Tobin Family Website

Ah, Christmas, over at last!  Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas.  I especially enjoy the excitement that the kids get out of waking up on Christmas morning and rushing downstairs to marvel at the bounty under the tree.  It is just nice to have Christmas behind us and to now be in the Christmas/New Year’s Day lull.  It is a time to unwind a bit, relax and spend some time with the family before the January rush hits.  I had to work last week, but the hours were reasonable since there was hardly anyone there and my counterparts at the contractor’s facility were all on vacation.  I was home by 5 every day, which in this traffic is a minor miracle.  I did manage to get a headcold over the holidays and spent Thursday working from home with almost no voice.  I wish I could have enjoyed it more, but I could barely breath and generally felt like crap.  

This year we hosted Karen’s sister and two kids, as well as her parents.  It was nice to stay at home and have other come visit us for a change.  It was a little hectic getting ready for visitors, but nowhere near as hectic as trying to travel during the holidays.  We got to play a lot of card games while they were here, to include Rummy and Texas Hold ‘Em.  The kids enjoyed being at home so that they could play with their new toys in their own environment. 

One of the great gifts that I got from Karen was Guitar Hero II for the X-Box 360.  I had suggested that we get it for the kids and I guess Karen interpreted that to mean that I wanted it.  Well, little did I know that I would enjoy it so much!  The best thing is that the whole family has been able to enjoy it together.  There is something very liberating to be able to hold a guitar like device and by pushing some fairly simple buttons be able to pound out great tunes from the 80’s and later.  It is very addictive!  The bonus is that the kids have gotten very interested in music using it.  While it won’t teach you how to play a real guitar it does give you a sense for time and rythym of music, which is a great precursor to being successful as a musician.  As I type (and yes it is 11:30PM), Ben is pounding out some hard rock song in the living room.  He took to it like a duck to water.  I even got Karen to try it and she did very well and had a lot of fun. 

For Karen, it was largely a holiday for new clothes and shoes.  It wasn’t necessarily planned that way, but I bought her a lot of warm tops from LL Bean.  The nicest was a sherpa-lined grey zippered sweater/coat thing.  It looks really nice on her and is very warm (our Florida-thinned blood demands it!).  I also bought her a really nice LL Bean sweater and another thick cordouroy shirt.  Her “big” present was a pair of Born brand shearling lined leather boots.  She loves the Born brand, but is too cheap to buy them for herself as they are very pricey.  The boots I bought were about 1/3 off but were still unreasonable.  I am glad she liked them! 

The kids made out like bandits this year (again).  Karen starts shopping in July and I swear she forgets how much she has bought until the week before Christmas when she starts pulling it all out.  Ben got a lot of Lego and Lego Star Wars products.  Delaney got a lot of doll products, including this robotic “Amazing Allyson” doll that interacts with her (listens, talks, has facial expressions, etc).  It is actually kind of spooky, but she loves it.   Ben got Medal of Honor Airborne for computer which we subsequently found out required a better video card than we had on any of our PCs in the house.  So, on Saturday I did a little post-Christmas PC upgrade to his and my computers (seemed like a good excuse).  We now both have a GEForce 8500GT Professional Series Video Card with 512MB memory on-board.  Hooah!  It is very nice for gaming.  The card was on sale (1/3 off) at Best Buy. 

Today I was contacted by e-mail from a gentleman named Niels Sterup in Denmark that is a distant relative.  He found his relatives in my genealogy pages and made contact.  He is a descendant of Lars Larsen (Brandstrup).  His Great Grandmother Anne Sterup was a Brandstrup and she is my 3rd cousin, 3 times removed.  He gave me some information about his immediate family that I will load into the Genealogy pages with his permission.  His Grandmother (Anne Sterup’s daughter) was born in 1921 and is still alive.  Her name is Bodil Marie Sterup.  I provided him with the names of Jan Tuxen and Werner Brandstrup Andreasen, the two Danish gentlemen that I received a lot of Brandstrup family history from, although I have lost touch with the two gentlemen.  It is interesting when I get contacted by someone through the Genealogy pages. 

Tomorrow it will be time to take down the tree and pull down the Christmas lights.  I want to have that out of the way before New Year’s Day so I can enjoy watching the NHL Winter Classic 2008 on NBC (at 1PM, New Year’s Day).  It is an outdoor game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Buffalo Sabres, played on a rink that they erected this week at the Ralph Wilson football stadium in Buffalo.  There will be 70,000+ fans at the event, a huge draw for a hockey game.  Normal attendance for a pro hockey game is usually less than 20,000 based on arena size.  This is a huge publicity event for the NHL featuring the league’s premier player and youngest Captain in the history of any major professional sport, Sidney Crosby.  It will be an event to watch if you are looking for something interesting on TV on New Year’s Day, and you are not a fan of the bowl games. 

Well, time to head to bed!  Happy New Year to all!  Diet starts tomorrow….

Tags: Tobin Family Update

Well, it is hard to imagine, but I believe that I am done with my Christmas shopping.  This past weekend, I went out and finished off the things I still needed to get Karen.  The sales were really good, especially at Kohl’s.  This is a store that I had never ventured into prior to this summer.  For some reason, I had it in my head that it was a glorified K-Mart.  I am not sure where I got that impression, but I was wrong.  It is actually a very nice store with a lot of brand name merchandise at very reasonable prices.  I may have to make one more trip out for stocking stuff, but the heavy lifting is all done.  Now I just have to wrap!  Karen, of course, has been done for some time and the presents have long since been wrapped.  It is a sickness, I am sure!

This past week, I had to make another trip to the west coast (the second one in 2 weeks).  I hadn’t planned this trip, but program events and activities warranted some more time on the west coast in meetings.  I only spent a day and a half, but it was very productive.  My normal trips out for program reviews are usually so packed with activity that I don’t get time to actually dig in deep and work some issues.  Last week was an opportunity to do just that. 

Upon returning on Thursday night, I learned that Delaney was erupting in a full body rash that somewhat resembled the chicken pox or hives.  By Friday morning, it was spreading down her legs and arms and I decided I needed to get her in to the doctor.  Despite calling at 6AM to get in the queue for a same day appointment, we were told at 6:10AM that they were fully booked.  They offered to have a nurse call us, which we accepted.  By 10AM we hadn’t heard back and the rash was getting worse, so I opted to take her to the Bethesda Naval Hospital Emergency Room in Maryland.  They concluded that she has Molluscum Contagiosum, a viral infection of the skin.  Karen stayed home with her again today and took her back to the regular doctor to question the diagnosis from Friday, as the online research we did over the weekend did not seem to match the look of her rash.  They confirmed that she had some sort of viral skin infection, but didn’t think it was the MCV.  They noted that some kids who get a viral infection exhibit this kind of a nasty rash as the body attempts to fight it off.  They said she was no longer contagious and that she can return to school tomorrow.   

Ben went ice skating early this evening with a friend and his family.  The rink is an outdoor rink that they set up when the weather gets cold.  I think he realized that it is not necessarily easy to stay up on skates as he came home with a bruised behind and a wounded ego.  He still managed to have some fun, but was eager to tell me about his rough go of it when I got home from work tonight.  I think after watching hockey with me and playing it on the X-Box, he thought he would be zipping recklessly around the rink with impunity.  After he fell the first time, he got a new found appreciation for how hard ice can be. 

Christmas is fast approaching and we are expecting Karen’s sister and two kids to arrive on Saturday from Vermont.  They will stay with us until Tuesday before traveling to Palmyra to stay with Karen’s parents.  Her parents will be coming up and spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with us, bringing the total to 9 people in the house for the holiday.  Fortunately, we have plenty of room to host everyone.  We are looking forward to it as it will be the first time since we have been married that we have hosted guests for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  If only we had some snow!  Yesterday, I made the run to Costco to load up the pantry with all of the essentials to feed the crew through their stay. 

I will be working the rest of this week, but have a 4-day weekend pass through Christmas day.  I will then be working Wednesday through Friday of Christmas week before enjoying another 4-day weekend.  It will be good to get rested up as I will have a very busy January, including a week long trip to Monterey, CA, for a conference.  It is going to be a large conference with over 600 attendees planned, and I have a short briefing that I have to give to the group.  Good thing I don’t get stage fright! 

My Hockey Blog is continuing to do well.  So far today I had over 88 unique visitors and they continue to keep coming.  It is a far cry from my friend’s cruise talk blog, Cruise Talk Central.  He has really done well and gets over 6,000 unique visitors a month (whereas my site has averaged ~900 unique visitors a month since 1 Sep 07).  I think he has found an outstanding niche market.  He just updated the site look and feel, so drop on over and take a look.  It looks really good!  He is the one that got me interested in blogging about as year ago, and you will see him commenting frequently under the name Mr. Papa.  Some day we will likely collaborate on a site when we both find the time and a topic that we both enjoy enough to blog about.  The advertising sold on the sites is not enough to quit the day job, but it pays for the web hosting and provides some extra spending cash.   

Tags: Family Update