The fire crisis has ended. It is now raining outside. Last night I was able to see snow on the peaks of the mountains that are about 10 miles away. It has cooled down quite a bit from the 90+ degree weather we were having a few weeks ago.

Hubby and I spent the holiday by going to mall to buy his birthday gift -- much needed shoes, did some looking around for Christmas gift ideas (Playstation 2 comes to mind) for the girls, got scheduled maintenance on my Odyssey and hubby got major work ($1K) done on his Tahoe. I've been toying with the idea of getting satellite radio, but for $10/month don't know if it's worth it.

We're also thinking of jumping the DirecTV ship and stowing away onto DISH network. In the next few weeks, DISH is supposed to have HDTV DVR promotion where they'll "give" you HDTV DVR for free in addition to standalone DVRs..at least that's what the salesperson said. I haven't seen anything on DISH's website about this upcoming promotion. Need to find DISH community forums for further research.

I'm oncall this week and will be spending at least 6-8 hours doing server upgrade Saturday night from home (hopefully) over VPN. Usually, when it starts raining the DSL connectivity starts dropping. Hubby has high school band competitions for the next two Saturdays and then will be gearing up for high school basketball season which is much less intense = not as many after-school rehearsals. Football team is going to playoffs and tied with visitor team at Homecoming last week.