I have a Zune. (Pause for for laughter) I've had it for about a year. One of the new things that Zunes do is keep track of all the songs you listen to. It can post your most-played artists and songs to a web page so that you can find other people who listen to the same kind of music as you.

One day, I accidentally left my Zune on while it was playing a Julio Iglesias album that I downloaded for RO. It played the album hundreds of times before I stopped it.

Now, when you go to Julio Iglesias on Zune, I am one of his top listeners.

Thanksgiving has been very good for the store.

In two days, we've sold more than we usually sell in two weeks.

In one day, we've sold more than all three days of Thanksgiving 2006.

This is a big comfort. Sales were flat in September and October and I was worried that we would have another year of barely earning enough to get by. Maybe it was the so called credit crunch. Maybe it was the old staff that quit and the new staff we hired. Maybe it was the mailer and hype. Maybe it's the wine and mimosa's that we offer our customers at our store. Whatever it is, people are now shopping in droves.

Happy Turkey Day everyone.

Thursday RO and I spend that afternoon with his family and then the evening with Matt and Sandy. Much food was consumed.

Friday is Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year. We started it off as we usually do-- with confusion and misunderstandings.

I had to run some errands before the store opened so I left in the truck and let RO take the van so that he could open the store.

While I'm half way through my errand, I get a call from Co whom I haven't talked to in years. He relays a message "RO left his keys and cell phone in the truck. He's stuck at home and needs you to return ASAP!"

I quickly returned home and picked RO up. He said that when he realized where he'd left his keys and phone he knocked on all our neighbors doors, but no one answered. Then he signed onto Bear411 and frantically started messaging everyone he knew.

RO was angry at himself for leaving his keys in the truck. I secretly felt smug. Sometimes RO has this habit of letting others pick up after him. If he gets angry at himself, hopefully he'll learn to watch after himself a bit more.

The rest of the day was very busy. The store had one of it's best days ever. I like that because rent and sales tax are due tomorrow.

Christmas is uppon RO and I. The store is decked with seven huge Christmas Trees and thousands or orniments. Every week till the 25th, RO and I have holiday parties.

It feels a bit strange.

Last night RO and I went to a Thanks giving party hosted by one of his closets friends. About twenty people where there. At one point we went around the room and said what we were thankful for.

Three guys broke out in tears when they said their part. What's that about? I can't imagine welling up from talking about the good things in my life.

My neighborhood is going through some kind of near-gentrification. But, instead of transitioning from run-down to high-class, it's topping about half way at "Box Store"

On the down the hill from my place, there used to be great views of Lake Washington. Now, a huge athletic center is going in. The center is prestigious, it's the trainging facility for the Seattle Seahawksb But it must really piss off the neighbors. The area used to be a quiet water front community.

Just down the street we have new Lowe's, Fry's and Target stores. It's more difficult for me to be irritated by them. They land they are on was formerly Boeing parking lot.

The thing I regret is that this area could become a world class waterfront district. Instead it's all about shopping. Yes there is a nice park on the lake, but you wouldn't know it's there from the Target parking lot.

Last night RO and I mailed out 5000 post cards.

We found this great website (CardStore.com) that lets us easily do all sorts of bulk mailings. It has made one of store's the biggest chores easy.

The only advertising we know works is direct mailings to our customers of about 5,000 people. Unfortunatly few bulk mailers will touch bulk orders for less than 10,000 addresses. Mailing out 5,000 post cards by hand is big pain in the ass

First you need to find a printing shop who can do a mail-merge-- take your address list and print the addresses on each post card. I'm suprised how difficult that is. The last company that did it for us, wrecked so many post cards when they went through the 2nd printing pass that the told us they would never do a mail merge again. At another print-shop only one guy know how to do the mail-merge. When he went he left, we were SOL.

After you have 5,000 addressed post cards, you have to buy 5,000 stamps and affix them to said postcards. This is tedious. It takes four of us hours to complete the job.

Post office people look at you funny when you ask for 5,000 stamps.

Then we stumbled upon CardStore. Now all we have to do is upload our mailing list and a couple of images, enter a credit card number and voila-- instant junk mail. In less than an hour we can do what used to take two days and four car trips.

One day this internet thing is going to catch on.

I've been on a leadership trainging course for the past fews of days. It was very intense, 8am in the morning to 9pm at night, plus homework. Plus Homwork! at 9pm on Thursday evening I was told that I had to give a 20 minute presentation at 8am the next morning.

I think half the point of the program was to place me under stress, and ensure I delt with it professionally as opposed to blowing up. To paraphrase the instructor, everyone knows how to speak clearly, to validate, to give and ask for freedback and to deal with agressive people. But, unless you actually practice, you won't do it well.

It's Hallowe'en! Many kids and parents come tricker treating through our halls.

It's funny how international my job is. Many of the trick-or-treaters-- the kids, don't speak English. So far I've heard French, Chinese and Spanish.

In a weird quirk, two of my old university friends, JM & GS, were in town. JM was here visiting family, GS is here for a conference.

Saturday night we had dinner together. JM's wife, JM's brother and I all work for the same company. GS's is here for a conference hosted by that company. The end result was a lot of shop talk that RO couldn't participate in.

I enjoyed the shop talk. RO's friends are far more artsie than my old friends. Sometimes I miss that.

Sunday GS and I tourned around Seattle. We went to the Pike Street marked. I really enjoy that area and would love to live there. Too bad the commute makes it prohibitive.

This past weekend I flew to Toronto for my youngest brother's wedding.


It was a Medieval Wedding. My brother wore a suit of armour. The bride was a princess. The whole wedding party dressed up in period costume. It ended up being lots of fun. I'm trying to find a great picture of the wedding, but none of turned up yet. I'll post one as soon as I can.

The night before the wedding, we groom's men took my youngest brother out to the Zanzibar, a strip club on Younge Street.

One of the women in the wedding party also came a long. At first we thought nothing of it. It turned out she was bi.

One of the guys bought her a lap dance. She gladly accepted it. She and the stripper were all over each other! Kissing! Licking! Pinching! Pulling! Our jaws dropped and we couldn't stop staring.

My middle brother was at the wedding as well. That one is still an idiot. At one point he needed to borrow a car. My dad loaned him his car. It was low on gas so dad gave my middle brother his credit card and told him to fill it up. Well, not only did my middle brother fill the car up, but he used dad's credit card to buy himself a new tattoo.

He's thirty five years old and he's steeling from his father to get new tattoos. Then he told dad, point blank, "Oh by the way, I also used your card to get a new tattoo." as if nothing was wrong!

My blog and what it's for....

At no point did I ever set set out to be a famous blogger, or create a popular blog. I started it for three prosaic reasons: to move my journal on line, to have a place to vent and rant and to keep me writing something fun and non-technical.

I've always kept a journal. They are very useful for jogging your memory. It's amazing the number of things that I've wanted to remember, but didn't-- my brain is only so big. Do you remember what movies you saw five years ago? Or great restaurants you ate at? Or fun places that you discovered?

Seven years ago I kept my journal on a computer. The computer died. It was the height of the dot com bubble and I ran into this little website called "Blogger." This was before Google bought them out. In a fit of whimsy I moved my journal online and made it public.

And now you know.

Last night RO and I watched Air Force One. We were very disappointed. For all the big names attached to it, it's never anything more than a luke warm action flick.

There is so much over acting and it was very predictable After the bad guys were introduced, I guessed the number and types of fights that the movie would need to dispatch each baddie. At the end of the movie, my guess was right. No suprizes. No twists. How boring is that?

My blog is 7 years old. Happy birthday blog!

Reading over it is somewhat humbling. Much of my life revolves around entertaining myself. Little of it involves doing anything important.

Our store manager has quit. I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me is glad she has quit. At times she was difficult to work with. She didn't like working with our best sales woman. She also didn't like hiring sales people. She prefered to hire teenage girls who helped, but mostly had to refer to her.

She didn't give us any notice. So, we are a bit short handed right now. Things will work out fine though. We can easily spread the load around. Some of our employees want to work more.

RO and I have moved our bedroom. I am suprized what a great idea this was.

We live in a log cabin with a daylight basement. The basement has a very modern look-- white walls with an orange peel texture. The upstairs, of course, is a rust log cabin.

For the past four years I put the master bedroom in the large room in the basement. And I enjoyed it very much. it was quiet and cool, a perfect place to sleep.

When our last roommate moved out, RO said he wanted a change, he wanted to live upstairs. I was a bit wary-- the rooms are a bit smaller and it wouldn't be as quiet. We moved up anywas. And it's turning out great.

First off, it's like we've moved into a whole new house. The log cabin bedrooms have a very different feel than the down stairs.

The upstairs is also better designed. A stretch of the downstairs hall is too short for me so I always had to walked hunched over. Upstairs has proper halls. Also, the bathroom is right next door so I don't even have to use a hall.

We are also using the opportunity to clean up and throw out all the clothes and crap that we never use. We move things up from the old bedroom as we need. What's left should be garbage such as old shirts that are still wareable, even though I haven't worn them in years. I want to throw all that out.

Between the flea treatments and our moving, our cat is getting angry at us. It has shown us its disappoval the only way it knows how-- it shits on the carpet.

But, I like the changes, so the cat will just have to get used to it.

The flea problem may be bigger than we thought. Our cat was flea free for about a day, then he started scratching him self again.

Tonight while RO and I were watching TV, RO saw a flea on his arm. Tomorrow we are going to spray everything again.

Our cat had fleas. For weeks now he's been scratching him self like crazy and developing lots of little welts. We tought it came from being outside and fighting with other cats. Two nights ago, RO looked at the cat's belly and saw fleas.

We gave him a flea bath and put a flea coller on him. The cat stopped scratching him self.

The cat usually sleep on our bed. Now, RO and I are looking over each other for fleas. The very sight of the cat causes us scratch.

Even though I changed the bedding last night, I'm going to change it again tonight. I've also got out cat a proper cat bed, and put it at the foot of the bed, so he can sleep near us, but not with us.

HR Violation #2.

Last night, after hours, RO went to our warehouse to pick up some tools. RO stumbled upon our warehouse guy have sex with someone. The warehouse guy was very, very embarrased.

We are unsure how to handle this. We could fire the warehouse guy. But, he works hard. He is one of the mature employees-- someone we can trust to do his job without supervision.

We are probably not going to fire the guy. But we need to be more strick with him. RO and I understand the impulse to have sex in different places. Hell, RO is kind of jealouse that someone else had sex at the warehouse before we have. But, at the same time, we can't permit that behavior. It could get us into too much trouble.