The Hampton Times

Here's everyone but me in Philly at the Thanksgiving Day parade in front of City Hall.

Here's Adrian getting ready to drink his apple juice at Olive Garden tonight:

Here are the twins' 2008 school pictures (Jason on the left, Dillon on the right):

View our Flickr Set of Dillon and Jason's birthday pictures...

Friday night my father and I moved the 50" plasma screen to its new home above our fireplace. Angie and I couldn't be happier with the way it turned out. We spent a grand total of $51 for the wall-mount bracket, a 15 foot HDMI cable and a 12 foot power cable for the TV. Thank you, Monoprice.com! This is just "Phase 1" of the new Home Theater setup. I wanted to get the TV on the wall in any scenario, so now that that's done I can concentrate on getting the rest of the home theater stuff in the room. You know, the surround sound speakers, Play Station 3, stereo receiver, etc. Maybe by Christmas we'll have that all in place. Here are some pictures of the family room. The first was taken when we viewed the house before we bought it. The second was taken after we bought the house and painted over the mural above the fireplace, and the third photo was taken today with the TV in place.

I love the fall, but I hate raking leaves. Our new house has tons of trees on the property so it is a massive undertaking to deal with the leaves. We paid a landscaping crew of three guys to do the lawn-mowing, edging and leaf-blowing when we first bought the house. They charged us $35, and they were done in about 30-45 minutes. I now know what a great deal that was! I just spent the better part of 3-4 days leaf blowing, raking, and mulching to get rid of all the leaves. Angie pitched in, as did my dad and my mom, too (all at different times). The leaves are still coming down, but there aren't many left on the trees so it seems a bit more manageable now.

If you are ever looking for cables for your home theater system, such as HDMI cables, coax cables, speaker cables, etc., then look no further than http://www.monoprice.com. It rocks. I just ordered a tilting wall-mount bracket for our large screen plasma TV for about $24! I also picked up a 15 foot HDMI cable for about $6! Just two weeks ago I spent $30 on a 3-footer at Target!