Amazon.com strange shipping

For Monica's birthday I ordered her two CDs from Amazon.com. I ordered them at the same time and they're both by the same artist. This seems like the kind of user behavior that happens a thousand times a day, though the artist wasn't mainstream.

Here's what we got:



The package on the right was shipped first from Illinois and arrived this morning. The one on the right was shipping a day later from California and arrived yesterday afternoon.
And of course the packaging is very different. Somehow this doesn't seem like the most efficient way to do this, either for Amazon or for me.

The good news is despite their prediction of an April 14th delivery, BOTH CDs made it her for her birthday.

Dog update

Those who have met Cocoa know he scratches and chews his paws quite often. We took him to a dermatologist last Friday to get checked out.

After giving him the once over he gave Cocoa allergy tests. Cocoa failed miserably. I wish we had a picture but couldn't get him to sit still. Picture a 4 x 10 grid with a dot at every vertex and big dots and most vertices. The large dots are everything he's allergic to including cat dander, wool, and grass. Great for a dog who lives in a house with oriental rugs and a cat and likes to run around a grassy back yard. We're getting him some allergy shots to desensitize him. We're also working on clearing up some yeast infections that cause him to itch. We hope he's better soon and thankfully he's really not so bad right now.

Hunny Bear went to the vet today because he's occasionally been limping. Thankfully the diagnosis is minor. His kneecaps are both loose but it's a grade 1 or 2 on a scale of 1-5. The vet recommended doing nothing.

Long time, no blog

Eek. It's been a long time since I've blogged. Lots of stuff happening but unfortunately that leaves me little time to blog. I'll try to catch up with some short posts over the next few days.

Had a very neat experience at the end of February. In 2006 at the Jewish Day School auction, Monica won me the experience to go to a Sonics game with Seattle P-I writer Jim Moore. We finally got it scheduled for Feb 24 to see Kobe Bryant play. (Free tickets to a Sonics game isn't reason enough to go.)

Jim was kind enough to take me out to dinner before the game and we got to chat for an hour or so about Seattle sports, his background -- he actually grew up in a house not far from where we live -- and being a sportswriter. Then before the game, he had a press pass made for me and we got to walk around behind the scenes. I watched as he interviewed Jalen, a six-year-old kid on the Sonics boom squad, and the Jalen's dad. Well, at least I watched until the cheerleaders walked by about four feet away. I don't remember much of the interview after that though dad
was surprisingly level-headed and realistic about his son. The article never did run as far as I could see.

The game was a laugher and Kobe got tossed in the third quarter. But it was the most fun I'd had at a Sonics game in years.

Geneology and Family Tree

At the end of 2007, a friend turned Monica and I on to Geni, where you can create a family tree and make all of your relatives members and then can add to the tree and add their relatives and so on and so on. Essentially it's viral* family tree.

Monica and I each had family trees that were put together from our father's sides and were able to add a lot of relative beyond what we might know off the top of our heads. Then my parents both got involved and talked to my grandmother and filled out as much of their families as they knew. And slowly we're adding some (geographically) distant cousins who are adding their families. And we're searching on the internet to see if we can find people.

One of the neatest parts of searching for information was having my mom go through her old records and searching the Ellis Island records and finding the official records where my grandmother (mom's mother) and her brother and parents came to the United States. It's also somewhat surprising to find information that conflicts.

I hope as time goes by other members add to the tree. Anyone who is married into the family has a whole tree to add. And I'm going to start searching Facebook to find many of my third cousins who I don't know at all.

If you're in my family, let me know and I can give you access to the tree. Or think about starting your own family tree.

Happy New Year

Best wishes for a terrific 2008. Maybe this will be the year Monica blogs.

I sent our New Year's letter out this AM so you know what we've been up to. If you didn't get it let me know.

I'm already off to a good start, completing a couple of small projects around the house and having a winning day in poker.

My latest project is working on our family tree on Geni. More on that later.