For Thanksgiving, Tracy’s family came into town and hung out. Tracy cooked a pretty traditional Thanksgiving meal. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc. Her brother and sister went to Napa for a day. We watched a lot of football. It was a good time.

Lucas is pretty fun now. He’s got a reasonable vocabulary, but sometimes his pronounciation isn’t quite right, his aunt Mary is May-May. He understands even more, so you can ask him to do things and he’ll follow basic instructions. He’ll ask for Baby Einstein by name. He’s still really cute. Tracy gave him his first hair cut.

For those who hadn’t heard: Tracy is pregnant again. She is due in mid-May and we don’t yet know the sex, but we will find out. We wanted a sibling for Lucas and we didn’t want to be raising kids when we’re 60 so it seemed like the right time.

This article brings up a very good point which I had overlooked. Stock options reward returns, but not in a risk adjusted manner. Companies really should reward employees with restricted stock grants that vest over time and not stock options. Restricted stock grants encourage behavior that is more attuned to shareholder interests while stock options encourage a go for broke mentality that would make most shareholders uncomfortable.

I was in bad shape for a few days. Lucas gave me some nasty virus which had a bunch of odd symptoms. I had a fever, headache, large painful blisters in my mouth, and a really bad muscle weakening. I had trouble doing some simple things like lifting Lucas and opening jars. I took a few days off of work to recover and I’m mostly over it, but it was pretty annoying.

Not too much other news going on. We refinanced the house, I think our rate of 5.97% was pretty good for a 15 year fixed with 1 point.

I bought an HD-DVD player, not because I like the technology or think it will win the format wars(I think it may have already lost), just that Lucas broke our DVD player and we needed a new one, the marginal cost of the HD-DVD feature wasn’t that much so even if it loses the format war I won’t feel too bad.

I look forward to watching Heroes every week. It’s excellent TV.

Work is fine, we are in our busy season as people start to buy calendars, photobooks, and greeting cards to send out as gifts. I’ve been doing a lot of capacity planning work this year and that’s an interesting change from some of my previous work. If our site falls over and dies from load then it’s my fault.