On the 22nd of November, Brandon’s cub scout pack participated in a Space Derby. This is similar to the pine wood derby, but instead of cars they make rockets. The rockets are propelled by a rubber band and a propeller. I was in charge of winding the rockets prior to the races and after winding 30 rockets that raced at least twice my fingers were sore by the end of the day. Brandon’s rocket one the first race and then came in second, ok lost, twice. I have the picture on my facebook site and it can be seen directly here.

Next was the Thanksgiving Turkey Trot. Danith and Brandon got up early Thanksgiving morning and ran in the family 1.5K while her sister, Megan, ran the full 5K. The bonus was that Brandon’s picture to the left, was featured on the sites homepage since he looks so awesome running. After the Turkey Trot Danith and her sister came home and helped cook a full turkey and trimmings for the Thanksgiving dinner we hosted at our house.

On Black Friday I tried to brave the crowds to get something special for Danith at Wal-Mart. (Sort of an oxymoron, but hey). Due to the trampling death at a east coast Wal-Mart they opened the doors early so all the good items I was after were already taken. Instead I picked up some smaller items for the boys. Later that morning we drove down to Rochester to meet up with my Mother and my step-brothers, Jim and Jason, and their family. My mother rented out the party room at Jason’s apartment complex which has an attached pool. We ate a lovely ham dinner and than the boys and I got to swim. Aiden had a great time and of course Brandon was showing off how close he is to being able to swim by himself.

And finally the snow has come to Minnesota. It is predicted to remain white through Christmas this year which will be a blessing and a curse. With the snow I took Brandon skiing for the first time. He had a blast and should pick it up in no time. I expect by winters end he will be able to ski most of Afton Alps. Now I just need to get Danith out on her new skis!

Have a happy Holidays as at my normal posting rate it will be the middle of January before my next post.

Step 2, install tile.

Guess I glossed over the hard parts.

Ok, so our kitchen needed some pizzaz and grease loves our walls. So we can fix both problems at once by putting up a tile backsplash in our kitchen.

After weeks of pondering and searching various tile shops, with kids that did not want to look anymore, we picked out some travertine tile in a dark, light checkerboard pattern. I measured the kitchen and determined we needed about 40 sq feet of tile and that leaves plenty for cutting and screw ups.

The tile arrived last Monday and there it sat until Sunday when we finally had no plans. I moved the tile-saw onto the island for easy access and got to work. The main tiles went up nice and easy in the diaganol pattern. We got nice and lucky that our cabinets and our countertop lined up on a half tile exactly so that made the top and bottom cuts nice and easy. The hardest parts were the outlet and switches.

By late Sunday afternoon the tile was set in place, and we left for dinner to allow the mortar to set-up. That evening I adjusted the outlets and switches and placed spacers were needed. Monday we put on a color enhancer. The last step is to grout which will probably occur this weekend. Below are some pictures for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

For supper the three of us followed a recommendation from Rachel Ray ($40 a day) and went to Snake River Brewing Company. The beer there was good but the service and the food was no good. The Brat I had I could barely get down my throat even when washing it down with the home brewed beer. So either Rachel Ray never really ate there, or they served her special food. Two Thumbs Down!!

Monday morning I was feeling much better, in fact anxious to hit the slopes. After a quick breakfast at the hotel we drove to Jackson Hole for a day full of skiing fun. Now I should give some background.. Before we arrived they had no fresh snow in two weeks. Sunday they got over 14 inches and Monday it snowed all day. Normally fresh powder is great, as if you fall it really does not hurt, which is true. But when there is snow up to your knees and ice underneath it really works your legs and ankles when you plow into 2 feet or more of pushed around powder. After a number of hours of this I was really getting beaten down. The highlight of the morning was from the gondola we saw a moose wandering around the ski trail. We avoided that trail for the rest of the day.

We took a quick break around noon at Bridgehead Restaurant and quickly hit the slopes again. My energy levels quickly faded and by 2:30 I had to call it quits and went to the Mangy Moose to drown my poor respitory system with some liquid pain killer. Matt threw in the towel 30-40 minutes later followed by Nate in another 30.

After returning to the hotel it was hottub time followed by dinner at Bubba’s BBQ. Excellent pulled pork, great fries but their chili and coleslaw were not good. Quite the exhausting day.

But my main love for the ReplayTV was its ability to download the shows to your PC as a standard MPEG file. I loved to be able to record shows, automatically remove the commericals and burn them to DVDs. I never really needed to buy a series DVD set due to this feature.

But alas the company that built the ReplayTV was mismanaged and they never updated the product in the 4 years I have owned one. Thus they do not support HD programming. And so here I am, having to switch to a different provider that in my mind had a limited feature set so that I could record in glorious HD.

So back to the story. Last Friday I come home to the UPS delivery man handing a large TiVo box to me. I actually did not touch the box until Saturday evening, probably because I secretly dreaded switching to the evil TiVo. Once opened I was quickly able to hook it to my HDTV via the HDMI cable and was quickly setting up the channels I support.

Now alas I can only get ATSC (Over the Air HD) and SD cable at the moment since I did not order any CableCards. But I am impressed with the quality of the picture coming form the TiVo box. All content is upscaled to 1080i to match my TVs highest resolution and even SD content looks great.

Since I also have a home theater computer right next to my TiVo I am interested in how to play music, movies and show pictures that are stored there w/o needing to preprocess them. I ran across some tools called PyTiVo and Galleon.

PyTivo is a great tool that will allow you to browse your media on your networked computer and directly download it. It can be almost any format and PyTiVo will convert it on the fly to a format the TiVo supports. Very nice and makes me think I can update it to directly stream shows from my existing ReplayTV boxes..Will have to look into that.

Galleon is a open source tool that allows you to browse and show/play your MP3s and Photos. I am sure it can do more but I have not looked into it too much.

So in a nut shell I am surprised and will post more as I do more with my new toy.