Continuing my fascination with super-sized sea life, check out these ginormous seastars found in Antartica.

They're so creepy they almost look fake.

More info here on MSNBC.

Happy Chinese New Year! This year is the Year of the Rat. Once again, here are a few comments about the new year from ChineseAstrology.com:

2008's socially adept Rat year brings us charisma, intelligence and the ability to charm the pants off of just about anybody – literally. Romantically, 2008's repertory will be as eclectic and varied as this first sign of the Zodiac. High-strung, curious, and ever alert to sexual opportunity, during Rat years we will all feel the need to make an emotional connection with our love partner. It is after sunset that the Rat year comes alive with numerous acquaintances, lively discussion, and intensely romantic interludes. We will all value companionship and love more than anything else this year. Enjoy the concealed and stealthy midnight hours ruled by the Rat of romantic secrets and delicious debauchery. People fall in love easily during Rat years and we will all be prone to some memorable infatuations...

...

2008 will also be an intellectual one, as the Rat is the curious professor of the zodiac. Expect a renewed passion for knowledge, and interest in the sciences in 2008. Travel and a hunger for new experiences, will also becon...

Words and language will become ever more important and poets, musicians and writers can easily produce their best work to date under the influence of the talented Rat. Exchanging and communicating are the priorities of a Rat year. A hyperactive and restless year of potential nervous disorders and neurosis of every type. A good year to explore relaxation methods such as meditation more thoroughly. You may find yourself more sensitive to illness, environmental insults and allergies this year as well, so be sure to get that flu shot and eat your vegetables!

As a Monkey, I'm looking for the forecast of "exhausting nights of love" and being in "a very comfortable and prosperous position." Much better than the difficult year they had forecast for me last year.

So there you have it. Have a great year!

OK, hopefully this is the last post on the Chris/cancer topic. It's Happy Dance time at the Evans house!

His pathology report came back and had good news. The renal cell cancer was confined to the removed kidney and the lymph nodes were clear. He has some follow-up checks, but no radiation or chemo or anything horrible like that. He's home now and eating/drinking real stuff again, so hopefully it'll be clear sailing ahead.

What a relief!

Kellie, Kristen, Eric, Katie, David, and I visited Chris yesterday at the hospital. (Wow, not a very prolific set of bloggers...) Like I mentioned recently, Chris learned last week that he has renal cancer. For a guy who just had major league surgery to remove a mutant kidney, he looked great. I was mentally prepared for him to look a bit ragged, but he looked pretty normal. The only real indication of his condition (aside from the fetching hospital gown) was that his voice was a bit gruff, probably from not being allowed to drink or eat anything for the past few days. (More on that here).

His wife Leslie looked good too and was in high spirits. We also got to meet Chris' mom. I love meeting my friends' parents; they're almost always as cool as their kids (clear correlation). It would crush me to see my kids with cancer, but she seemed to holding up well too.

Kellie, Kristen, and I brought Chris a few Vosges Bacon Chocolate bars, which are fantastic, of course, because they have bacon. Hopefully, Chris will be able to enjoy them in a few days, unless Leslie keeps trying to kill him.

It's great reading the comments on his blog. I think it's a real testimony to the man Chris is that so many people care about him and are concerned. As Leslie mentioned in the blog, EVERYBODY LOVES CHRIS! Go, man, go!

A few years ago I worked on the MSN Explorer 8.0 team; the project was code-named Texas. I made a few really good friends on that project. This weekend two of them had serious medical surprises.

Craig, movie critic - really, he was the FOX13 movie dude - and former speech writer for Bill Gates, had surgery to get his appendix out; his blog post just said, "They say it has to come out tonight."

Perhaps even more severe, Chris, golf and ski buddy now at DeepRockDrive (guess they couldn't afford spaces for their name), went into the hospital with a sharp pain, thinking it was as kidney stone. Unfortunately, it turned out to be cancer. Chris goes into surgery tomorrow. He and his lovely wife, Leslie, have started a blog to document the experience.

Other than the fact that these two good friends of mine (both of whom are about my age) had these problems on the same weekend, the weird thing about these was that I found out about both on Facebook. Sign of our times, I guess.

I admit I'm a little freaked out by my friends having these kinds of health problems. I know these are strictly age related, but it's playing on my impending feeling of doom around getting older. Of course, my feelings here are nothing compared to what Craig and Chris are going through. My prayers and best wishes go out to them and their families.

Welcome to 2008! I'm not really one to make New Year's resolutions, but I have been thinking about things I want to do this year. Mostly, I have a list of things I've wanted to do for a while that I never quite got around to. Over the past few weeks, I took some steps to get going on these. Here are a few things I want to do and the steps I've taken. (Blogging about them will also help create a little public accountability.)

Spend more time with the boys
I think the kids and I do quite a bit together already, but I think these are the prime years I have with them where they're old enough (7 and 10) to really participate and still don't mind hanging out with dad, so I want to double-down on our time together.

The kids have been bugging me to go camping beyond our backyard for some time, so I thought I'd start there. I haven't ever really camped (OK, we went once when I was two), so I've been dragging my feet a bit, but I really want to try it as well. I looked into camp sites last summer, but it was almost impossible to reserve one at that late date, and I didn't want to chance driving somewhere and not having a site. So, this week, I reserved a choice site at Deception Pass State Park (close enough to home that we can bail out if it sucks) in June. I'm pretty excited and will probably book a few more dates just in case we love it.

Incidentally, the Washington State Parks reservation system is pretty good. They show you the individual sites with descriptions and ratings of quality and privacy, have photo(s) of the site, and make it easy to see what dates are available. Good use of our tax dollars.

Work out more
As I've chronicled on this blog, I've been up and down with my working out. I definitely do best when I have scheduled events I'm working toward, so this morning (the first day of sign-ups), I signed up for the RSVP (Ride from Seattle to Vancouver and Party). It's a ride like the STP (Seattle-to-Portland) that I did two years ago. I tried to sign up last year, but I waited too long, and the ride sold out. I'll do the Chilly Hilly again in preparation too, but I'll probably skip STP. Good to have the goals on the calendar now. I may do another half marathon (probably Kirkland in May instead of Mercer Island in March).

Learn to play an instrument well
I took piano lessons on and off growing up (mostly off) but never really reached a level of reasonable competency. I've always wanted to play well, so I started piano lessons last month, taking the half hour before Andrew's lessons (can't skip my lesson without making him miss his). We also just had a little Yahama grand piano delivered yesterday. It's been fun playing again, and my instructor has me working on theory as well to better understand what's going on. This had added an interesting new dimension.

I thought about starting guitar instead (which I've also always wanted to play), but I'm much closer to competence on piano, so I figured that was wiser. (I also played clarinet for six years, but I don't have much interest in picking that up again. Not too many social opportunities for clarinet...)

Learn to speak another language to adult fluency
I grew up speaking Chinese at home, suffered through eleven years of Saturday morning Chinese school, took a year of Chinese in college. I also took four years of high school German (enough to get by as a tourist). However, I can't really do business or carry on adult conversations in either language. Since I'm closer to fluency in Chinese, I decided to build on that base. Although I'm basically illiterate in Chinese, I figured I'd start with my listening and vocabulary skills. I started listening to Chinese language podcasts. There are a few good ones, but my favorite so far is by a guy named Serge Melnyk (really). More on these later.

I have lots of other things I want to do, but I figured this is a good start. Hopefully, I can stick with these and build some good habits. What are your plans?

Our move went well despite the fact we had a crazy rainstorm the day of the move (nothing like dragging everything you own through a downpour.) Fortunately, the movers did a pretty good job keeping things neat and dry (hats off to Hansen Brothers Moving).

We're mostly unpacked now; we even have the cars in the garage. We also have the old house pretty well cleaned up and ready to sell; it should list tomorrow.

Unfortunately, we still don't have real internet access; we've had to continue to use our T-Mobile Dash mobile phones as modems like we did after the big windstorm last year. (For those who read my Comcast rant, I decided to follow the advice Adam left in my comments to use Speakeasy. I'll blog about them later, but so far so good. We should have service about a week from now.)

Just as we are getting settled in, it's time to go again. I'm chaperoning Andrew's (10) fifth grade class (actually, three classrooms) for four days and three nights at Islandwood, an outdoor education camp on Bainbridge Island (about a 45 minute ferry ride from Seattle). I think moving or work would be easier, but it should be interesting. Wish me luck.

Sorry I haven't been posting much recently. As I mentioned a little while ago, we bought a new house. The movers show up tomorrow morning, so things have been a bit hectic. Lots to write about though. Once I get data in the new house (still don't frickin' have service installed!) I'll pick up again. I'm taking all of December off of work, so I should have more time to write.

Gotta love a holiday mostly centered around food...

I know this is like saying ""I hate evil" or something similarly obvious. We're buying a new house (more on that later). Obviously, we need Internet service and cable is generally the fastest connection type around, so I didn't even think about who to use. I went to the Comcast website to get service and figured we might use them for phone service too (reminder: we don't have TV).

I went through their long wizard to order my service and was connected to their chat service to confirm a time for the installation truck roll; I thought this was a nice touch and better than waiting for a call back. I was "on hold" for about an hour (terrible), but it got worse from there.

The service person proceeded to ask me everything I had already typed in only to say that she couldn't transfer my service since the new address wasn't in her database. It's a new house. Don't people who are moving into new houses ever need Comcast service? Their site couldn't have flagged this an hour ago before I wasted this time?

Now, I have to call the local Comcast office. What's worse, she couldn't transfer any of the information I typed to the local office, so I'll have to do the whole thing on the phone again. Lovely.

I am going to spend some time looking for alternatives to Comcast broadband now. Why do companies make it so hard to give them money?