As you may have heard on the news, "IT" is here. That is Dean Kamen's Segway self-balancing electric scooter. A lot of folks here in this area are especially excited/proud because Dean lives in Bedford, NH and DEKA in HQ'd in Manchester, NH. Many folks around here "know someone" who was working on IT. Within VAutomation the spouse of one of my co-workers works at DEKA.
I put a temporary link in the upper right hand corner with a link to the Christmas lists for Michelle and me. I'll take it down in about a week. In recent years the grownups on the Bilik side of the family each get assigned at random one other person to focus on for Christmas gifts. In this way you're not trying to buy something for mom, something for dad, something for ..., etc. The giver can buy one or two nice things or a bunch of smaller things or something in between. It takes a bit of stress off of the holiday season.
One of the boys nearly gave me a heart attack yesterday. He grabbed one of the holiday electric candles sitting on the window ledge. He then proceded (as you would expect a 10 month old) to aim it towards his mouth, bulb end first! Yikes! Visions of broken glass inside the mouth, electricution, a burnt mouth! Oh the possibilities! You don't want to think about it. It's more fearful than pulling the Christmas tree over!
The women went last weekend to Tiny Tim's Christmas performed by the drama club in Infant Jesus School. Later that evening John, Mary, and Drew Martinez watched the kids while Michelle and I went out for a bite of dinner in peace. Sunday was Drew's fifth birthday party. I spent much of that afternoon trying to fill out the medical savings account reimbursement forms. You wouldn't believe how many Blue Cross benefits statements we have had this past year.
Lastly, in case you didn't notice, I put up more pictures . These ones are mostly of Michael and Daniel. I'll try to get more snapshots of the girls this week.
I've heard reports that some people are not able to click on the thumbnails and get an enlarged, single photo page. If any of you see a problem, please email me with details of what you see (or don't see). Most hiccups I've seen so far are usually cured with a click of the browser's Refresh button. I can only test these picture pages from a couple of browsers on my Mac and Internet Explorer at work. Perhaps some of the popular services like AOL or Compuserve include browsers that have trouble with the links??? I can't tell. I've never used one of these "value add" providers. I've always used vanilla internet service providers who just get me connected without "trying to make it simple". It's not an elitist thing. It's just that I've been online since 1990 when the Internet didn't have AOL, Compuserve, Juno, MSN, and Earthlink trying to dominate the Internet. The extra stuff that they add between you and the Internet is more than I care to use.