it’s been over 3 months since my last blog post and unfortunately there’s not really a good reason (or at least i can’t think of one) for my recent absence. hopefully the blogging will pick up again now that i’ve started a new entry, and all 10 of you that read this can be complete again. so where do we start? let’s do this bold headline style:

christmas schwag
santa was very good to me this year, piling in tons of geeky goodness. some of my favorites include: a new wedding ring, xbox 360, wii, xbox 360 hd-dvd drive,farscape seasons 1-4, tv b gone.

of cats and dogs
our loveable cat isis ran away about a month after we got juno (sometime late november/early december). we tried everything we could do to find her including visiting local pounds several times per week, posting lost and found signs, and lots of manual searching around our neighborhood. unfortunately we were never able to find her, and paige took it pretty hard. i talked paige into getting a new kitty to help her with the loss of isis and to bring a fresh face/playmate into the mix for juno. so late december we picked up our new kitten loki. you can see pictures of him on my flickr page here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcaner
aside from that, juno is well into her teething phase, having lost at least 7-8 teeth in the past weeks. we’re taking her in to get “fixed” sometime soon (along with loki).. hurray for population control.

california knows how to party
rob and i headed out to pasadena a few weeks ago to give some JBoss training. the trip started off a disaster as it was below freezing here in dallas (around 28 or 29 degrees) and it was raining. my original flight sunday night was cancelled and i had to take the next flight going out monday morning. unfortunately, i had to rush from the airport directly to the training location, as the customer needed to get the training done ASAP. luckily though the timing ended up being perfect as we ended the class a full 3-4 hours early on thursday. while i was there i had a chance to catch up with some old friends, and as luck would have it, opie was also in orange county the same week (we both live in dallas and we were both in southern cali in the same week.. crazy). tuesday night i went out with an old coworker/friend brian and his wife melissa.. they’re 7 1/2 months pregnant and they are just ecstatic about it. i honestly can’t wait for that moment to happen to paige and i, but it will probably be a few more years down the road. wednesday night i got a chance to hook up with chris paschal a friend who i hadn’t seen in probably 7-8 years (maybe more). he has gotten himself into the acting scene near hollywood, and is performing regularly in an improv/sketch comedy group called “some dead hookers”. the timing was good enough that we were able to catch a show of them being challenged by another local improv group, and it was a really fun night. lots of laughs were had, and we were even able to fit in some good local seafood and a little bit of guitar hero in the mix. i recommend you check out chris’ sketch group token white people for some pretty funny 5 minute clips. thursday night i endured a nice 2 hour drive (hurray LA traffic!) to hang out with opie and KL. they took me to this korean (or maybe vietnamese? hell if i know) place in orange county that was pretty damn good… the amount of food we had to eat was pretty impressive, they called it 7-course beef.. it was definately a once-in-a-while kind of thing to do.