The Neel Family

Dave is taking a new position with Met Life Financial.

I am now officially traveling to Austin and will be there on the 17th and 18th.

Preethi and I sometimes have trouble meeting each other as we live an hour and a half apart (Blacksburg and Lynchburg). Tonight we're splitting the difference and meeting for dinner and a movie in Roanoke.

I umm... won't be filling in the details on what happens after the movie...

I'm tinkering with the template (trying to get the site to look decent). Two things I'm trying to do is post links to people's webpages on the sidebar (notice I've got a big 3 links up!) as well as find a nice picture for the title bar.

So If anyone has a) a digital copy of a picture of the old homeplace or a picture of everyone from a family reunion or b) knows of Neel webpages, email the pic/links to me (jody.neel@gmail.com). In the meantime, I may try to make do with a picture from the wedding. I'm also going to try and clean up comments so they display properly.

I may be traveling to Austin next week for the SDR Forum meeting (not a conference). The primary reason is that there will be a bunch of different groups there that I'm working with and with so many people in the same place, it makes the meeting rather efficient. I'll post more info on this later...

As an interesting aside, when I was in Austin this past spring, the official conference "social" dinner was at the Iron Cactus. It appears that will be the case for this meeting as well. From first hand knowledge, I know that there are other restaurants there. Really.

A few photos that I took on Christmas Eve at the house are posted on Ofoto.

Preethi and I went to Vegas for our delayed honeymoon from Christmas to New Years (I'm uinsg to term postneymoon as contrasted to a preneymoon). It was good fun. A lot of food, a lot of walking (the strip itself is quite long and quite a walk from casino to casino), and a little bit of gambling (mostly nickel blackjack). Some friends from San Diego also drove up and visited for a little bit.

We've posted some pictures from the trip on ofoto.

As many of you know, Preethi is from Tamilnadu, a state of India next to Sri Lanka. However, her family lives well inland from the coast, so everyone was ok and no property was damaged either.

Preethi and I went to DC this weekend to get her fingerprinted. All went well, though we had to wait an hour for our "appointment."

We visited with Preethi's aunt who couldn't make it to the wedding and we got a little "wedding cake." We brought along the wrong camera, so ya'll have to wait a bit for pictures.

Sunday, we got up and visited a Korean grocery mart that some friends had told us about. Twas quite cool (no pictures taken at all alas) . They actually made fresh kimchi and calimari and had Korean electronics/toys in addition to a humongous Korean vegetable mart (complete with a guy chopping veggies and wrapping) with stuff like lemon grass, battata (I have no idea what that is, looked like a tuber), water chestnuts, and a bunch of other veggies that I've never heard of.

Then we went to Potomac Mills to shop some, would tell you guys what we bought, but that would ruin the surprise... The Marines had set up Toys for Tots displays right in front of the Disney Store and KayBees - smart (and they got $20 out of me which is about what I would've spent on a toy had I had more time). Potomac Mills also has a nice Lego store - alas no giant Lego statues for sell, yet.

Didn't get a chance to surprise the O'Daniells as it was late when we left the mall (got back to Lynchburg a little before 9:00)

CDs

Toby Keith – Shockin Y’all

Brooks and Dunn – Greatest Hits Collection 2

Tim McGraw - Live Like You Were Dying

Books

Cartoon History of the Universe – vol 1, vol 2, vol 3 – Larry Gonick

Power of Productivity – William Lewis

The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati

The Coming Generational Storm by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Scott Burns

The Wisdom of Crowds: by James Surowiecki (Author)

Stuff

Bush Doll with Turkey

Games (Gamecube)

Memory Card 1019

Mario Power Tennis

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

Mario Party 6

Teenage mutant ninja turtles

Pikmin2

silliness