This is the first weekend of the last three that I've been at home with Mrs. theskinnyonbenny. It's good to be back in a routine, but cold and rainy Louisiana winters are for the birds. We had two days without rain this week, and I made it outside to enjoy the sunshine somewhere around zero minutes. The weekend forecast is entirely for rain.

I had a conference call scheduled today at 11:00. Unfortunately, I hadn't had a chance to take my morning bathroom break yet, and the call promised to be a difficult one. I dialed in to the number, and found that it was just hold music. The host hadn't started the call yet.

Several years ago, I was a true corridor crawler, spending all day every day going meeting to meeting to meeting. We reorganized the company a few years ago, and the resulting structure and physical layout eliminated 90% of the internal meetings that wasted the days away.

If there's anything more boring than a blog where people recommend random music that they like (especially without a feature that allows you to play the song right then and there), then it's a diet blog. I mention this only because I'm veering very close to boring diet blog territory with this post. But stick with me a moment.

I started several posts this week, but never had the time to go back and look over what I read, fix the really dumb mistakes, and get them posted. There were a lot of sports-related topics on my mind this week, so I've combined a few different false-starts into a single weekly sports post for today.

Top ten quotes from Charlie Weis's halftime speech during yesterday's Sugar Bowl.

In a few days, the memory of my burning intestines will fade, and New Year's Day 2007 will be a happy memory of being curled in a chair, half asleep, half awake, watching football, and not passing a single thought through my head the entire day.

It's been a few weeks now, but one night we were sitting outside at the Regal Beagle, enjoying a cool fall night, and having a few drinks. Because I love to play with fire, it takes only a slightly cold or damp period to get me to light one up, so we were enjoying the warmth between face fulls of smoke.

On the Friday night after the bonfire festival, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny and I drove down to New Orleans for a night on the town. We had a dinner reservation at Emeril's, where I had eaten a good -- but not mind-shatteringly delicious -- meal a couple of years ago. The food was doubly as good this time. Maybe not mind-shatteringly delicious, but it was really, really damned good. So I guess Emeril has gotten back to what put him on the map: making food.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been out and about a ton lately. I spent the week of December 4 away from the office, on a rather dull work trip. It was four straight days of meetings, and through almost all of it, I was talking or people were paying attention to me. (That might seem natural to you if you don't do a lot of meetings in corporate America. In reality, most meetings require you to only pay about 35-40 percent of your attention.)

This is just a note to test whether the "Submit Post" button on my site still works.

A description of my post.