Back Home Again

After a 6 hour drive through rain, wind and massive amounts of blowing dust, we are home in Scottsdale.   Our trip to San Diego was fun and memorable.

Christmas was very special spent with my family — Mom and Dad, my brother Jack, his wife Ashley and the girls — Hannah, Mackenzie and Zoe.   It seems my nieces have got the musical genes from both Jack and Ashley.   Hannah, 9 almost 10, plays violin.   Mackenzie, 6, received a guitar for Christmas and both girls received an electronic keyboard from their grandma so they could learn together.   Zoe, age 2, will entertain you at the drop of a hat with her made-up songs and dances.   I love the way she combines the ABC song with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.   She makes up her own lyrics, which only a two-year-old could understand, but they are still sweet to hear.

While I was in San Diego the week before Christmas, and Norm stayed in Scottsdale to supervise work on our home, my brother helped me rebuild Ivan, my trusty computer.   Ivan received a great makeover!   He now sports an Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 at 2.4 GHz on a 2.39 GHz motherboard with 2.0 gigs of RAM, a new video card with 512 mgs of video RAM, and a spiffy new box from ASPIRE called an APEVIA X-QPack.   This thing is half the size of my old tower and so easy to manage.

My new chair is running great and I’m really enjoying it because it’s so much nicer than the old one.   Perhaps I’ll post a review in a few days.

There is so much to catch up on now that I’ve returned home.   All our old carpet was ripped out of the house and we have vinyl that looks like slate tile.   It’s beautiful, but our house is in a shambles as all of our possessions had to be boxed up and moved out and then back in again.   Norm didn’t have time to unpack much before he joined me in San Diego.   We’ll be playing the “where did I put that” game for quite a few days.