well, it seems i have gotten somewhat involved in the mike huckabee movement a bit.

i have been going to these meetup.com meetings with ruthie about the presidential candidate mike huckabee up in plano (collin county). you see, someone organizes what is called a meetup group and then people that have that in common can get together offline and exchange ideas and so forth. they have them for all sorts of things like, web design, php, american idol, homer simpson and whatever else the american public can come up with.

anyways...the guy that organized the mike huckabee collin county meetup group bailed out quite unexpectedly right before our last meeting.

a nice man named jim edwards offered to take over and i agreed to help him get technical with the meetup group and deal with the online aspects of this group.

after much back and forth trying to get ahold of the past organizer, i finally did and got the group working again.

jim and i are starting a new and unusual blog in the next few days about bbq and mike huckabee. yes, bbq.

see, the celeb, chuck norris has endorsed mike huckabee for president and this coming sunday, jan. 20th on chuck's ranch in navasota, texas they are having a $1,000 a plate bbq. so im sent out a notice to all the members about this event.

i digress...jim had this idea to create a site based on the idea of "bbqer's for huckabee", figuring that people like bbq and people like mike huckabee. so i got a new domain name www.1001bbqloversforhuckabee.com and that's where this new blog will live!

nothing there yet, but the start of a wordpress blog and a template. check back, jim's going to be writing up a storm there.

wow, he really won the iowa caucus.

that was great, now new hampshire might not be so easy. i do applaud his decision to not air the negative ads against romney. it would have been a mistake.

he was great on jay leno the night before too.

the maribeth house has finally sold!!! we closed on december 28, 2007 and are out of it for good.

it was kinda odd, but the house showed over 55 times and then we got 3 bids in a few days. one was right and we took it and they wanted to close really quickly (no complaints here). so that was a real relief to both ruthie and i.

let's see, josh is about to start a course in emergency medical technician (emt), david is in israel on a trip called birthright with amy and jon has immersed himself in yet another sports activity. he is now on the wrestling team at richardson high.

i also had some fun playing around with my new "fisheye lens"...

this is a picture of our new kitchen at the glen cove house. i saw a tutorial online the other day about how you could get a cheap fisheye lens to work with a compact digital camera.

it really works!

click image for larger view

it was pretty simple to put together. the ingredients are 1) one of those small door viewers (you know, the type you have in an apartment door) 2) the cap from a target prescription bottle (check to make sure it fits over the camera lens) 3) a drill to drill a hole in the target cap...that's it

you just stick the whole strange looking thing over the lens and have fun. i have gotten some unusual and bizarre photos with this contraption. try it.