Busy Times

The last few days have pretty much been a blur. Saturday began with Naomi's ice skating. She received her class review and was graded from 1-5 (5 being "Strong") in the skills taught in the class. She received a "5" right across the board and so now is able to move up to the next class level.

After this we had lunch with some friends in the area at a local Cuban restaurant. The food was excellent, I chose a BBQ pork dish with rice, beans and a fried plantain. We will certainly be coming back. The kids enjoyed the food OK but especially liked the fruit shakes that were available.

In the afternoon, Mindy went out with her friend Holly and I stayed home with the kids. At about 4:30 she called and asked if I wanted to go to Atlantic City that night with Gary (Holly's husband). I didn't need too much convincing and so plans were made...

We left the house at around 9:00, picked up another friend on the way and arrived at the casinos around 11:00. I played $1/$2 NL right through until 4:30 and despite losing a little, had a lot of fun and figured out a few things about playing in a casino. You only get better with experience and I certainly know what mistakes I made and how I plan to correct them. My biggest winning hand of the night was a KQ that hit nicely with a flop of 9TJ! Other than this, I did not really get too many nice hands but it was certainly a good night.

We arrived home at 6:30 and I grabbed about 4 hours of sleep before getting on with the rest of the day. First item of business was to watch the cricket from the previous night. Unfortunately Australia did rather poorly so it was easy to fast forward through the game and watch the damage. Following this, our organization kick continued - now our basement is relatively uncluttered and we have places in our various storage closets and bins for all of our stuff. A couple more weekends of this and I think we will be able to get everything in line.

On Monday, Mindy's present arrived! I had actually told her what it was over the weekend - the book of the series we had recently watched "It's Not Easy Being Green", shown here on the Sundance channel but produced initally on the BBC. It was the story of a family that purchased a 300 year old farmhouse and renovated it using environmentally sound practices. They also began to largely live off the land, raising their own pigs, chickens and garden. Some of the more interesting projects they tackled were to created an aquaduct driving a wheel providing some of their power needs; their own bio-diesel plant; ducted wood heat throughout their house and a pump to take water from their spring to a tank in their attic. Very entertaing to watch and so I figured the book would be interesting. Mindy was happy with the book, despite the long wait.

Last night we watched the movie "Superbad". It was made by the same people who did "Knocked Up" but not nearly as good. There were some parts that were quite funny but unfortunately some quite poor sections as well. Not superbad but certainly not supergood either.