Work has been super busy and stupid lately, hence the lack of updates, but I’ll have a new posting soon, true believers.

I suppose I should call the leaf pool, since I did say in the rules that it would end either when we were “done” raking or when we got the first snow. The latter happened this weekend. It wasn’t much to speak of, maybe an inch or so, just enough to make driving unpleasant and raking impossible. It’s already started melting. No talk of further snow this week, but we still have to wait for it all to melt and everything to dry before raking begins anew. So although our job has not ended, the contest must.

Therefore I declare the winner: Dan wins with his guess of 43, one shy of the actual total. He will receive his fantastic prize as soon as I figure out what it is.

I suspect that if we get to complete more raking, the final final total will be closer to Esthela’s guess of 53, and if that’s the case, she may win a second-place, slightly less fantastic prize.

But you’re all winners in my book!

In other news, Secretary of State Colin Powell has resigned. Between Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao not stepping down and the death of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, dreams of an all-Wu Tang cabinet remain just that: dreams.

In the upper right corner of the page is the “Leaf Update.” As of this writing, it reads “28″. What is this an indicator of? This is how many 30-gallon bags of leaves we’ve raked and bagged so far this Fall. We’ve done 28 bags so far, with more to go. In fact, if you would like to make it interesting, we can start a pool. Email your guesses for the final tally and win some kind of prize, I don’t know what. This will be done Price-is-Right style: whoever is closes to the final number (determined by how many bags we do before either we declared the job done or it snows, whichever comes first) without going over will win.

For those who want to make an informed guess, here are the stats in play. We’ve got two big trees that are more or less done dumping leaves on us. There’s a third tree that’s about halfway through. Last year the total count was somewhere in the forties, but we didn’t do a fantastic job. As a wildcard, our neighbor across the street blows his leaves out into the street, and many undoubtedly end up in our yard. And it’s super windy right now, so there’s no telling how many leaves are departing our yard and coming in from others’.

Incidentally, these numbers only reflect the front and sides of the house. The backyard we won’t deal with at all until Spring, probably.

So get those guesses in! I promise the prize will be amazing!

It seems strange to follow up something so serious as the previous post with just about anything, but life must continue. I want to thank those who have emailed, left comments on their website, and called. I know it’s helping them get through this time. I’ve forwarded (and will continue to do so) the notes to them, and they’ve appreciate the kind thoughts and prayers.

Rather than try to figure out what would be an appropriate way to continue things here, I figured I’d just bite the bullet and dive right back into goofy business as usual.

I hope it’s okay for me to write this here.

Kurt and Anna are my gracious hosts here, providing the space and bandwidth for this website. They’re also dear friends I’ve known for over a decade. You might remember me posting photos of their newborn daughter Simone (sister to Sophia) a couple of months ago.

Yesterday Simone passed away. She was only two months old.

When Kurt’s parents called me to tell me what happened, the event was still new, and they didn’t have much information. Consequently, I don’t have any information myself. The doctors weren’t sure at that time what had happened; it seemed like she just stopped breathing. Heart failure is suspected.

Of course, this came completely out of the blue. I hadn’t gotten to see Simone yet, but all reports were that she was a healthy, normal baby. Everyone is in shock.

One of the worst tragedies is for a parent to bury a child. And there isn’t much crueler than to have someone so important in your life be taken away after so short a time. As devastated as all their friends are, none of us can come close to what they’re going through right now.

Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers; they have a long and difficult road ahead of them.

UPDATE: More details, including information about the memorial, can be seen here.

Esthela, if you’re still reading this, please email me immediately.

We rolled back in from a visit to the old stomping grounds last night. We had a lot of fun and it was great seeing everyone again.

We left Tuesday night and spent the night outside of Syracuse, New York. Actually, not far from where I lived, in Corning, as a wee tot. Then Wednesday we completed our trek to Cincinnati. For those planning on traveling through New York and Ohio, be advised that every square inch of roadway there is under construction. Also, there are approximately twenty-twelve squillion semis in Ohio, all traveling in packs of seven.

We got to Cinci and dropped in on Anne, Stewart, and Sydney. It really hadn’t been that long since we’d seen Sydney but she was huge! It was very sweet how she refers to Stewart and Anne as “Daddy-o” and “Mommy-o”. Stewart busted out some Dance Dance Revolution, but we mostly took it easy. It was good to see a lot of Stewart, since his busy schedule meant we hadn’t seen much of him in a while. They’re headed to Las Vegas soon, and I’m sure we’ll lose track of them as they descend into a nightmare of booze, hookers, and blackjack.

Thursday we continued on to Champaign and arrived at April and John’s in the evening. We ate at an old favorite: Dos Reales, and then went by our much-missed old bookstore, Pages for All Ages. (Pages was having a “scratch and dent” sale and I picked up some comics TPBs for pennies on the dollar, which was sa-weet!)

Friday I actually went into work and got to see some of my co-workers for the fist time in a while. It was great to see John, Nate, Shelley, and others I email to on a regular basis but hadn’t seen in a while.

For lunch, I went to Steak and Shake with Vicky and Dave, who I had missed terribly. Dave and I used to meet for lunch on a regular basis and it was one of the things I really missed, so it was nice to be able to do this again. All that was missing was a lunchtime trip to Wal-Mart to check for toys.

My workday was filled with meetings, mostly, the last one of which was with the Oracle group in TGI Fridays. That’s the downside of working from home — you can only get drunk by yourself.

Friday night I was going to drop in on Dave, Brian, Rob, and Topher, who were gaming at Brian’s place, but time was not kind to me. We ended up playing an interesting Lord of the Rings boardgame with April and John, and looking at their photos from their recent trip to the Netherlands.

Saturday was Dave and Vicky day! We went to Zorba’s for lunch (mmm…gyros) and then hung out at their place a bit. We saw their London photos, Dave showed me Star Wars Galaxies (tempting!), we discussed politics and other subjects, and we played San Juan. For dinner we went to Jupiter’s for pizza, and Dave and I went over to my old game store, the Dragon’s Pile. (Not the actual name.) Oh, and it’s still SUCH a pile. After wading through all kinds of junk on the floor to search through the unorganized used gamebooks for an In Nomine book (unsuccessfully) while John, the owner, played City of Heroes and cussed out Wizards of the Coast, it made me sooooo happy for my current game store!

Sunday morning we all met at Original Pancake House, a traditional breakfast spot for our gang, and after a couple of games with April and John, we headed back to Cincinnati. Once there we visited with Anne and Stewart a little more. Monday was spent driving all the way back home, where we arrived a little before ten p.m., making excellent time.

It was so good to see everyone, and we thank them for taking time out to hang with us. It was great to visit some old haunts. We did go by our old house and saw that the new owner had NOT put up a fence (we had bet that this would be the case). We were glad to see that it was well-maintained, and the flowers Becky had planted were still there. There was a moving van in the driveway for the duplex next door, home of Lois and Johnny, and it looked like it was pulled up to their place. We didn’t see any activity, though, and I can’t imagine them being able to hire a truck (they couldn’t drive) so I’ve no idea what the story is there. I’d love to know.

All in all, a very nice trip. Some selected photos have been added to the photo section. Thanks to everyone for helping to make it easy for us to visit, who put us up, and who put up with us. We miss you all and you’re welcome to come drop in on us anytime!

Tuesday night around 7:30 we went over to Mike’s for boardgames with him and Dan. We played San Juan, which has been added to the “to buy” list, and TransAmerica, which has also been added to that list. We got back at about 10:00.

Here’s what we returned to: the smoke alarms were all going off, the electric starters on the gas range were all going click-click-click-click, and the kitchen was drenched. In a few minutes we figured out what had happened.

Some time between 7:30 and a little after 8:00 the water hose for the refrigerator’s ice maker popped off and sprayed water all around the kitchen. Items clear on the other side of it, towards the living room, were wet. The water had shorted the electric starters on the range, which is why they were clicking. The hose then worked its way back down to the basement and drenched it, including the smoke detector, which is why those were all going off. (For some reason, none of this set off the motion detectors on the house alarm.)

That hose had popped off once before, so we knew where the cutoff valve was. We turned off the water and began cleaning everything up. What a freakin’ mess. A neighbor stopped by and told us he’d been out walking his dog and heard the alarms, but seeing no signs of a fire, assumed it was some kind of malfunction. That’s how we knew this was happening as early as a little after 8:00.

I cut the power to the range to stop the clicking and removed the injured smoke alarm, which shut those up.

About an hour later we had the kitchen mostly dried off and the water in the basement mopped up. Fans were going to help it all dry out even more. The digital clock/alarm on the oven started shrieking for no reason, so it got its power cut off as well.

The story has a somewhat happy ending, though. Yesterday the oven and range dried out and are functioning normally again. Everything’s dry and it appears our only losses were that smoke detector and a loaf of bread. I fixed the hose connection on the fridge so it shouldn’t do that anymore. Things could have been a lot worse.