thanksgiving on the farm

The yearly tradition for thanksgiving is for my dad's side of the family to goto his parents house on a farm in Worthington (rural sw minnesota). As a kid we would go there a lot and I always had the time of my life and I think it was great for my development. I would ride tractors, make fires, shoot guns, and ride dirt bikes. I think a lot of other city kids miss out on this stuff and I'm grateful to have experienced a little bit of it.

It's always a nice true vacation as except for maybe a few low-stakes hands in the car on my laptop, it's poker free.

We are all ready to go skiing and snowboarding out west but nobody really has any worthwhile snow. I was able to convince jay, dave, billy, and dave p to get vail season passes too as it's just such a good deal so we're hoping they can get some snow soon. It works at Vail, beaver creek, heavenly, Arapaho basin, and Breckenridge. All for $579. Their website says 620 now but if you have a friend refer you you can still get it for 579. Pretty sick.

There has been talks of a pickup pond hockey type hockey game as well as some snow football once we get some snow and I'm looking forward to both. I've only skated now twice in the last billion years but owell it'll be fun to go screw around as most people are about as bad as I am.

I got a sick new laptop a few days ago and so far I really love it. It's the ultraportable toshiba R600 which has a 12" screen and weighs 2.5 pounds. It also has a transreflective (or something) screen that works in direct sunlight so I'm seeing some poker on the beach in my future. It also has a solid state hard drive which makes it faster and more durable. The battery life seems to be about 4 hours which is 4 times better than my last hunk of junk. The one negative thing is there is only 1 speaker and it's brutal as far as sound quality. Not a huge deal but annoying nonetheless.

Everyone laments about vista and this has been my first experience with it and so far I really like it. I haven't had any crashes or issues and I like how everything just seems smoother and thought out. I did HATE the UAC (the thing that pops up whenever you open a program or file and asks you if in fact you wanted to do that) as well as was confused as to where to find how to enable hidden folders to access my poker stars hands (which are stored in the user apps dir instead of program files) but past that it seems pretty sleek.