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great dinner, including dessert with home-made cream. reading the paper, and listening to american idol season 10 in the background. actually pretty good, steven tyler and jennifer lopez do a good job, i didn't expect it.

watched blue valentine last night, very good, tough movie. rotten tomatoes rating: 89%.

had an eye dr. appointment today, to get rid of something i had on my eye lid. was pretty quick, they cut it and then burned it. ended up with a circular red scar under the eye, hopefully it will disappear within a few days . i actually forgot my medical card, and didn't realize till i was there. luckily i was able to remote desktop into my server, from there access the file system on my desktop, pull up my account login and password with UHC, go back to safari, pull up the site and login, and from there find my card and fax it to the dr. directly from the mobile site. the wonders of technology.

BTW, talking about tech stuff, i installed the latest version of handbrake, 0.9.5 (about time, the latest release was from nov 09), and ran into some issues on server 2008 R2. after some research it turns out .NET framework 3.5 is not installed by default, but the thing is you cannot just download and install it. you have to use the server role manager and from there enable the feature (comes pre-installed but not deployed). many things on server 2008 works this way. in any event, worked fine after i did that.

back to work today. we broke 40 F, wooho, hadn't happened in a long time. but i am just watching the news and the weather guy said that no more, we go "back to the ice box" for the foreseeable future, dropping to 9 F by saturday, ugh.

looks like american idol season 10 starts tomorrow with steve tyler and jennifer lopez. may or may not follow, we'll see.

here is a pic that rita sent us today from our summer reception

Martin Luther King day, and we are off! We rented an SUV and spent the day skiing upstate New York, in Hunter Mountain. Fairly quick trip. We had a ton of fun. Traffic was a little slow on the way back, sort of to be expected. We stopped by Longhorn on Route 17 for dinner, great as usual

Just got home now. Successful trip, we may do this again.

We got up around earlier than usual this morning, walked Bogie, went through Union Square, market starting to get setup. Lots of residual snow still left on the curves because temperature has been pretty cold, we haven't been about 35 in a long time. I think it's supposed to get ugly tonight, forecast says it will be 10 F (about -12 C).

saw Despicable Me yesterday at home, very funny, liked it quite a bit!



last night, saturday, we had dinner with friends at craftbar, one of Tom Colicchio's restaurants. great food.