January 1, 2004 - Today starts off a new year for me. I am still having a difficult time with the passage of time. Time seems to want to move along quicker than I want it to. I guess I'll had to catch up by summarizing 2004 in this message, right after I describe my day. I started the new year by driving from Orlando back to Tampa. We got into town and drove with my mom down to John's Pass to walk around the shops next to the Gulf of Mexico and Intercoaster Waterway. After we had walked around for a bit, we went back to my mom's house for dinner. My dad had been cooking steak while we were away, and dinner was good. I played a few games of shuffleboard with Barb, and set a personal high for myself, with a score of 115. Barb scored below zero in that game. In the evening we went to Ybor City in Tampa and walked around what is a mix between the Cincinnati equivalent of Newport on the Levee and the Main Street bar district. We stopped in two bars to get a drink, played some pool against 3 drunk women, and split a slice of pizza before returning back to my parents house for the evening.

OK, 2004 was a great year for me in many ways. the biggest excitement was my traveling. Just as I am starting 2005 off with a trip, I started 2004 off the same way, driving with my sister from Cincinnati to New Orleans to Tampa to Miami to Washington DC back to Cincinnati. I flew to San Antonio, San Diego, and San Francisco. I drove to Chicago 3 times. I flew to Rhode Island and New Hampshire, and drove from New Hampshire to Boston to visit my friends Rob and Laurie. I drove with my friend Mike Morgan from Cincinnati to Seattle and back. Including Ohio, I was in 28 states this year. I also learned a few lessons about driving. I lost some family members. I made a lot of new friends, and I moved into an apartment where I live by myself. I started taking exercise more seriously by running, biking, and playing soccer to balance out my high calorie diet. I don't think there will ever be a year exactly the same as 2004, but there is still a lot that I am looking forward to in 2005. I am just starting a new relationship with a girl named Christie. I am poised to finish my plan of seeing all 50 United States by the end of the year. At work, I am going to have a lot of fun leading some pretty big projects that will save the company some big dollars and have good visibility to the vice president level, which will hopefully push my career ahead to the next level. I'm starting to have fun playing the tenor sax with a blues band fairly regularly, and I can tell that my musical skills are getting better. 2005...here I come.