Home for a Lazy Sunday

Today is about as lazy as it can be. The wife and I returned from Rockford more exhausted then we thought. This is mostly because our daughter is in a cranky phase and was a screaming meanie at Red Robin last night. The Hockey game was fun, but sadly the Ice Hogs could not beat the Peoria Rivermen. This will no doubt be met by a great deal of ribbing from my family in Peoria.

Right now I am sitting here enjoying the Bears game and watching my daughter chase our cat underneath the Christmas tree.

I found a great writing program called OmmWriter which is a no frills writing program that allows you to type away without the distractions of spellcheck and formatting. I like it because currently my background is a snow covered landscape and I am typing over it.

It is available for free download here.

otherwise, the wife has flown the coop for a spa afternoon and the daughter and I are working on singing "Bear Down".

Adios

I am off to Rockford today with the family to enjoy some good food and a Rockford Ice Hog game.

There is definitely something exciting about minor league hockey over NHL. To me, I think the minors is a place where everyone is so hungry to achieve that it drives the game.

I wanted to share a great website with you all. It is called FiveBooks.

FiveBooks is a website that compiles the five best books on a particular subject offered by scholars in the field of the subject. It is essentially a great site to use if you are looking to learn about a particular field, from Einstein to Music. It is very intriguing and has prompted me to reach out to a couple of friends about starting a History Club, which is really a fancy way of saying a Book Club. In my mind we would pick a topic and read books about the topic and then gather for cigars and whisky in some dingy backroom bar and discuss the topic and how it made us feel.

If you are local maybe you will want to join.

Random

Happy belated Thanksgiving.

A few random thoughts for my readers (all 5 of you)

-Pick up the new Kanye West album in stores now. It is easily my favorite album so far this year and may be the best so far this decade. It is not necessarily kid friendly, but a great record for the car or on the computer when little ones are asleep.

- I also have been listening to the new Cee Lo Album. Great if you like a fusion of 60's pop and R&B. Not as strong as his work with Danger Mouse.

-Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect is by far the funnest gaming experience I have ever had. It runs about $149 but you will be having a great time sweating out to Dance Party or the white water rapid game that comes with the system.

What I Am Reading This Holiday Season

A couple weekends ago I joined my wife's family for a college football game in Ann Arbor. I love college football games because of the energy and the excitement. This game was by far the best one we had been too, mostly because the Fighting Illini and Michigan went into overtime and battled back and forth, until, sadly Illinois fell short.

It was also a nice weekend because neither my wife or I had to drive. This gave me the opportunity to pick up a magazine at a truck stop to read on the way home. The truck stop we stopped at had a very dismal inventory of magazines, so instead of my preferred Sports Illustrated, I ended up picking up a Rolling Stone.

After reading a couple great articles about Conan O'Brien and Taylor Swift, I read a great book review about Keith Richards. Keith just wrote his autobiography with James Fox called "Life". Now because the review was so good, I thought I would pick up a copy from Amazon. Boy was I not disappointed. I am currently a hundred pages into it, and simply reading about Keith Richards upbringing has been a joy. I cannot even imagine what a ride I will be in for once we get into the Rolling Stones years.

My second book on the agenda is Decision Points by President George W. Bush. Now this book at first would seem political, but skimming in it seems very insightful and thoughtful to the Bush presidency, and how he came to make the decisions that would, for better or worse, shape his presidency. Far be it to me to wax poetic about a presidency, however I am one of the few out there in the world who think that as history evolves, the eight year term term of G.W will be looked at differently, with fresh, respectful eyes.

I imagine these two books will last me, but if there are any suggestions I would appreciate it.

Why I Disappeared

So as my five followers have noticed I was on a great blogging rampage leading into labor day and then completely disappeared. I will not lie that some of this was laziness but for the most part the business of life sort of caught me by surprise. While I was blogging about leaderships lessons and great websites, I was also on the sly, looking for a new job. It had come to the point at my last job that I had become way to comfortable, with the work and the people and the business. Life in the office was one repetitive task after another, and I was slowly just evolving into the type of worker who spends his days surfing the internet and not caring about th output. In mid-August, after a good month of refining my resume, I found a hit. I had two very good interviews, and by October 15th, I was in a new company where my hard work and ideas would be appreciated.

During that time I was also taking three classes at Depaul that for lack of better phrase, were kicking my ass. The worst of the three was a statistics class that was taught online and totally utilized Microsot Excel to formulate problems. Now this may seem like an easy class, but trying to create formulas in Excel and copy and paste data from one tab to another was time consuming. Not to mention this class had one huge project each week.


So I abandoned the blog for a while. But I am back over the holiday break and hope to really dive in to the blogosphere.

sorry for the interuption.