Housekeeping…

Just a few odds-and-ends:

* Passover begins at sundown! Inasmuch as the dietary restrictions of the holiday can be quite taxing, this remains my favorite Jewish holiday because of the Seder. The educational component through the Seder is what I like to consider an archaic example of a multimedia experience — where one gets to taste the bitterness of the time of slavery in Egypt, and recline on pillows at the dinner table (kind of) to demonstrate the freedom found after.  Oh — and there’s the whole “drink four cups of wine” thing.  Who can argue with that?

So — we’re packing everything up, and in a few hours…

* We’re heading to New Jersey! And we’ll be spending the first few days of the holiday with my brother, his wife and their three girls.  My Dad and his girlfriend will be up there. As well as my brother-in-law-in-law. Usually with the ever-increasing tolls on the I-95 corridor between Maryland and New York I look forward to the lower gas prices in New Jersey, but this time I’ll need to be careful of tainted gas. *giggle*

* Have you submitted your guesses for the Shiny Stakeout “Name that Header Photo” Guessing Extravaganza? Probably not — because I don’t have any fabulous prizes to give away (yet).  The pictures are here, and you can submit your guesses to contest at shiny stakeout dot com. I haven’t received any email on this yet — so if you’ve sent email and you haven’t received an acknowledgement from me — reply to the blog and I’ll check it out.

* Update on TequilaCon ’08: I’ve contemplating attending this — even though I’m kind of new to this community. But it seems like a nice bunch of folks, and if all keeps up with the blogging this time next year, I’ll really want to go but it will likely be somewhere cost-prohibitive.  So — I’m thinking about it this year (although it’s coming down to the wire.

At this point, one of three things will happen:

(1) Mrs. Shiny (a.k.a. socKs) and I will drop the kid off and attend, making a short weekend out of a three hour drive to Philadelphia. Should be fun for the both of us. She blogs as well, so I suppose she’s still eligible. It depends on if we can drop the kid off with my Dad over the weekend…

(2) Shiny will be attending! And will possibly be looking to split a room at a hotel downtown for Saturday night to save on costs. If anyone’s in the same boat, please let me know. (I’ll likely leave pretty early Sunday morning.)

(3) Shiny and socKs will have their own TequilaCon back in DC that weekend. But with hookers and cocaine. In fact, forget the TequilaCon part of it! If anyone wants to participate, we’ll send you a free invite for every 10 kg of pure cocaine and every 40kg of impure hooker.

That’s it for now.  I likely won’t have any time to blog until we get back on Monday, at which point I’ll do my shamelessly self-promoting birthday post.

Have a good weekend…