Christmas 2003

I got to see lots of family this Christmas, and I actually seem to have gotten to the point in my life where I can truly appreciate that. Lots of people got to meet Paige for the first time, as well.

Claire broke our previously established agreement about not buying each other gifts, but I still ended up with a little weather/hiking station on my wrist. This watch does temperature, altitude, air pressure (plus weather forecast by air pressure), digital compass, oh yeah, and it tells the time.

I also got some nice dress shirts, some tools, and an Atari joystick. I've also expanded my library with a book on tape and the last William Gibson book, Pattern Recognition. I seem to have gotten about as many toys as Paige has.

I managed to extend the holiday all the way to the following Monday. I got a bit of side work done, accidentally blew up and upgraded JBoss on my server, tempted myself a lot with ebay auctions, researched linux 2.6.0 stuff and tried a couple different recompilations of the kernel. It was good to get a bit of time to myself. I wish I had thought to upgrade the server to 2.6.0 while I had time to babysit it a bit.

The daycare in half my house was open Monday, so I got to play with Paige a bit and still have time when I wanted it. I went for a walk with 5 other kids as well. It seems like a fun way to spend the day, though I know I was not there for the truly busy parts of the day.