-key) meeting and then we had basketball practice saturday morning and the girls didn't want to come back early.

I've seen a number of 'thankful' threads in the past couple days. It's harder for me to be thankful this Thanksgiving as I've had to take a >75% pay cut in my job and am looking for something to make up the difference. I know this is lack of perspective. When asked on thursday what I was thankful for, I said 'my family', for which I am very thankful. I'm glad the twins are doing well in kindergarten.

I'm glad, of course, that we have a home and we have clothes and food and two cars that (mostly) work. My extended family is great and I have some good friends (though too few here in Columbia).

I've been (finally) ripping my CD collection to our hard drive. I'm having fun with that. I'm thankful for music: REM and the Smiths and the Flaming Lips (most recently ripped).

Christine deserves special mention as incredibly patient with me. I keep telling her she should trade up. Remember the joke about getting a second wife? What we really need in our marriage is a second husband, one with a little more earning power.

Here's a conversation Wil and I had friday night. We were playing the Lord of the Roings Board Game and it was really late. I said 'Are you getting sleepy?' Wil said, 'Yeah, and i'm tired of getting beaten by Sauron!' This was the second time we'd lost the game (which is played cooperatively) in about a week.

I got to go to the Panthers game on sunday and the tickets we had were for the Club Level, which was pretty swanky. The Panthers scored the winning touchdown with 20 seconds left. That was exciting. And I got to spend the day with my little brother, Cory. It was great. I'm thankful for it.

I know I've mentioned this site before, but I went back and added a bunch of the recommendations from The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities page including Spybot, NaviScope, and Star Downloader (Amazing!). Lupas Rename 2000 could be used to sort your unruly mp3s or pix (though I don't happen to need it right now).