We had a good weekend. Yesterday was my birthday and I've got to write about all my awesome gifts. We also had trick-or-treaters, went mountain biking for the first time in months, and had a fun night out with the "El Paso crowd".

First of all about the trick-or-treaters - we had lots. We figure about 100 kids, in groups of 3, 4, or 5. We still have lots of candy left over though. Ted's vote for the cutest was our little neighbor (she's 3 I think) who was dressed up as a pizza! Her candy bag was a pizza box. I didn't see her so I can't comment.

Early Saturday morning we biked at Erwin Park with Dan. Our last biking excursion was late August so it's been a while. It was pretty fun. My bike, with all the modifications I made last winter, is still feeling awesome. We had some crashes but no injuries. After biking we also went to the dog park so the whole family was happy and tired.

Saturday night was the third in a series of nights with the "El Paso crowd": Dan, Vanessa, Erica, Ali, and Eric. They are all from El Paso, and they have each hosted a night of drinking and game-playing at their homes in the last few weeks. We are the only ones left. I wonder if they would come to our house even if we're not from El Paso. Maybe I should call it the "dog lover's convention" as between the 4 households we all have 7 dogs. Anyway, it was really fun and entertaining as usual. Ted and I will have to think about hosting one next.

Sunday was my birthday! I had a really nice day and got such great gifts. The biggest one is actually something that Ted and I bought together, but we are calling it my birthday gift because we got another big thing that we are calling Ted's birthday gift - but I'll write about that when Ted's birthday rolls round. Anyway, my big gift was an Escient Fireball E-120. It is a "digital music manager" or some people also call it, a "music server". Basically it is a stereo component with a hard drive (this one is 120 G). So you can store your CDs or other music onto its harddrive and then when you want to play it, you just scroll through the on-screen display and find the CD you want instead of having to go look for the actual physical CD. It also connects to the internet to do CD recognition and download cover-art for your CDs. You can even shop online for new music through it. Probably the coolest thing about it, though, is you can make huge playlists, or even randomly play through everything that you own. We got this thing about a week ago (but I didn't want to "announce" it until my birthday) and have finally loaded all 320 or so of our CDs into it. So when we put that on random you get quite the mix of music! Anyway, there is so much more I could say about this but I don't want to write a book. It is a really really cool stereo component, that's for sure.

My parents sent us the money to buy lamps for our family room, so we got some really nice ones. You can see them in this picture. My sister sent me a really nice shirt. I was also really surprised to find that Ted had another gift up his sleeve (after all the money we spent on the Fireball I was not expecting anything else). He bought me an espresso machine! We've been making vanilla lattes and chai tea lattes at home... yum!