Catching Up

It's obviously been a very long time since I blogged, and I apologize. I do plan on going back to an average-1-a-day schedule. Currently I have tons to post, so it should be easy. Also check out my blog for my daughter for pictures and stuff.

Let me try to catch up categorically with everything that's been going on.

Personal Life
We bought a house. For real and sure this time, I swear. Not like the last four times. I'll have pictures really soon; the inspection should be this week. All we have to do now (as before) is sell our place. But we've dropped price again and the market is looking up, so we're pretty confident.

There was a massive cascading hardware failure at work two weekends ago, that cost our tech department hundreds of hours of overtime. If the original failure hadn't been Friday night (giving us until Monday morning to get things back up) the AMA could have been in serious trouble. We're all working super hard to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Hiroko added to her endless medical travails by having another kidney infection, and she was feverish and in pain for a week. Also she got a huge blister that a dermatologist is just guessing is some kind of bite. Poor lady.

Sports
The Bears lost the Superbowl. It sucked a lot. We took Ren to a party, which was her first significant time outside the house.

It's 41 days until baseball, and just a few days until spring training games. I am very excited. I'll be posting more and more Cubs stuff over the next couple months. Maybe I should just make another blog...

Chess
I've been playing about an average of 1 game a day online, and playing my best chess ever.

Also Morelia, a major international tournament is going on right now. There's been one big upset. But probably if you care you already knew.

Poker
Last April, Jamie Gold won the 2006 World Series of Poker, which, if measured in participation and money involved, was the largest sporting event in history. He won $12 million. But it came out later that before the tournament, he'd verbally agreed to give half of any of his winnings to another guy. On February 7, he actually did it. That's some payout.

Also I have big news personally about poker, but I'll save that for a separate post.

Okay, that's all I can think of at the moment. Much more to follow in the coming days.