I just wanted to get an update up on the blog since it has been neglected for so long.

Rebecca is currently between semester in school, so we’ve been catching up on things around the house.  I’ve been working entirely too much, but I have a very nice setup at work now.  I’ll post pictures soon of my new work space at the office.

I just started getting things rolling on the plans for my company.  I applied for and was accepted for the Bizspark program from Microsoft, so I’m currently setting a development environment and new servers at home so that can start working on my new ideas.  I currently have four different projects that are all slightly related but different enough that they are aimed at completely unrelated markets.  But they all have a lot of potential and fill niches that are in serious need of rethinking.  For more information about those projects and my own tinkering and hacks you can check out my personal blog (www.benanderson.net/blog) or the Simplified Solutions’ website (www.simplified-solutions.com).

Tonight we had some friends over for Rebecca’s birthday party.  It was a lot of fun.  We just hung out, played the Wii and PS2, and snacked some.  We got to enjoy the games that I bought Rebecca for Christmas, which can help add a lot of life to a small party.

It was a bit tiring to get prepped for the party tonight, since I’ve been swamped at work with team changes, the other leads out through out the week, working on security changes in the office and dealing with some very messy production issues.  As a result of all the time up at the office I had to clean the house last night, which wasn’t that big of a deal, I just wasn’t able to start till 8:00 after I got home from work.  I also decided I’m not all the excited about tile or wood flooring in a house, since it ends up being more work to clean.

Yesterday we thought that we might have to call the party off since Rebecca has been sick, and yesterday was the worst of it.  I didn’t think that she was seriously ill, but with the strain of flu going around, it could have been a serious issue.  Luckily, Rebecca is fine, and the party turned out great.

P.S.  I’ll post pictures from the Honeymoon soon, as well as video from the birthday party.

Rebecca has been in Ireland since Thursday morning.  She left Wednesday night and will return Monday night.  While she's been out I've been experimenting with my meals.  One of my favorite things to cook with is fresh garlic.  This morning I made scrabled eggs with bell peppers, onion, garlic and half a strip of bacon, and seasoned the eggs with Cayenne pepper powder, salt, black pepper and crushed red pepper.  To prevent the eggs from drying out and to make them very pluffy, I used a tablespoon of beer.

Tonight I made burrito meat with garlic, bell peppers, onions, black beans and ground beef.  I picked up fresh handmade tortillas from Krogers and put cheese, and sour cream on the burritos.  My sides were fresh guacamole with lime chips and steamed zucchini.  It sounds very weird, but it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  I ended up over eating...

For dessert, I mastered the art of creating Irish coffee, complete with layered cream.  A very pleasant treat.

The depressing part about it all is that I didn’t have anyone else around to share the experience with.  There are plenty of leftovers, but the experience was only half fulfilling since it was experienced alone.

A year ago I set up our wedding website and blog on GoDaddy’s share posting, since I have a reseller’s account.  But over the summer, for business purposes, I bought a dedicated server and consolidated all of my hosting accounts.  Since our blog and wedding website expire on January 17th, I’ve moved our site to my dedicated server.  Hopefully, now that things have calmed down for us a little, me more so than Rebecca, we’ll have at least some updates to the site from time to time.

For those interested in the technical aspect of the setup, the blog is using the .NET Blog Engine, and the main site is still using the ScrewTurn wiki.  We’ll have a gallery and links to my photos soon, so check back periodically.