Tons of stuff since last Thursday. For one, as of right now, it has rained a little over 4.75 inches (that's a little over 12 cm for you metric folks) since Thursday. We have not had rain like this in a few years. Good times considering how long we have been under a stage 3 water restriction. Friday I brewed up a batch of cream ale beer. When I started it was not raining but right after I started it poured down all day. This may or may not affect the beer. It was hard to keep the brew at a constant temperature and therefore at a steady boil. After pitching the yeast, it started the process of converting sugar into alcohol in just a few hours, so I think everything will turn out well.

Also, My best gal decided on Friday to take take a position at another company after working at her current job for around 8 years. It is a big change for her, and thus it affects me as well. I went through all the various advantages and disadvantages with her, and tried to help her make a wise decision and prepare her for all the things that would happen now, such as the current company giving her a counter offer, and the like. Also, this puts a dent in my vacation planning. She did, however get the new place to agree to let her have 2 weeks of vacation instead of just one, so I can still go twice this year, although they might both have to be in the later months.

Saturday I began a major overhaul of my garage. This process is going to take a few weeks. Basically, I am doing the same thing I did with my closet. Tossing out everything I don't absolutely need, to clean up, and maximize usable space. Also, I tend to just kinda stack shit up here and there, and then leave it there, so it creates a haven for various bugs, spiders, and stuff like that. I also have TONS of leftover wood from projects I have done, so I am phasing that out as well. I am taking a few pieces of wood each day to work, and depositing them into the big dumpster, which gets emptied every day. I figure it will all be gone in a few weeks 8-). I am also going to buy some sort of organizational containers for garage stuff, so I can lump similar things together on the shelves to make them easier to find. I also may purchase some sort of large toolbox to put all my tools in. I have quite a healthy collection now, and it is sort of scattered around, and I am not happy with that.

Sunday, I went to visit some friends, and we went out to eat, then to 3 different beer stores 8-). We drank pretty heavily and played Guitar Hero II on the XBOX360. (http://www.guitarherogame.com/gh2/). We played well into the night until we were so tired we could not continue. Got home around 2:00am.

Monday, I went to Lone Star Park (http://www.lonestarpark.com) with a friend of mine from my hockey team. We bet on the horse races all day. It was a blast. My friend hit the first daily double, so he used the proceeds from that for the rest of the day for his betting. He didn't do so well after that, but he broke even, so that's a good day. I hit a few exactas and trifectas, but still ended up losing about 35 bucks. So to try and make up for it with a big win, I made a few interesting bets on the last race and ended up losing 65 more. So overall I came out 100 bucks in the hole, but I took 125$ to lose on betting, so in a way, I sort of won 25$ 8-). Gamblers will ALWAYS spin their story to make it not seem so bad. Anyway, it inspired me to figure out some sort of horse betting system to make money next time I go. Basically, my system will establish a sort of points system based on a certain criteria, with more important factors weighing more heavily towards the overall point total. The horse with the highest overall point total, will be my pick. This is by no means revolutionary, and if it was easy, everyone would do it, and make that their career. There are people however, who do make a career out of horse betting, so it can be done, so my goal is to make my horse betting hobby a little bit more fun, by winning more money. I will post more on this later.

Anyhoo, I know I said this would be less of a log of my days events, and have more opinion pieces, but so much happened over the holiday weekend, that I needed to jot it down, for my own memorandum more than anything. I'll put up something more interesting before the end of this weekend.