These are before and after photos of Ian’s room. We put in new closet doors and closet shelves, and obviously gave it a nice coat of blue paint. We ripped up the “beautiful” deep green (no, not Forest Green…it was deeper than that) carpet to reveal hardwood floors. Someone who lived there before wrote on the wood floors with permanant marker, so that made for some good reading. We had the floors sanded and that took care of the writing. :-) We do need to put some things on the walls, but we will get to that in time.

These are before and after photos of Rebecca’s room. As with Ian’s room, we ripped up the deep green carpeting to reveal hardwood floors. The flooring near the outside wall was a bit damaged but we can roll with it. It appears that the window has a little leak in it of some sort and that is something we definitely need to give some attention to. We put in new closet doors and shelves. Rebecca’s room is one of my favorite rooms in the house and she really enjoys playing in her new room.

We officially moved into our house this weekend. We were delayed a couple of weeks because we had some immense problems with the appliances we ordered from Home Depot. Every one of the items were damaged in some capacity. And it took them over a week to respond and have the new ones re-delivered. In addition, we had some delays with construction and the bathrooms. Our first order of business is to continue to focus on the upstairs and get all the bathrooms and bedrooms in good condition. At present, Lisa and Steve are living in what will be the office as we paint the MBR, the bathroom, and the walk in closet. The kids bathroom also needs work but it is in functional condition.

Incredibly, the New England Patriots won Super Bowl XXXIX for their third championship in four years. Let me repeat that…their third Super Bowl championship in four years. The Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys of the mid 1990′s are the only two teams to accomplish that feat in NFL history.

Now for those of us fans who followed this franchise in the era of Steve Grogan, Sam Cunningham, Tony Eason, et al, to witness this run of excellence is completely unfathomable. I remember not too long ago when they were 1-15 and were just a complete joke of a NFL franchise. So I guess that’s what makes this string of victories so sweet. And to have two Patriots Super Bowl championships sandwich a Red Sox World Series victory…too much fun and happiness for this New England sports fan to comprehend. Lets do it again next year!!

Enjoy this now, kids. You may never see this happen again. Congrats to the Patriots for another amazing year.

Google continues to expand the services it offers and is rapidly becoming more than just a search engine. Granted, every product that Google releases is driven by search but they definitely encroaching onto the world of the portal. Case in point is Google Maps which is actually a pretty impressive yet simple maps product. One really cool feature is that when the location you are looking for has been generated, you are able to “grab” the map and move it around similar to how you can do that for Adobe PDF documents. That is very helpful when you want to get a sense of the surroundings of where you are looking for. It eliminates the supremely annoying functionality on Mapquest, Yahoo Maps of having to click the N/E/S/W arrows to move around the map.

I was teased. For a while now, I have seen ads for Sonic Drive-In on ESPN. Sonic is a fast food chain located everywhere but the northeast. So coming out to Phoenix, in the back of my mind, I was wondering if I may be able to sneak off and grab a bite to eat there. The food on the ads look good, but we shall see what its like in person. Alas, the great irony is that there is a Sonic about 2 miles from the hotel I am staying at and we actually drove right past it when we drove to the hotel.

Guess such a culinary indulgence will have to wait until next time.

I have spent the past few days in Phoenix, AZ visiting my company’s office out here. My group has had some all day meetings which are always fun. In this quick visit here, I have enjoyed the nice warm weather, the dry air and a good steak at a place called Cartwrights on the north side of Phoenix. I think the interesting aspect of this town is how spread out the city is. The thing I find weird is that all of the houses have the same look and feel to them – very homogenious. Its been refreshing compared to the sub-zero cold of the Northeast this time of year. PHX is not a bad place to be in February!!

This is the first time I have been out in PHX for about 8-9 years. The first time out here was nothing but fun as I went to the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.

I look forward to coming out here for future visits so that I can get in a round of golf, maybe catch a Arizona Diamondbacks game and add “the BoB” (BankOne Ballpark) to my list of visited baseball stadiums, visit Taliesien West, the Arizona Biltmore, and whatever else I may find.