Monthly Archive for: ‘January, 2008’

Welcome, Pete!

I’ve been lagging behind in my blog posts… probably something to do with going back to work. My Xbox 360 has been complaining a lot too about how I’ve not been playing very much. One piece of important news that I haven’t posted about yet is…

We adopted Pete! Pete was our foster dog (of course), and we really liked him. He was adopted out to a family, but he didn’t do well in their home — he would bark all day long while they were at work. We never had this problem when he was at our house, so we’re assuming it was because he was alone there, but had Max here to keep him company. In any case, he was returned to the rescue, and we staked our claim.

Pete’s about two years old, and is a smallish Chocolate Lab. He’s small, but still pretty heavy — 75 pounds or so. While he is generally pretty mellow, we have noticed that he seems to have some minor issues needing work. When we first had him, we thought he was a dominant dog, but now we think he’s somewhat submissive, but wants to be dominant… so he tries to act dominant whenever he can (kind of a bully). I’m sure we’ll work out his issues over time.

One embarrassing event with Pete was two weeks ago at the Reston Dog Park, when he lifted up his leg and peed on the leg of a man at the park. Kathie was the closest and apologized profusely; fortunately the man was very friendly and understanding. We’re not sure if Pete was marking his “property”, or was just aiming for some spot on the ground and didn’t care who was in his way, but we’ve been keeping a close eye on him at the park since then!

Kathie has written about Pete on her blog as well, of course!

Cutting it close

Nothing like sitting in a meeting at work (in Philly)… looking at my watch (well, at my blackberry in this case — I haven’t worn a watch in years) and seeing it’s 5:53… and looking at my e-mail confirmation for my Amtrak Acela train leaving the station at 6:07.

Quick goodbyes, elevator 10 floors down, find a Taxi, hit every red light in Philly, get to 30th Street Station, find a Kiosk, insert credit card, navigate menus to print internet-purchased ticket, get a boarding pass, find the right stairway, jump on train, doors close. Whew!

Of course it’s still not my favorite thing to lose an entire day (leave the house at 6:40am to get to Union Station in time for the 8am train, then get back to Union Station at 7:45pm to arrive home by around 8:30, but the train trip itself is actually pretty nice (about 97 minutes each way), but it is nice that HQ is reachable for day-trips.

Once the train is built-out to Reston (hahahahahahahah!)… I can’t even complete that sentence. When I moved here almost 13 years ago they were talking about building the train out to Reston. But even if they did, it would be so much more convenient: Drive to the Reston station, take the light rail to West Falls Church, switch trains and get on the metro, take that to Metro Center, change to a different train to Union Station, then get on Amtrack. Cake!

Snow & Neighbors

We had a pretty decent snowfall today… a few inches of really enormous snow flakes. Kathie and I had to take Max to the vet in the early afternoon, and when we got back we were shocked to see our driveway was completely cleared (via a snow thrower)! We parked, looked around, and saw our neighbor across the street (Brian) shoveling his walkway and asked him about it. As it turns out, after clearing his own driveway with his snow thrower, he made his way down the street and did 7 other drives! Our driveways aren’t exactly small either. What a nice surprise and nice gesture!! We usually subscribe to the “it will get warmer and melt eventually” method of driveway clearing.

The hawthorn trees at the end of our driveway looked very pretty with their red berries standing out against the white snow. I grabbed the camera to get some photos, but it was already raining pretty steadily so I only spent about 20 seconds on the attempt:

New mobile number

I have a new mobile phone number. My old number will be disconnected in a week. If you’re on Facebook, you can get my new mobile number from there. If not, send me an instant message or e-mail and I’ll get it to you.