Back from Montana

Diana and I spent the past week in Montana, visting the family for Christmas. In total attendance were the two of us, David and Elaine and Ben, my aunt, and my parents.

The trip was a lot of fun. We spent most of the time in the house, sitting around the fire and watching little Ben be cute and play with toys and stuff. He's an exceptionally good natured baby. I think he only cried for maybe a cumulative 20 seconds or so over the entire week. It's kind of eerie, actually. Otherwise, he loved banging on a pot with a spoon, waving stuff around, and generally making funny noises and being cute. Very fun to watch. He's not crawling yet, so it was pretty easy to plop him down, spread out some toys, and watch him go to town.

Montana was beautiful. It snowed a heavy, wet snow the day we got there, and then was pretty clear for the next few days, and then snowed a very light powdery snow the last two days. We went snowboarding in the middle of the week, and that was really fun. Unfortunately, the mountain is prone to being really fogged out, so we only went once. The day we went, the fog was pretty bad down low, but taking the chair to the top of the mountain was really breathtaking. All of a sudden, you broke out of the cloud into sunlight, and everything was clear as day. Turning around, the whole landscape behind us was like a sea of clouds, with mountains sticking up in the distance. Absolutely beautiful.

Not much else specific to report from the trip. It was great to see my brother and Elaine be parents. It was fun seeing my aunt, who I don't see too often. We hung out a bit with some friends of my parents, who were a lot of fun to be around. I schooled my brother in chess a few times, though we did split some games and I think he even beat me once. Good times all around.

Since getting back, we've unpacked and gotten all moved back in. I've been playing with my new iPod Mini, and organizing my electronic music, which is fun. I played a bit of World of Warcraft, which is still fun as ever. Watched the Chargers second and third string whoop up on the Chiefs.

Last night, Diana and I went out with Iwan and Sara, Little Buhr and his ladyfriend and played some poker at our local establishment. It was a fun, but I'm sorry I didn't get to see Little Buhr more. I won about $30, while Diana lost just a couple bucks. They have pretty good food there, too, which you can eat while playing, which is really cheap ($2 or $3), so we definitely paid for our fun and food.

Back to work today. It's pretty quiet, just catching up on emails and stuff. Apparently there was some excitement the week that I was gone. People thought that every transaction that we posted was incorrect somehow, and were trying to figure out a strategy to repost them correctly. Turns out that only a tiny fraction was done incorrectly, and the problem has been fixed, so just a minor cleanup effort.

That's all I got for now. For your (or probably more specifically, my) pleasure, here are some Yahoo chess games. First and second.