The trip has been over for months now and I've moved on to "normal" life again. There's at least one story I still wished I could have written about... in fact I'll try:
Last day in Venice, we were running about trying to find the one place that had a mask that I liked. We spent the waning hours of the day looking, until we found ourselves in the increasing darkness surrounded by closing shops and admittedly somewhat scary environs. We decided to give up and head back to the room. Passing by a shop, out of the corner of my eye, was The Mask. We went in, the lady hadn't closed up yet and cheerily let us browse, where I found a few more with a similar design, one that I liked even more than the one in the window. Happy ending!

 Right then, that chapter closed, I sit here ready to embark on coding up the web page that will handle the taking of the Trivial Quiz portion of the upcoming Pentathanerd - Winter Games. Originally scheduled for the Ides of January, it was pushed back to February 8th - 12th due to logistical problems arising from the LEGO Luge course construction. These problems have been somewhat ameliorated by a proof-of-concept run today in the snow which could be applied to making a solid luge course. The other events of the Winter Pentathanerd- the Biathalon, the Hardware Teardown/Rebuild, and the Snow Sculpture event - are all set to go.

 This is just one of many distractions happening at the moment. We've scheduled out about five major projects that need to happen this summer or earlier, including repainting the whole garage, remodeling every bathroom in the house (sequentially, not in parallel), and many more projects. Also, I'm going to help out the Blake fencing team in their run up to the high school state championships on Feb 21st, which means leaving work early one day a week and consequently finding hours of the week that can be used to make up that time.

 There are more distractions, but the more I write about them, the more time I don't have to actually do anything about them. So, with that in mind...