Happy Hanukkah

Sunday evening the phone rang and it was my nephews calling to thank me for their Hanukkah gifts. It was very nice to hear that they had already started celebrating and that everything arrived in time for the holidays.

The girls are all excited about Christmas of course. They are off from school for 2 weeks and are spending time with their friends and getting everything ready for Thursday. We will be doing a Christmas Eve lunch which will be a nice new tradition.

I am also looking forward to the holidays. We decorated the Christmas tree Sunday, Sam finished wrapping some gifts and we did some baking. We also cracked into Mom's fruit cake - delicious as usual. Now all we need is a bit of snow to make it look more like Christmas.

Before I go I want to wish everyone a Happy Holiday Season. Whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah or something else I hope it is happy and safe for everyone.

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Good Things .....

It has been a great few weeks - lots of things happening - all VERY positive and all keeping me smiling. One of those is Tika's success in her art. She is getting ready to compete for a spot in a summer college program, the next judging is in January, and she has been preparing for it. She sent me this pic the other day - I think it is a great drawing and I think she has lots of potential as she keeps getting better and better.

For me I had a great day at work. I had a call from one of our PR people today and they wanted me to speak to Renay San Miguel, a former CNN Anchor who now writes freelance. He was writing a story on a report that was being released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I spent about 30 minutes talking with him and his article came out online this evening. Of course he did not use everything but the highlights were pretty good. Here is the link CyberSecurity Article. Hopefully the customers I work with will appreciate the comments.

Have a great week - only 16 days to Christmas :-)

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Race update ....

The official results were posted and my official chip time was 2:03:20 which is 6:10 faster than the clock time. This was due to the corral start that was used and I had placed myself in the second corral with an estimated time of 2 hours. The 2:03 time meant a pace of 9:25 which I felt was pretty good considering the couple of months without running. Also the course was a fun one which was a bit hillier than I was used to. So now I begin planning for 2009 and trying to see what I want to accomplish for the year.

The rest of the Atlanta trip was fun. We did our Thanksgiving dinner - chicken (turkey was a bit much for two), a nice rice pilaf, sauteed broccoli and a nice wine. Not a traditional Thanksgiving meal but for two after a Marathon it seemed like a good fit.

Friday we headed out to do some site seeing. We walked from the place we were staying in Midtown down to Centennial park to hopefully get to the Aquarium and Coca-Cola World. Turns out the lines at the Aquarium were a bit crazy so we went to Coke World first. It was very interesting and if you ever get a chance to taste one of the Italian Coke products called Beverly I would encourage you to. It is an experience. After we left Coke World we headed over to Centennial Park to walk through it - caught a small water show and then grabbed some lunch before heading back to the apartment to get our act together and head out to do some shopping before dinner.

Saturday we packed up, cleaned up and started to drive back to Virginia. It was a fairly uneventful drive - fun but nothing to cause any pain like the drive to Atlanta. With stops it took about 10.5 hours so sharing the driving did help. Overall it was a great few days - a good race, good company but very nice to get home. Now looking forward to having teh same kind of fun in 2009 with a few races :-)

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