Hey there! It's Christmas Eve and I've already got one of my presents! Yup, it's a 3 hour battery for my camcorder. Which is nice, because the one that came with the camcorder is only a little bit over an hour, and I've missed several things because of running out of battery life. The only thing is that it looks kinda funny to have such a large battery on my small camera.

I'm downloading the new Trillian version right now. It's been years since we've updated it and I got tired of clicking "Ignore" every time I open it and the window pops up telling me that an update is available.

BonnieJean sent us a video file last night that the Kinmen team did for Christmas. It was a hoot. It also reminded me how much I wish we had DSL...it took 5 hours to download! BTW, BonnieJean seems to be the only one on the Kinmen team with any acting ability at all. She's quite good in fact.

Last Saturday we had a Christmas party at our house. It was a hoot. We had mostly people from either our home school group or karate show up. It was a nice sized crowd: not quite too many people, but enough to crowd the walk ways. We played a couple rounds of Mafia, which was a hoot. I was the mafia and Ethan figured it out and was loudly telling everybody about it, and I managed to turn it on him and get him lynched instead! Yea! Then the sheriff checked me out and declared I was a bad guy, and even though I was lynched because of it, I thought I managed to give a really good defense and even convinced one person to vote for me! (for those of you who don't know, the sheriff is not allowed to lie, so if he says somebody is the Mafia, they're dead.)

I got all the kids "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" for Christmas. Last night I installed it and played it some...I'm not sure if I like it or not. I still haven't figured out all of the commands yet.

I'm back to tele-marketing now. Made two sales yesterday. The annoying thing is you have to average about six a day to make commission. So I'm not making any more than $6.50/hr. There's one guy there who makes an average of 3 sales an hour...that's $21.50 an hour!

Black belt testing is being held in Bowie, TX this year. We're going to be going down on Thursday night, spend the night at Aunt 'Rie's trailer, visit relatives on Friday, spend the night at the trailer again and then go to the testing on Saturday. I've been to the last two and they are always really, REALLY fun to go to. You get to visit with a lot of karate friends from other dojos, you see some really good kata, some really good breaks and of course a lot of fighting. This time Mr. Murry is letting me actually help out with the fighting, which is really cool. I just hope I don't get killed! Mr. Henderson, one of our black belts, is going for his second degree black. Steven, Philip and Taylor, three of our brown belts, will all be going for their 1st degree brown (one level below black).

Well, I've got to go make lunch now. Talk to y'all later! God bless!