Warm October Weekend in Chicago

Growing up in the Chicagoland area all my life, you typically don't see the nice weather we had this past weekend in the middle of October, but we'll take it.

Cindy and I made our effort of being outside to make the most of it. We headed out to Old Orchard Mall on Saturday, and we definitely weren't alone. It was pretty crowded but with the weather, you couldn't really blame folks for being out there. We ended up just browsing and not leaving with anything, but Cindy made up for that on Sunday.

Sunday, we headed out to Woodfield and Cindy did her "damage" there, albeit it rather a mild amount of spending. She stopped in at Swarovski as usual to pick up another piece for her Lovlots collection, which she is close to completing. All told, she probably has over 20 Swarovski pieces in her curio cabinet, to the point where we'll be looking for a bigger one soon. We have been meaning to take pictures and keep tabs on the pieces she has and post them in a section on our website, but I haven't had too much time to get to it. Soon, though.

Speaking of Swarovski, they are having a member event for their Swarovski Crystal Society (SCS), of which Cindy's a member. It's going to be at Woodfield on November 2nd I believe, and it will be the second one we're attending. Our first was a designer signing earlier in the year. Cindy has her eye on a few Sea Turtle pieces that we recently discovered and have fallen in love with as a result of our last trip to Maui. They'll be in our living room by the end of the year, that's for sure.

On the Maui front, I did start making a few updates to our website to make room for the latest details and photos from our Maui '07 trip, and that should be ready in a few weeks. I have a few other things I'm working on, but those should be wrapped up shortly.

Really, where does all the time go?

October 14th, 2007

Another week past, another week closer to Christmas. :)

Nothing too exciting happened this past week, just going through the days one at a time and trying to cross things off my todo list. Speaking of which, I finally finished the new version of The Ciolinos website and I just deployed it using my cellphone (I love technology).

I also spent some time yesterday surfing the web for Maui blogs to try and find some links for my Ka'anapali Dreamin' site. I found a few good ones which I'll try to post there soon. I was using Technorati to update my blog info and did the searches with them. I was a little surprised that there weren't that many other blogs like mine out there, but I wasn't surprised with the amount of junk and spam in the search results.

On the car front, I played around with a few car company sites in search of my next set of wheels. I liked the Pontiac site and did two custom cars with their build tools. The first was for the G6, which came out really sharp. It also went over our budget at something like $425 a month. After that reality check, I built one for the G5 that was a little bit more of our price range. It's not exactly the beast I wanted, but it's better than a 4-door. Now we just have to save for the down payment. I could probably start one of those fundraiser meters to keep track of where we're at.

Switching topics, we were shopping at Target yesterday and noticed that they didn't have any of the old iPods like Cindy wanted. We decided to track one down before they were gone everywhere, and found one at FYE in Golf Mill. It's a small 4GB Silver iPod Nano, and she's already starting to load it up. She also got the same car radio cable for the AUX input that I have, so now she'll have her tunes wherever so goes, too.

With Halloween coming up, we stopped into the Halloween Store for a quick peek and to see if there was a costume that Cindy liked. There was a nurse outfit that she later mentioned would be worth a second look. I'll keep you posted if photos would be available. We also scoped out a few infant customs for my little cousin Zach, but we didn't think they were small enough for him.

That's mostly it for now. Nothing too notable coming up this week, but you never know.

Just another Sunday

Well, another week has passed since we came back from Maui, and we're pretty much back into the normal swing of things again.

Since there isn't a hockey team this year, that bit of stress is absent for the next six months or so. Even with that extra time now, there are still about a dozen things I'm working on that are competing for my time. In addition to finishing Ka'anapali Dreamin' and starting to get traffic driven to it, I also have started a redesign of The Ciolino's website. Aside from that, I still have to add our latest Maui trip to the Kris and Cindy website, plus finishing the template for this blog.

Whenever all that gets finished, I still want to make webnelly.com more of a profile site and add more things like screenshots and stuff to it. Following that, my next project, igloosurfing.com, will kickoff and I hope to have a lot of fun with that.

Outside my life behind a computer, there's no shortness of things to do elsewhere. My car is 3 wheels in the grave and I need to start looking for a new one. I'm not too thrilled about adding another car payment to our budget,but we'll manage.

There's also quite a few things we would like to swap out at our condo, such as a new TV and some furniture. It's certainly never boring or simple around here, that's for sure.

It's been awhile now...

I know it's been awhile since there's been activity here, but that doesn't mean we haven't been busy.

Since the last post here, I've completed a web development certificate program at the Illinois Institute of Art in Schaumburg, we've completed our second trip to Maui, and I even put up an entire site called Ka'anapali Dreamin'.

So it's been a little busy. The high school isn't going to be having a team this year, so I sort of get the winter off. That will give me some extra time to add more to this website, specifically for the new Maui trip we just completed. Also, with the Ka'anapali Dreamin' site, I was able to publish the blog as part of the main site and share the same look and feel, so that will be in the works for this site, and well as maybe a minor redesign.

That's about it for now.