This year, we gave the gift that keeps on giving... the stomach flu. But, before I get to that, let me back up a bit...

If you recall, we got our power restored after over a week of outage with just a little more than 12 hours to prepare for our holiday travels.  However, we managed to get everything together and arrive at the airport the suggested 2 hours before the flight.  Out trip went through Phoenix instead of Denver, so I figured we'd be in the clear weather-wise since nothing ever happens in Phoenix.

Wouldn't you know it, we got to the airport to discover our flight had been delayed due to fog in Phoenix.  After a bout with a touchy airline representative (which I may eventually devote an entire entry to), we decided to go ahead to Phoenix since everything was delayed coming and going in hopes that our connecting flight would be delayed as well.

4.5 hours after our flight was to leave originally, we boarded the plane with still a slight chance of catching our connection.  After we landed in Phoenix, we discovered we'd missed the connection by a mere 19 minutes.  With no flights available to El Paso until Christmas, we really had only one acceptable option... rent a car and drive.  So, at about 9pm, we hopped in a car and drove the 6.5 hours from Phoenix to El Paso to Becky's parents house.  All in all, I felt a great sense of accomplishment in having executed such an old-school road trip with a 1-year-old.

Christmas with the Pattersons was great.  I got something I have wanted most of my life... a radio-controlled helicopter.  Thanks everyone.  The only issue was that things in our room were much colder than we were used to, which resulted in Jenna waking up every 30 minutes after midnight due to being cold, and she got all sniffly and such.

We went to Cattleman's (a world-famous steakhouse) for dinner Christmas eve, and I had a huge t-bone.  It was delicious.  Becky had been feeling ill earlier in the day, but we attributed it to lack of sleep.  After dinner, she took a turn for the worse.  I started feeling bad, but attributed it to eating too much.  Becky went to the doctor while I put Jenna to sleep.  By the time Becky got back, I was full on sick, but it was too late to see the doctor.  It was probably the worst night of my life.  Becky's dad helped us tremendously by tending to Jenna, who had also caught the bug.

The next morning, after an unpleasant episode in which I thought I was literally dying, I went to the doctor too.  We were scheduled to fly to Austin and drive to Belton this day, and were contemplating delaying the trip.  We ultimately decided that the pros of keeping our original schedule outweighed the benefits of staying longer.  So, somehow, we got on a plane to Austin and then drove the hour from Austin to Belton.  Unfortunately, the wake of our illness still spread to virtually all of Becky's family.  Some of them got sick on their flights home.

In order to avoid getting sick when we arrived in Belton, my parents just waved to us as we went to the apartment behind the house where they work.  They had gone to alot of trouble to quarantine us away, which was great because we had alot of room for Jenna and we had complete control over the temperature.  For the next few days, we followed a protocol of constant hand washing and such to prevent the spread of the plague.  We even avoided seeing my brother's family completely to avoid any complications for their new son who was less than a few weeks old.  This seemed to be working until my Dad got sick, followed by my mother that night.  My aunt also got sick on her flight home.  We ended up canceling several rendezvous we had planned with friends in the area.  In the end, we finally had a very short visit with my brother's family on his back porch.

Even though we had to be up at the crack of dawn on the 1st to get to the airport, we thankfully had an uneventful and undelayed flight home, and we just sat on our couch in disbelief of the events that had transpired during the previous few weeks.  Now, we just have to shift Jenna 2 hours back to Pacific time.

So, to everyone we had hoped to visit while we were in Texas, we're sorry things had to go down like that.

Well, understandably, with a 3 week old baby in the house, this was the craziest holiday ever.  On top of that, I got an XBox360, and traded in the 95 Maxima for a 2004 one, which absolutely rocks.  I'll blog about both later in more detail.

Andrew and Sara came down Christmas morning, as well as my dad.  My mom was feeling ill and didn't want to get Jenna sick, so she didn't come.  We really missed her, and that made Christmas alot weirder for all of us.  Luckily, she's coming down this week to spend some time with us.

As per usual, we had stockings jam-packed with fun goodies like pocket multi-tools and books and candy and frisbees and such.  Mom puts together quite the stocking.  I think they were mostly to keep my brother and I occupied Christmas morning so they could get an extra bit of sleep.  She would bring them to our rooms in the wee hours of the morning while we were pretending so sleep.  We'd tear into them immediately, sometimes in the dark, so we were just guessing what we were playing with.

Anyway, I fried up a turkey, which turned out great.  I only marinated one side of the turkey since Andrew likes his "plain".  The other side was garlic herb flavored, and I did the best "distribution" of the injected marinade I've ever done.  Usually, I've got alot of big pockets.  This time, it was spread more evenly.

We had a great time.  Jenna got alot of Baby Einstein DVDs and some good books.  I read "Goodnight, Gorilla" to her last night, and she appeared to enjoy it (Which basically means she did not cry).

Well, another Thanksgiving, another delicious fried turkey.  We had a great time.  Becky's parents came on Tuesday and we've been having alot of fun since then.  My parent's came about lunch time, and my Dad and I cooked the turkey.

This year, I did a half-and-half turkey again.  Half flavored with injected Chipotle Tabasco, and the other half with a garlic and herb injectable marinade.  I got a bit lazy this year and forgot to pick up the peanut oil.  Thankfully, a store was open in the morning, and I got some.  As a result, it was a different brand than I normally get.  Unfortunately, when the time came to start, I discovered it was not enough oil.  Thankfully, the store was still open and I was able to get another box.

We did the best job so far of bringing the turkey up to temperature, so there wasn't near as much "volcano effect" as usual since there wasn't alot of condensation or other external moisture.  Everything went perfectly.  The bird turned out excellently (as usual) and was fantastic.  It, along with the other excellent foods prepared by the girls, made for an excellent meal.

Unfortunately, Becky's dad wasn't feeling well and was unable to participate fully.  He's feeling much better now, though.

Check out my turkey photoset and the other photos near them for the fun.  I'm sure my dad's pictures will be up shortly as well.

Wow, I can't believe it's been 5 days and I haven't made an entry about the 4th of July fun.  We spent the weekend in Belton with my family.  On Sunday, we hooked up with Heath and Courtney Robinson and their two sons, Gage and Soren. It was quite fun to catch up with them and see how big their kids are getting. We took them to the mall and into the arcade that I think used to be Eckerds.  Watching them play ski-ball and air hockey,  with Soren barely able to see over the edge of the table was a blast. Here's the photo set of our meeting.

On Monday, the 4th, it was time for the annual Miller 4th of July Olympics!  Usually, my mom comes up with a bunch of crazy games, and we play them and declare winners and such.  This year, Andrew wanted to be in charge of the games.  He did a pretty good job.  We started with the bean bag toss, where you try to knock wooden blocks with animal pictures on them off a saw horse from across the yard. Then, we set up the casting competition, where we used a standard fishing pole equipped with a foam ball and tried to cast it into a pool.  This was quite challenging.  I got some pretty good shots of the moment when the ball hit the water.  After that, we attempted to drop quarters into various sizes containers which were submerged in water.  We all seemed to have drastically different theories about what would work, and oddly enough, most of them worked pretty well.  Most involved harnessing the rotational inertia of the quarter to prevent it from fluttering as it sank. Then, it was on to one hole of tennis ball golf, where you had to navigate a course with a tennis ball and 9 iron, which was also quite entertaining.  That was all for the outdoor games.  Next, we stacked Jenga blocks end to end to see who could get the highest.  For some reason, the girls were much better at that game.  After that there was a heated game of what we call "ball game", which is simply throwing ping pong balls in a trash can, in order to break a 3-way tie for second.  Once 4 place was settled, it ended in a sudden death round of "ball game" for second place.  The prizes were "winners choice" between:

• Some foam balls
• A pocket knife
• A vanilla scented candle
• A small stuffed monkey
• A velcro paddle and ball set

It was great fun. Check out the whole set for the games of the 3rd Julympiad.

Andrew made his patented secret recipe trail mix, which is alot like a bowl of candy.  His wife Sara made a delicious cake.  And we had lots of other goodies.  We didn't get to shoot any fireworks this year, which was unfortunate, but that just means we'll have to make up for it next year.  I hope everyone else had as much fun as we did.

I've been off for vacation for a little while, and today I went in for my first day of the new year.  I had been suspicious about whether today was one of the official holidays on the calendar, but I went in anyway.  Hardly anyone was there, and I related my suspicions to my boss, who went and got a new 2005 calendar and confirmed that it was indeed a holiday.  So, we went home.

Luckily, I won't have to spend time tomorrow catching up on my email and such since I did it all this morning.

We had a great time today with Becky's family. I finally got Halo 2 and have been playing the campaign mode since I can't get online yet.  It's by leaps and bounds the most beatiful console game I've ever seen.  All the cinematic sequences appear to be rendered in real-time and look as good as pre-rendered sequences.  Very impressive.

Becky and I have spent the last few days here in El Paso for some of our Christmas vacation.  I took some time to clean my father-in-law's pc from the many viruses and spyware programs that were grinding it to a halt.  It only had 64MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 384 using some old RAM that I happened to have in one of my bags. In the process of cleaning, I upgraded his AOL software to the 9.0 “security edition“ which comes with anti-spyware and anti-virus software, which was actually pretty nice.

Anyway, it's working great now and we're having a great time. I always realize how much I miss broadband when I'm here. Just googling something is such a huge ordeal. It snowed quite a bit yesterday evening, but the ground's still pretty warm so it's almost all gone now.

For the second year, I deep-fried a turkey for Thanksgiving.  Altogether, I think this was my 4th time, and this was by far the best experience. Here's some links to my past experiences.

The changes I made this time were:

• I let the turkey warm up a bit.  This kept the condensation from occurring so rapidly and therefore there was less popping when the turkey went in.
• I turned the turkey upside down (legs up).  This was suggested by several friends.  This reduced the “volcano effect“ of the hot oil through the body cavity.  It also kept the breast meat more uniformly in the oil.
• I made my own injectable marinades.  I usually just buy something premade.  This year I made a butter and herb marinade, as well as a Chipotle Tabasco marinade.  I've always done a half-and half, one side more exotic than the other.  Both turned out well.

Anyway, it turned out great.

Becky's parents and her brother Andy came down and we all drove up to Belton to have Thanksgiving “late-lunch” with my parents, brother and sister-in-law.  Everything was great.

[UPDATE] fixed spelling of volcano

Wow, finally another post to put in my “4th of July” category! Man, what a weekend!  We spent some time in Belton with family to hang out, watch the annual 4th of July parade, and shoot some fireworks.  We got VIP-type seats at the parade because we were “in-the-know“.  We shot a great bounty of fireworks.  It was a blast.

It was the first weekend and major event for my new Canon Digital Rebel, so I have TONS of pictures.  I'm working on a gallery.  I'm having to sort through hundreds of pictures.  I may just give up and put them all up there.

We also went to Dave and Jen's parent's place.  Well, more precisely Jen's parents.  There we shot fireworks, camped and played with cameras.  Jen's brother Jerry also has a rebel and was kind enough to let me play with some of his accessories. He has some pictures of the weekend already up.  We couldn't have asked for better weather.

I'll post when I get the pictures up somewhere.  I have some fantastic fireworks photos.

[UPDATE: My new gallery is available]

After we went fishing, we met Dave and Andrew, Dave and I went to Sammon's in Temple to play some golf.  I've shared some golf stories before, and it is well-known that I suck.  I've done some crazy things like accidentally throwing a club into the water, and now I have another one to add...

I hit Dave with a golf ball.  It was a total accident. I was lining up a 9-iron shot while Dave was searching in the stream for his ball.  A 9-iron is supposed to give you a really high arch, but mine went like a drive...straight at Dave.  I hollered, Andrew hollered, but to no avail.  Lots of thoughts went through my head like:

• He'll be killed, and I'll get life in prison
• It'll hit him in the eye and he'll be blinded
• Maybe he'll pull a Matrix maneuver and avoid it completely.  The ball will continue and go right in the hole.

Nope.  It hit him right in the front side of his elbow.  He's doing fine now, and it looks much better.  I felt really bad.  He had to play trombone at church the next day.  I thought his career might be over, but it's fine.  I even found out he was bragging that he had been hit.

Anyway, I had some nice shots, like a 45-foot putt, and a drive on a par 4 that put me inches from the green (which then took me another 5 strokes to get it in the hole).  It was a blast.

I've been really busy, but I want to get most of my activities up here, cause we had alot of fun.  I'll get them up one-by-one.

Saturday morning, I got up early to take my car in to the shop to get the windshield replaced.  It had a huge crack in it, right at eye level.  While it was in, we decided to go fishing, so my dad, brother (Andrew), and I hooked up the boat and went to the lake.

Now this boat is pretty small, and really old, and it's had its share of problems.  It used to belong to my grandfather “Papa” who loved to hunt and fish and everything outdoors.  I got alot of my love of the outdoors from him.  He headed out to a nice cove near the northeast corner of the lake.  I'm working on being able to generate maps from my GPS data, but I'm not there yet.

We fished for a while until we spotted a pretty cool cave.  Andrew didn't want to go in because of the spiders, and, to his credit, there were some pretty large scary-looking spiders in there.  I got in there and killed them with an oar.  It was pretty cool.  It's hard to see what it was like from the pictures, but it went way back. If I had had a flashlight, I might have gone in further, but no way without one.

We trolled around some more, and witnessed a kid getting hooked in the ear across the cove from us.  It was really quite, and all of a sudden, everyone in their boat was screaming and yelling. The kid was pulling away, which was setting the hook deeper, the mom was yelling, “Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-“ and the dad was yelling “Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-“. It was crazy.

When we tried to start the motor to go elsewhere, we realized it wouldn't go into gear. Perhaps it was the stump we hit on the way into the cove.  We tried to open it up and fix it, but the linkages were fine, it must have been something in the vertical-to-horizontal transfer case, which we couldn't fix.

We made an effort to get back using the tolling motor, but the winds were pretty high, and the GPS was indicating it would take almost 2 hours to get back at that rate.

We flagged down another boat, which happened to be the boat that we witness the hook-in-the-ear earlier.  The boat “The Emperor of China” towed us back to Temple Lake Park and we got the boat out of the water without too much trouble.  We were happy to have gotten back.

Those of you who live in the area know we don't get snow very often, so this is a big deal.  We woke up this morning to a winter wonderland.  There was about 1.5” to 2” of snow on the ground.  It was really cool.  According to the news, it's the most serious snow in the Austin area since 1985. At first I didn't believe that statement until I went outside and realized it was real snow.  Not just piles of sleet.  Actual honest to goodness snow!

After several attempts, Becky convinced me to walk through the park with her and we took some pictures of the kids attempting to “sled” down a hill on anything they could find including knee boards, kayaks, and cardboard boxes.  There's nothing quite as funny (and disturbing) as a little foul-mouthed kid flying down a hill in a cardboard box.  It was really cool to see the whole neighborhood out enjoying the rare day.

The top picture is a panorama I stitched together from 3 separate pictures, which turned out really well.  If you look closely, you can see the people walking back up the hill on the left are the same two people twice.  Ah, the wonders of the space-time continuum.

The next picture is of the little stream that runs through the park, which looked really awesome in the sunlight.  It's amazing how different everything looks with white on it.  They have been doing some construction next to the stream, which has been ugly and muddy, but with the snow covering it, it looks much better.  It reminds me of the old hymn, “Whiter Than Snow”.

Anyway, at this point, I'm just rambling to have enough text to make the pictures look like they were not just strewn about on the page.  If you looked at this entry early in the day, you probably got a look at it when it looked much worse.  The two zoomed in pictures are probably too big, but I wanted to make sure you could see the little kid in the box, who, when he got to the bottom, was dumped out of the box and into the mud.

Well, Becky's parents came into town last night from El Paso.  I worked most of the day today and we all ate at P.F. Chang's, one of my very favorite restaurants.  It seemed a little silly to have a P.F. Chang's feast the day before Thanksgiving, but it was delicious anyway.

We just watched the first half of the special edition of “The Two Towers”.  All the new footage is great.  It really fills it in nicely.

Tommorow's the big day, all my practicing will come together, and we should have a great fried turkey.  I got it all marinated this afternoon, so we're all set.  Half cajun creole and garlic flavored, and the other half hot & spicy.

Since we're on the subject of eating, I'd like to reveal to everyone that I've been working hard and have lost almost 30 pounds in the last several months.  Really it's about 27, but 30 sounds better.  For the first time since college I weigh 200 pounds.  The best part is it's a lifestyle change that should be simple to keep.  I mainly realized that I was eating for about 6 people.  It all started when we had a health screening at work, and my cholesterol was high.  Since I was going to have to adjust my diet anyway to avoid cholesterol, I thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone, and not eat them both for once.

My ultimate target is somewhere between 190 and 200, but with alot more muscle than I've got going on right now, so I plan on heading toward 190, and stepping up the exercise.  Becky's lost alot as well, and we both are feeling very good.  Mom and Dad are losing weight as well, and I'm very proud of them for that.  We'll be seeing them tomorrow, along with Andrew.  Poor Sara has to work.  Jeff, I'll be sure to get his email address.

Anyway, hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!  I'll probably use the extra time to get up some pictures I've been promising.