It's Been a While...!

It's time again for an update. What's been going on? Quite a few things, actually.

First and foremost, I've been pretty busy with work. At the end of January, I helped put together the "board book" - a package of information for our Board of Directors' meeting. Some long hours were required.

Also, in the last weekend of January, our new Pastor closed on his new home, and I pitched in to help paint. He was installed on the afternoon of the 4th, which also happened to be the same day as our latest Praise-Team led service at the church, so Rachel and I as the fearless leaders of that group were busy preparing for that too. And of course, the Super Bowl. Oh the grief I took for deciding to cheer for Peyton.

A couple weeks ago I did a full reinstall of OSX on the iBook. This time I saved enough space to install Ubuntu, and now I have a fully functional dual-boot machine. The Airport Extreme wireless card even works with WPA2!! Go me!

Early in January, a group of guys and I got together to brew some beer at the Shenandoah Brewing Company in Alexandria. (They have great root beer too.) This weekend, our Heavy Scottish Ale (7.7% Alcohol by Volume, Rachel says it tastes like wheat bread...maybe it does) was ready for bottling. Now we have a case and a quarter each to enjoy. That was pretty fun.

Also this weekend, I started Kal's Moblog. Check it out. What is a 'moblog,' you ask? It's a blog that you update using your mobile phone (mobile + blog = moblog) via text or MMS message. Since a 450 character blog post isn't that big, and because it would be a pain to type a whole post out in T9 or whatever your phone uses, it's usually confined to a picture with a caption. That's what I'm going with. The bottling from the brewery provided the first entries. Expect to see more...I especially want to show the readers in Michigan Bethesda's white pavement. Pretty spectacular.

Be sure to check out Kal's Classic Homemade Root Beer on the moblog. The yeast is working its magic on the counter right now. If it works well, we'll see the dawn of Kal's Diet Homemade Root Beer and Kal's Premium Homemade Root Beer (honey sweetened).

I also did our taxes yesterday. I was quite pleased to see a federal refund of $155! Compare that to last year's tax bill of $1,458 and you would too.

Finally, Deedle has been to the vet's a lot the last few weeks. First it was a routine check-up. From there we found we needed to have a small mass on her shoulder removed, and her teeth cleaned. Before the appointment came, he mass (which was a cyst), decided to burst, so she went back and it was determined she was fine, and it'd go away. When we took her in for the teeth cleaning this week, though, they said the cyst (caused by a glandular tumor) was back, and would keep coming back if we didn't remove it. So Deedle got more than she bargained for -- dental work and surgery! She's doing well now, except for the wounded pride of having a shaved patch on her back and on her front-left paw where the IV went. She's such a good sport!

-Kal