Family: November 2008 Archives

Today won’t be the detailed rundown of how everything went. I’m still playing catch-up from being out of the house since Tuesday. The family took a trip to New York City (well, part of us did), and everyone had a good time. The pictures and video are bountiful, so I’m going to need some time to pull it all together. However, a bullet-point summary of what we did the past 5 days would go like this:

Tuesday

• Travel to my parent’s in Northern Virginia after school with all 3 kids

Wednesday

• Leave the twins with my parents (thank you for watching them) to drive to Manhattan to visit my sister Emily for a few days
• Walk around the tour of the Macy’s Parade balloons, as they are moored next to the Museum of Natural History (only 1 block from Emily’s apartment) — it was crazy/busy there

Thursday

• Watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade from the middle of 73rd Avenue — we couldn’t get any closer, but was close enough to see almost everything
• Take Will to a playground in Central Park for a while, then walk over to Strawberry Fields and back to the apartment
• Eat a Thanksgiving dinner with Emily

Friday

• Ride the subway twice — first to go to the Empire State Building, then to go to Rockefeller Plaza to watch ice skating, see the tree (unlit), and eat lunch
• Meet up with Emily and visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral
• Walk to FAO Schwartz, only to find the wait in line to be rather long
• Take a taxi back to Emily’s apartment (Will’s first ride in a taxi), then back to the playground one last time
• Go to the movies to see Madagascar 2 (all 4 of us enjoyed it), then go out to eat at a diner-style restaurant

Saturday

• Try to leave early, only to discover the battery was dead — finally got a jump from AAA
• Drive back to Northern Virginia to spend the night at my parent’s house
• Got to see Dena, Dennis and Nicholas at dinner — Will really enjoyed seeing his new cousin again

Sunday

• Drive back home in the rain — only took about 30 minutes longer than normal, and that included a stop for gas

That’s a lot going on in one long trip. We all survived, and we really enjoyed the company of everyone we met over those days. We hope everyone else had a fun and safe holiday weekend. We hope to see you soon.

As I said, I hope to post pictures and video at a later date, but I hope this suffices for a quick summary at moment.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s pitch on signing up for the blog via e-mail, it works great. In fact, it even posts the blog entry itself in the e-mail. I didn’t have any pictures or video in it, though, so I’m not sure how that would work. However, it was relatively straight-forward and easy enough to view or to surf over to the actual entry, if you like. This is what the e-mail looked like for me.

As another follow-up, this time to my rant on the price of gas, I thought of one other factor that may be driving down gas prices more than you might expect — the price of corn. After all, the fuel for most of our cars is 15% ethanol, so just like when gas prices shot up a few years ago when partial ethanol content was mandated (causing the price of corn to go up in a nice little feedback loop), it appears the price of corn is coming down (as shown from the graph for 2008 below):

That’s a pretty steep drop in the price of corn this year, which should help drive down the cost of gas even further. I’m still not convinced something else is going on (as ethanol is only 15% of the gas content), but it definitely doesn’t hurt. Now, what about corn-based foods — why haven’t their prices come down with this drop in prices?

Happy Veterans Day to all of those who have served our country. Your service is greatly appreciated.

As for the core reason for this posting — I finally got around to adding an e-mail subscription feature to my blog to alert you when there is a new entry on the blog. There is a box now in the column to the right of this post (the second of the three columns) that has a place where you can enter your e-mail address to subscribe to this service. This may make things easier for those who do not use an RSS reader to keep up to date on when a new entry is posted on the blog. If you don’t like checking in each day, signing up here can have an e-mail sent to you at the end of each day when an entry has been posted. You will be able to see a good summary of what was posted on the blog that day.

I have not tested it to see what actually gets delivered, but the Feedburner FAQ suggests that it will post the content in the e-mail. I have to believe that with pictures and videos, it will be easier to experience everything on the blog (as opposed to viewing it in an e-mail). But you will be able to link to the entry from the e-mail.

Let me know how this goes for yourself and if you see it as a value-added feature. Don’t worry about your e-mail address going to anyone but me. I will be the only one to see it, and I won’t be spamming family or anything. I’m signing myself up tonight to see how it works for this posting. I’ll let everyone know how it went.

You made it to the finish line once again. (As I noted earlier this week, Emily was going to run the New York City Marathon today.) But this time, you absolutely blasted your personal record by almost 20 minutes to finish unofficially in 3:47:18. As we can tell from the splits, you held on well through the end and really kept up the pace through the finish line. Great job — wish I could pull a time like that.

Go get some deserved rest and plot your next move. Hopefully, you’re not too worse for the wear after today’s effort.