Hockey!

Well, maybe this whole 'working for HP' thing is going to work out, because we just enjoyed one of the perks. HP sets aside 72 tickets for every Sharks home game in the HP Pavilion, and they have a lottery on their intranet where every employee can enter. I guess not everyone knows about it, because after less than a month of entering, I got 4 free tickets to the Dallas Stars v. San Jose Sharks game.

The timing worked out really well, because it's Iain's birthday this week too, so it was kind of an extended present for him. Since we had 4 tickets we invited his friend Johnny and Johnny's dad Mark.

It was a pretty exciting game, and they kept it close until the 3rd period. We even got to see a small fight. What's the old addage... "I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out"?

Sadly the Sharks couldn't pull out a victory, and gave it up to the Stars in a 4-2 loss. I was kind of bummed since I'm almost never there to cheer on the Sharks (If you don't know, I'm a HUGE Colorado Avalanche fan), and the one time I want to see the Sharks win... well, that's just the way it goes. We had a good time anyway, and hopefully this won't be the last time I win the hockey lottery.

But I HAD to do it!

Well, here in sunny California, the leaves on our maple don't drop until sometime in December, and with the hectic schedule of the holidays any cleanup of the leaves gets postponed until after Christmas is over.

This year Iain asked if he could help rake up all the leaves while I was taking down the Christmas lights from the house. In the time it took for me to remove and rebox 8 strands of lights, he'd done an awesome job of raking all the leaves into a pile, and I congratulated him on his hard work. I even offered to get the camera so I could take a picture of him next to the pile, so we could show everyone what a hard worker he was.

Well, as soon as I got the first couple of pictures of him with the pile, he decided he had to perform a right of passage -- jumping into a pile of leaves. He said he just HAD to do it. Needless to say, I said 'sure',and he had a good time with it, but after it was over we were digging leaves out of every pocket, every sock, etc., and he wasn't too thrilled with that part.