One full day back and Christina and I are already ready to return to Puerto Rico — We had an excellent, much-needed vacation in San Juan.

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A three-day weekend was very much needed.  As always, I did less — much less — than I planned and had an extremely lazy weekend.  That’s not to say it was boring; On the contrary, I had more happen in the past several days than I have had happen in the past several months.  Starting last Wednesday through Saturday, I learned of a pending jail sentence, a pending divorce, two pregnancies, and a severe motorcycle accident — all involving family or close family friends. If there is one thing family is good for, it is keeping things interesting!

Marriage is a hot topic.  Gay marriage, marriage rights, “what happens in the bedroom… “, etc, etc.   These all pop up in the news regularly.  Should ____ be allowed?  What about ____ ?   Maybe I’m missing something but I’m curious why marriage is a legal institution at all?

I’m living the hypocrisy so I can appreciate the tax benefits from being married… but I don’t understand why I deserve those tax benefits.  Regardless, not only taxes but health care, visitation, power of attorney, inheritance, citizenship… all of these are heavily influenced by your marital status.  The religious folks out there believe marriage is sacred… but it seems  but in the past month, I’ve had two friends reveal their marriage plans.  Neither was due to any dying desire to rush into marriage — it was simply for the health care.  A business transaction, nothing more.

It seems to me that if marriage is a sacred institution, which it should be, it should be removed from government supervision.  I’m not the only one who seems to think this way.  Replace it with a legally binding agreement unrelated to the religious ceremony known as marriage.  Marriage can then remain a bond between a husband and wife and the government can legislate w/o getting bogged down in the religious ramifications of laws.

Recently, Facebook altered everyone’s home page to provide a more real-time, “life streaming” type of view of your friends.   The changes are a direct adoption of the Twitter phenomenon, a company Facebook tried but failed to acquire earlier this year.

While the Facebook community revolted, as they do each time Facebook changes, I think the whole idea of “life streaming” is fascinating. I learn a lot more about my friends by observing their behavior and activity online than I do from “Likes”, “Dislikes”, “Relationship Status”, etc (the typical stuff found on a social network).

Even better than viewing miscellaneous status updates from my friends are viewing the items they find interesting.  I use Google Reader to aggregate news and it has a built-in method for quickly sharing articles from the web.  That is automatically displayed to all my friends and vice-versa when they find interesting articles.  I use Reader more than even Search or Maps.   The feed of items along the right pane or via the “My Life In Links” tab above is an RSS feed of my Google Reader Shared Items.

The consistent problem with life streaming is that activity on one online site doesn’t show up on my activity at another site.  There are any number of approaches to resolve this including propagation websites like Ping.fm, aggregators such as FriendFeed, multiple site-posting functions in applications, and any number of others.  They all have varying degrees of usefulness but all seem to be lacking in some way.

In the meantime, I’ve been testing various items.

• Google Reader RSS/Atom Feed or click the “My Life In Links” above.
  
• FriendFeed or click the “FriendFeed” tab above.

We got our first true winter storm this week.  Tuesday morning, Christina and I awoke to a winter wonderland, so to speak.  As always, I had some concern about getting to work but I really didn’t have any issue at all despite some minor skidding and sliding.  I did almost get rear-ended by a Jeep (<sarcasm>SUVs are sooooo much better in the snow…</sarcasm>) Therefore, I was pretty surprised when on my way home, I repeatedly got stuck in the snow.  I guess my way home is the uphill portion of my route and it was on some of those hills that my car got stuck.  Thankfully, I never came to a full stop and my car would (very slowly) work itself through it.  Seeing my speedometer hit 50-60mph when I was only going maybe 1mph was a bit disconcerting, however.  Nevertheless, I made it home no worse for the wear.  Though it was hazardous out, I didn’t notice all that many people getting stuck — more sliding off the road.  I was a bit unsettled at to why my car would be having a worse go of it than others so I took the car in to the auto shop Wednesday morning and confirmed my suspicions.  Driving in snowy or icy conditions with bald front tires in a front-wheel drive car is not something I’d recommend.  

That evening, Christina and I reverted back to our childhoods and went sledding.  Well, her childhood at least — I don’t think I ever went sledding when I was a kid.  The first time I ever went skiing was in college with my uncle.  I loved skiing and Christina and I had a blast sledding.  Our community has a great location for sledding even though, off to the side, there are a few hazards that Christina and I attempted to run into a few times.  Definitely prefer human sledding over car sledding, however.

This afternoon, Wil Harris, a guy I follow on Twitter and a frequent guest on the TWIT podcast, sent along a link to the new (probably not safe for work)  “Love Me Tender… or Else” Agent Provocateur ad.  I’m not all that familiar with the company though it appears to be a British version of Victoria’s Secret, though quite a bit more suggestive.  The Love Me Tender ad is pretty good and I showed it to Christina this evening.  Afterwards, she took over the laptop, started navigating the Agent Provocateur site…  and immediately starting looking through the shoe section.  Shoes!  I don’t think any guy watching that ad would immediately start shopping for shoes…

This past weekend was another full one.  Friday night was an old-school Gears party and a great time, as usual.  The chainsaw is still overpowered but what can you do.  Saturday was another painting day at the condo as we try and class up the joint for the new tenant.   It went pretty well and I was even able to get home in time to watch VT pull ahead in the ACC championship game — in HD on my new TV as well.  I told Christina later that might have been one of the best hours I’ve ever had.

Anyway, I then had to head out for my company’s (very early) Christmas party.  My company always does something a little different than most — we can get away with it since we’re so tiny — and this year we had a bowling outing and then dinner at McCormick and Schmick’s.  It was fun despite my worst bowling game ever — need to do Wii Bowling next year so I can show them up.

After dinner I was finally able to get in a co-op game of Left 4 Dead.  All I can say is that it lived up to my expectations.  Exceeded them.  Chris, Frank, Lucas, and I teamed up and played through the No Mercy level and I can honestly say I’ve played few games that were as non-stop intense as Left 4 Dead.  The forced co-op works as advertised;  You simply cannot wander off alone no matter how good you are because the zombies will overwhelm and kill you in less than a minute.  The game is extremely polished with a lot of attention to detail, plenty of humor, and just an all around well-made game.  The other highlight is that each play-through is completely different due to the “AI Director” who randomizes everything on the level and adjusts based on the current status of your progress.  Very cool concept and adds tons of replayability.

Sunday was a bit more tame as I met my sister Erin in Fredericksburg to swap the van for my Celica.  So very glad to have my Celica back — it might not be the fanciest car in the world but it suits me perfectly.  The evening was wrapped up with a birthday dinner for Christina’s grandmother.  Whew!

Thanksgiving has come and gone and my least favorite holiday is now behind me.  It’s not that I dislike Thanksgiving — I’m just not a big traditional meal kind of guy so a holiday devoted to just that isn’t really my thing.  A few days off work, on the hand — That is something I can get behind.  Regardless, on my new rotating holiday schedule (thank you Married Life!), this year was Turkey Day down in Richmond.  True to my family, it was a loud and boisterous affair with people coming and going and upwards of 25 some people tucked away in every nook of my grandmother’s house.  In a rather bizarre turn of event, I somehow ended up spending a good portion of the day watching Dallas with a bunch of Cowboys groupies…  Ack!  Ah well, I’m more of a college fan anyway.

Speaking of college football, due to the crazy parity (and mediocrity) of the ACC conference this season, VT is somehow going to the ACC Championship game this Saturday.  They will match up against BC – Sound familiar?  That’s right — all of the twists and turns, the unexpected upsets, the week-by-week changes in division leaders… at the end of the season, the exact same teams from last season are playing for the ACC conference championship.  Surprise!

Now that the college football season is winding down, I finally got a new TV for my basement.  My too generous mom dragged me out to Circuit City on Black Friday and coerced me into picking out a new TV for my downstairs “man cave.”  After moving into the townhouse a bit over a year ago, I had given up my nice HDTV for the living room upstairs and had made do with a 19″ monitor down in my basement that was also hooked up to one of my computers. No more — I’m back to the sweet goodness of a big HDTV.

There was a catch, of course.  My car, which is ideally sized for me, is not quite as ideally sized for an HDTV.  I had a few different options for transferring the TV back to my townhouse but in the end, I settled on my mom’s minivan.

My mom will tell all who listen that the minivan she has, a Mazda MPV, is the only minivan that drives like a car.  She may be right but whichever car it is that it drives similarly to… well, it is definitely not a Toyota Celica.  While it’s a very nice vehicle in it’s own right, I just can’t get past the notion that I’m driving around in a minivan.  On the other hand, my mom can’t stand driving around “an inch from the ground” in my car either so I guess it’s good that we’re supposed to be swapping back next weekend.  I’m just glad I hadn’t chosen to borrow my uncles truck.

Welcome, Sarah.  My sister Amye popped out #3 a couple of weeks ago and between that and the eldest niece’s birthday, our not-quite-monthly trip down to Richmond took place last weekend.  Sarah is a little young to hold my interest — they’re much more entertaining once they learn how to talk — but Abigail and Samantha are endlessly amusing.

Christina and I made it down just in time to catch the latter half of each of their soccer games.  There is a dramatic difference in their approach to the game: Abigail is a non-stop motor, devoted to the game, and a true athlete in training.  Samantha has a much more lackadaisical interest in the game and is much more focused on being subbed out so she can get more juice boxes and snacks.  After they came off the field, Abigail was more interested in playing laser tag and basketball while her sister kept cornering people so that she could play “pretend”.  Samantha does a great kitten impression and seems to find no limit to the scenarios she can dream up.

There was one more birthday for which I was asked to visit Richmond for and that was my own.  Living up to his reputation, my uncle Steve showed up at Texas de Brazil ready to embarass me.  Texas de Brazil is not exactly a “low brow” restaurant and I’m sure the wait staff appreciated stepping over the inflatable walker extolling my new age and numerous infirmities.  It was good for a laugh, though.  I did snag a copy of Spore as a present so I’ll probably be writing about that in the near future… that is, as soon as I have a free bit of time to play it.

Christina and I are back to work today after our Vegas trip. Jason & Adrianne joined us in Vegas for the last 2 days and we mostly wandered the strip, stopping for drinks and the occasional craps session. Jason was a big proponent of playing craps while we were out there and it worked out pretty well for us. Christina was “rolling bullets” and we walked away a solid winner — enough to cover the poker tournament buy-in from the first day out.

You would have no idea the economy was in the dumps by the amount of construction out in Vegas. CityCenter, in particular, was ridiculous. The Venetian is still my favorite casino — I’m sure the excellent poker room there has nothing to do with it. They expanded the Venetian to add the Palazzo and the Wynn had added the Encore since I had visited last. I guess there are always people willing to go out and gamble though I don’t know how people can afford to stay at some of these casinos.

The last time Christina and I were in Vegas, we did a television screening where we rated tv shows using a little dial. You don’t know what show(s) you’re going to see until you’re in there but we ended up watching clips from 3 primetime comedy shows. The only one I remember was “How I Met Your Mother” with Doogie Howser but overall, it was actually kind of fun and interesting. Anyway, as we walked through MGM on Saturday, we talked it up a bit and so the 5 of us decided to do it again. As luck would have it, we ended up screening “Wellington” — some reality show Animal Planet is developing. I thought for sure it was another reality show MTV was creating and was a bit stunned that Animal Planet was the channel behind it. Imagine The Hills or Laguna Beach merged with horse shows… if you can imagine such an abomination. I dialed up “0″ from the get-go and rode it until the very end of the 40 minutes of my life that I will never get back.

Our overnight flight back was fairly uneventful and we got in about 5am on Sunday morning. After a nap, the rest of the day was spent doing yard work and watching football. Early to bed last night and now I’m back to the daily grind.