I love Thanksgiving for two reasons.

Reason#1: Gives me an opportunity to reflect on all the wonderful things I have in my life; family, friends and a job.

Reason#2: Allows me to eat some of my favorite food; turkey, stuffing, noodles and sweat potatoes.

That being said, since my backissues started a few years ago keeping weight off has been a challenge. After my metabolism slowed, I started realizing that I was actually getting old like the rest of the mortals out there. This typically was not a problem because I am a walking oxymoron in that I am a big guy that likes to run. Now since my back is in shambles I dont run hardly at all and recently under Doctor’s orders “not to, period!”

After one week of vacation and a week at training in Virginia, I finally got back to work today. Of course I love the time off, but playing catch-up at work stinks.

I can honestly say the training in Virginia was well worth it. The database we trained on uses Oracle and Cognos. Fairly smooth running database but Oracle can be very finicky sometimes.

I am really enjoying being home. I love holding my boys and Kim. I love hanging out with them and just doing normal everyday things. Our family event the last two weeks has been to watch the Fox TV Series 24. We are on season 5 right now. Before I left for Iraq Kim bought me season 3-4 to watch while I was there. I think Kim was hesitant at first because she is not into the macho guy action flicks, but she has really been into it.

The Strikers played in the soccer tournament two weekends ago and it was amazing. They were the second seed in their braket. The first seed was the only team that beat them all year that I spoke about in the last post.

They played one game on Saturday and won the game with no problem. Now on SUnday it was a different story. They had to play a semi-final game and about 2 hours later play the championship game if they would win in the semi-final.