BilikFamily.com

I was talking briefly with Alyssa on my drive home today to get status on her home addition. Along the way she mentioned that I hadn't written anything lately. 'Tis true. I usually write when things quiet down at night. With mom and dad visiting, I was spending more time with them — out for dinners, watching movies, etc.

After the folks left Saturday morning, I also spent some time this weekend refreshing my résumé. This took up some of my writing time. It's been over a year and the things I've done differ enough from my last job that I thought things needed updating in case a good opportunity came along. Back when my last office was imploding shutting down, I did my old résumé on a work copy of Microsoft Word. I had long since lost the file for that, don't have Word anyway, and only had a few Adobe PDF format copies.

I decided for somewhat geeky reasons to do this one in an old document markup language called LaTeX. I had used LaTeX way back when for papers in my undergrad days and once more for a customer in my last job but hadn't used it in about 6-7 years. In many respects it's not that much harder than the use of HTML for writing web pages, but there were a few rusty brain cells I had to refresh.

I don't want to stay up too late so I'll close with a few rapid fire bullets of highlights:

• The folks had a great time here, but left a day early to avoid potentially getting stuck in another storm that was expected in the area.
• I took last Friday off to be able to spend more time with them before they left. Michelle and I used a bit of that time to consider a second refrigerator or freezer at a nearby appliance store. No decisions so far.
• This is winter school vacation week in NH. As expected, there have been sleepovers. Pray that Michelle keeps her sanity with the kids home all day long all week long.
• The twins had a regular 'well child' checkup today. They had good clean bills of health. As seems to have been common since birth, Daniel is a smidge shorter and heavier than Michael. Mighty Timbo has his checkup tomorrow.
• I'm getting a bonus check from ATI AMD this week. Who-hoo! In addition, AMD launched the new 690 chipset with ATI graphics included. This starts to fulfill the vision of being able to buy the processor, the graphics, and the glue logic all from one company. (See also this ArsTechnica summary of the announcement)
• A couple of weeks ago there were also some press releases about the area I work in.
• I fixed the meat drawer in our existing refrigerator yesterday by ordering a replacement part from AppliancePartsPros.com. If you need a small part to fix an appliance in your house, I got very good service from them.
• Michelle and I went out for dinner tonight. We've gotten in somewhat of a rut of going to Black Forest Cafe on date night. We like that it's quiet, creative in their menu, and affordable. Quiet is especially a feature to Michelle!

So that wraps it up for now. There are other topics I could rant on for many a paragraph, but my eyes would start to get fuzzy if I pushed things much further. I'll save that for another post, hopefully in the near future...