Today is my last work day for the year. Thanks to a day of vacation tomorrow and a generous holiday schedule from my employer, I will be able to enjoy the better part of two weeks away from the office. Not that it’ll be slow during that time… we leave Saturday to visit my family in Wisconsin. It will be so good to have everyone back together… Rebecca gets back from Panama on Saturday. Oh, and I’m also very ready to be allowed to dig into the massive pile of cookies that Becky has been making over the past couple of weeks. I think her goal this year was to make so many cookies that she could take them up to my family’s place and still have cookies left at the end of the visit. I’ll bet she achieved it.

Lots of other blogs do Top 10 lists at the end of the year, proclaiming their best new albums or movies or books or the like. I don’t think I’ll be doing that here. First of all, I doubt I’ve bought 10 CDs all year. And I haven’t watched too many movies, either. I may do a book roundup, though - I’m probably gonna be over 80 books for the year, maybe I can do a retrospective.

After reading the above two paragraphs, I’m amazed that content like this keeps anyone coming back to this blog. Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas.

Christmas shopping is complete. The Christmas program is over. We’ve received a bunch of Christmas cards already. We still haven’t gotten any sent. Apologies in advance to organized friends like Stephanie and the Hollands. It’s not that we don’t appreciate you thinking of us and sending us the pictures. We do, really. We’re just not organized enough to get our own sent out this year. When I was growing up it was the family joke that we would send out a New Year’s letter, because our Christmas letter always went out really late. I think this Hubbs household might have to do the same thing.

Tasks for this week: baking cookies. Well, that’s mostly Becky. She has baked so many cookies this last week already. Toll House cookies. Chocolate Espresso cookies. O’Henry bars. Chocolate chip cookie dough balls. I know the Chex Mix is coming up yet this week. She has a schedule for every day divided up into morning, afternoon, and evening, with baking tasks laid out appropriately so that she can finish before we head to Wisconsin on Saturday. I am impressed, as usual, with her organizational determination.

Other tasks for this week: Wrapping presents. Just because they’re all bought doesn’t mean they’re ready for Christmas. We’ll load up the coffee table downstairs with all the wrapping implements and then turn something on the TV. I’m thinking it’ll be more Heroes. I never watched Heroes when it started last year on TV, and once I got behind, I knew it was no use trying to start in the middle. So I got Season 1 and we’ve been saving it until we had time. Now with the writer’s strike and no new shows to watch, it’s the perfect time. We watched five episodes over the weekend. Totally hooked. If not Heroes, it’ll be time to break out the Muppet Christmas Carol. It is pretty much a yearly tradition - who can fail to love Kermit as Bob Crachit and Michael Caine as Mr. Scrooge? So much fun.

I’m taking Friday off work to get a head start on the holidays. Then we pack and head off to see the family. Lots to do between now and then, though. After all, it’s only one more week ’til Christmas.

Got a long-awaited phone call from my youngest brother Andrew last weekend with some fantastic news: he and Heather are officially engaged to be married. I was hoping to post a picture with this, so I went to Facebook, and, well, it didn’t disappoint. (You have to be Andrew’s friend on Facebook to see the album.)

A few observable facts:

• They seem so young! And yet, assuming a summer 2008 wedding, Andrew will be older than I was when Becky and I got married.
• Becky and I were never this adorably cute.
• It’s been almost 10 years since the last Hubbs kid got married. Hope it’s not another 10 years before the next one!

I had a hard time deciding which pictures to post here - they’re all so darn cute. But here is just a taste. (Click the pics to enlarge.)

Twenty years ago today my little sister Rebecca joined the world. She has the distinction of being the youngest, cutest, and most spoiled ( ) of all the Hubbs kids. She’s in Panama right now, so I don’t know how soon she’ll see this, but anyway: Happy Birthday, sis. Hope you have a great day. Looking forward to seeing you again at Christmas.

And, because I can, here’s one of my favorite photos of Reba in recent memory. Love ya, sis!

First off, sorry to any of you who tried to leave comments yesterday. Something with the way the upgraded theme interacts with the spam catcher is leaving something to be desired. I’m working on it, but in the mean time if it disallows a comment of yours, send me an email to let me know, would you? Thanks.

Otherwise, it’s Wednesday. I am looking forward to a couple packages coming later in the week, though. Tomorrow, DHL should be bringing the new shoes I ordered last night. I’ve had my old Converse Chuck Taylor lo-tops for a year now, and have worn them out pretty good. It was time for a new pair. This time I’m living on the wild side - instead of replacing my black ones with another black pair, I’m getting green. That should be fun. I don’t think I’ve ever had a package delivered via DHL before, and I will say now that I’m very impressed with their package tracking on their website - it seems to be more granular and updated more frequently than UPS’s tracking info ever is.

Earlier in the week I got a gift card from work as an “alternative reward”. Cool. Even better is that with that gift card I’m getting a set of Shure E2c headphones. I know several folks that swear by them, and I’ve been thinking about the purchase for a while now. They were on “clearance” at Target last week for $89, but I got ‘em off Amazon for $60.

This weekend on Saturday we’re headed to Des Moines overnight - we just needed to get out of town for a day or two. All my business travel has finally added up to enough Hilton rewards points to get us a free hotel room on Saturday night, and I don’t have to lead music on Sunday, so we’re off to visit the zoo, an orchard, and whatever else we find interesting in the big city. Can’t wait.

My brother Ryan turns 28 today.  Scary.  He has gone through some big changes recently - moving to Washington, DC, to attend Georgetown University’s grad school this fall.  Best wishes, bro, on your birthday, and good luck going back to school!

[Once again, thanks to dan for creating a good format to rip off.]

• Laura turns three today! Happy birthday to my little sweetheart.
• New Orleans was pretty cool. I have a couple of blog posts floating around in my head, maybe I’ll have some time this weekend to write them out.
• Never trust the airline when they say “oh, everything will be delayed, so you’ll make your connection just fine.”
• Driving home 4 hours from Chicago is long, but it beats staying there overnight.
• I almost forgot the going-away lunch in my honor scheduled for today. That would’ve been embarrassing.
• I have pretty much successfully moved into my new building/cube/department. Such fun.

Hard to believe it’s been that long already. Nine years ago tonight, on a hot, sticky night in Charlotte, NC, Becky and I exchanged our vows and became Mr. and Mrs. Chris Hubbs. (Our first stop after the wedding was in a Home Depot parking lot that had an available dumpster, but that’s a different story.) God has blessed us greatly, and it’s been a wonderful nine years.

So today we are celebrating in Orlando. Becky woke up at 2:45 CDT this morning to finish getting ready so she could catch her 5 AM flight from Cedar Rapids to Minneapolis, and from there she headed down here to Orlando. I picked her up at the airport about 1 PM. We grabbed a little lunch and then came back to the hotel. I think she spent some time at the pool while I grudgingly attended the afternoon’s technical sessions at the conference.

Tonight we ate dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. It was my first time at a Ruth’s Chris, and given the price I wouldn’t be able to eat there very often even if there was one close to Cedar Rapids. That being said, tonight I had what was hands-down the best steak I have ever had in my life. It was a filet, cooked medium, and just the smell of it on that sizzling plate as it came to the table was almost worth the purchase price. I will say this: Ruth’s Chris knows how to do service right. When we made the reservation online, the form asked if it was a special occasion, and I noted that it was our anniversary. From the time we arrived at the restaurant and gave our name, each staff member who spoke with us first wished us a happy anniversary. Then they gave us dessert “on the house”. It was tasty, too. Bravo, Ruth’s Chris of Orlando.

Two more days of conference and then we have two days on the beach before heading home. Nice.

We had the whole clan over this weekend - well, almost the whole clan. Ryan came in from Chicago, Aaron and the folks from Wisconsin, Andrew from his job in Illinois. Becky’s folks were already here visiting. We were only missing Rebecca, who is finishing up her six-month DTS in Panama. She’ll be home in about 10 days - sure looking forward to seeing her.

We took a whole ton of pictures over the weekend and I’m in the process of uploading some of them to a Memorial Day Weekend set on Flickr. Here’s a couple samples. Enjoy!

This weekend we had very nearly my whole family over to visit.   My sister is still in Panama, but otherwise, my parents and all my brothers came in on Friday and got to stay through Sunday afternoon.

We had massive amounts of food and celebration; fortunately then we were able to send some of the leftovers home with them, otherwise we’d be eating them for a week and there’d still be some to go bad.   There is still a bit of birthday cake hanging around, though…  I’m looking forward to another piece of that carrot cake - yum yum.

Things are staying busy with the family these days - Mom and Dad are busy as usual; Ryan is waiting to hear on his acceptance to Georgetown grad school, Andrew got accepted to George Fox University and will be headed there in the fall…  and not leaving Aaron out: last week he bought a b-e-a-utiful Taylor acoustic guitar.  We had to keep a towel around just to wipe up all the drool. 

I’ll post some pictures once I get them off of the camera.