There are a ton of things to be thankful for during this Thanksgiving weekend.

I'm thankful for the fantastic weekend of family time, rest and honey-do's completed.
I'm thankful for the great meal on Thursday and leftovers... diet and exercise needed this week coming.
I'm thankful my family is healthy and happy.
I'm thankful I'm employed with a career I enjoy.
I'm thankful for some of the extra work (web sites) I've kicked off recently. Another one started this weekend.
I'm thankful for my new dog who's bringing me joy everyday. I saw this quote recently, "The only phyciatrist I need is the lick on the face of a good dog."
I'm thankful for living in the greatest country in the world.
Looking forward to the Christmas season!

I've had a couple side projects going on in parallel.
First was my Aunt and Uncles business site, New Beginnings Spice. I started out working on this project as a Domino shopping cart site. As I investigated open source shopping carts, I settled on Zen Cart. There were just too many features in Zen Cart that I liked and was happy not to program so many things. Especially the credit card processing. Actually, the credit card processing was the deal breaker.
Second was my church's web site at St Paul's Lutheran Church. I went with a WordPress design. I've put together a team of people who will help in maintaining. I have Flickr and Google calendar integrated with WordPress plugins. Really excited to have this up and running for the church.
Now, let the maintenance commence.

Nice. I see another Neil Young archive release for Dec 2nd, Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968. Looks like a cd and dvd combo. Knowing Neil's attention to detail and quality, this should be good. Looks like a heavy influence from the Buffalo Springfield material. Dear Santa....

I love it when I get in my car and see the % download on my Sirius receiver. This time it was some of the long awaited XM merger stuff. 2 years since the announcement of the merger. Deep Tracks, BB Kings Bluesville and The Loft caught my initial attention. Looks like they took some of the most popular XM stations and replaced some of the similar Sirius stations. I listened to Deep Tracks a few times in the car today as I did my usual channel surfing. Loving it!

It's been 20 years gone bye but I now have a dog. My wife has animal allergies. We saved some cats 3 years ago and I've been after her for a dog ever since. I finally must have broke her down. She came home one Saturday and surprised me. She was about 12 weeks old and lonely at the pet store. My wife felt sorry for her and brought her home. Best use of the stimulus check! First picture is when we got her over the summer. Her first day I thought something was wrong with her. She was so shy. That didn't last long. Next day, she was really getting the lay of the land. Now, well, she everything they say about Labs. She's very active and very loving. She's never in a bad mood and always happy to see me. She follows me all over the place. I can play with her and she just loves the attention. We're hooked. Of course, we have to deal with her bad habits. She grabbed our turkey off the stove last night when I wasn't looking. She chewed up my eye glasses hours before my trip to Disney World last month. All is forgiven. We love her!
2nd picture is from a couple weeks ago. She's growing.

I have two sites hosted on Bluehost.com. One is my aunt and uncle's business, NewBeginningsSpice.com and I'm working on my church's website. I used ZenCart for one and WordPress for the other. I'm just waiting for my domain transfer to go through for the church site and it will be up and running. I've only been using BlueHost for a short time but what I've been pleased with is the live chat help. So far it's been very responsive and point on with the help I've requested. Hope to have more to say about the sites I've been working with lately in my spare time.
Rock on!