Happy Thanksgiving!

Carnival Victory

Our family vacation fund generally consists of whatever extra money we come across that we did not include in our monthly budget. Loose change, rebate checks, fat wallet cash, small group babysitting reimbursement, etc. Like Dave Ramsey says, the best vacation is one where the bill does not follow you home.

Last week during lunch I headed to the credit union with my latest contribution - a plastic box full of change. I poured it into the machine and the total came to $182. That gave us enough in our vacation account to book 3 tickets on the Carnival Victory in March. Leaving out of one of my favorite cities - San Juan - we will spend the next week stopping in St. Thomas, Dominica, Barbados, St. Lucia, Antigua and St. Kitts before heading back to San Juan.

This will be the 4th cruise that Staci, Charlotte and I have gone on. We love cruises as there is always something for everyone to do. I also get a lot of good transfer opportunities as you are always meeting other people. One of my favorite cruise memories was on our last cruise.

One morning Charlotte and I went down to eat breakfast by ourselves wearing our Seattle Mariner Ichiro jerseys. We were seated with 2 older snowbird retired couples. Commenting on our jerseys led to a discussion about baseball. Both couples were big baseball fans and they started telling me all of these wonderful stories about baseball in New York in the 50's. I could have listened to their baseball stories all day, but after my omelet was finished, we had to excuse ourselves and take a very patient Charlotte to the Carvinal kid's club.

Pistol Pete Maravich

I just finished reading Pistol - The Life Of Pete Maravich, about the great basketball player whose creative and flamboyant style was truly 15 years ahead of his time. I did not become a basketball fan until the year after the Atlanta Hawks traded Pete to the New Orleans Jazz. I vaguely recall watching him play with the Jazz and Celtics during the rest of his career. The video below is definitely worth watching:

The Belt Rack

Shameless plug for the family business - for all of your leather shopping needs, please visit:

www.thebeltrack.com

Staci just spent a lot of time building the website. She used a hat model who works for goldfish crackers and yogurt.