Happy leap year extra day! In honor of this special day, I’d like to share a recent culinary experience. One day in January, I was visiting with my parents and as I was leaving my Mom gave me a bag with some clothes. I had apparently left them at my brother Steve’s and they had dropped them off for me. When I got home I set the bag on the table and left it there for a while. I rarely eat at the table so stuff does pile up there sometimes. I had noticed a small box in the bag, which looked like some sort of vitamin tablets. I figured my Mom had bought them and put them in with the clothes, which is the type of thoughtful thing she often does. Anyway, a few nights later I felt a scratch in my throat and started to worry that I was coming down with a cold. Then I remembered the vitamin tablets, which I figured were some sort of cold preventing remedy. So I opened the box and ate a few of the colored drops. At first, I thought they tasted a bit funny, but they were sweet and vitamins often taste weird. As I continued to chew, I started to wonder a bit more. Then I looked up close at the box and noticed that they weren’t cold tablets at all! They were rabbit treats! Needless to say, I felt quite foolish eating animal snacks to prevent a cold (but they did work!) It turns out that Steve and Kelly had put them in the bag since their bunny recently passed on (RIP Spencer) and they were intended for Larry, whose fiancee has a bunny. Little did they know that I had intercepted them for my own medicinal use!

Quite a few of the loyal readers of this blog are F1 fans, and since the season starts in two weeks I thought I’d provide a recap of all the news that’s taken place over the winter to help you get ready for the new season. To start, there’s been one regulation change that should help jazz up the show this year - traction control is finally gone! All the cars are using a standard ECU (engine control unit) to allow the FIA to prevent cheating. So we should see a bit more passing and the starts (already one of the most exciting moments in sports) will definitely benefit from the lack of launch control systems. On the driver front, the big news is that 2x World Champion Fernando Alonso has moved back to Renault, with Heikki Kovalainen joining Lewis Hamilton at McLaren. Other than that, the driver lineups haven’t changed much. New faces for this year include Nelson Piquet Jr. (Renault), Kazuki Nakajima (Williams) and Sebastien Bourdais (Torro Rosso). There are a couple of new races this year too; the European GP will be held at Valencia, Spain and there is a new stree race in Singapore that will be held at night! Judging by winter testing, it looks like a battle between McLaren and Ferrari for top honors once again - no other team looks set to challenge them for speed. The midfield will be exciting for sure though, as there seems to be very little between then next 10-12 cars. As for my boys at Honda, it’s looking like another trying season, even with Ross Brawn aboard as the new team principal. Still, I’m as excited as always about the return of my favorite sport, and I hope you all will join me in following the new season when the first race starts in Australia on March 16 at 12:30 a.m. I’ll be watching if you want to call and say “G’day mate!”

It’s snowing! As I promised a while ago, here’s a video of Jazzy making snow angels. I hope you enjoy it as I go for a ride to (finally) try out my snow tires.

A milestone day for my Mazda3 - the odometer “rolled over” from 99,000 to 100,000 miles today. Of course, as you can see, it’s a digital display (anyone remember the song with that title?) so there wasn’t that moment where the old-style gauge would slowly start to turn, and then invariably the first digit would fail to line up neatly with the zeros. I haven’t even had my 3 for four years yet, so I’ve managed to pile on the mileage in a short amount of time. Fortunately, the car is still zoom-zooming away and feels almost new. Here’s to the next 100 grand (mmmm... tasty candy bar).

Okay, how great was that Super Bowl? Wow! First of all, it was a great football game; competitive from start to finish with some amazing plays. Then, the commercials were much better than last year’s lame crop (my favorite was the giant pigeon FedEx commercial). And best of all, we got the upset that nobody thought was possible. The Giants played yet another great game, just as they did against the Cowboys and Packers, and Eli Manning has gone from pariah to demi-god in New York City (and it was great watching Peyton root for his little brother so intensely). As you can see, we were decked out in blue to support the G-men. I borrowed a Jason Sehorn jersey from Adam that I’m never giving back, and even the dogs wore red and blue ribbons (Jazzy someone didn't end up in the photo for once). Super Bowl Sunday truly is a great American holiday. Now we just have to work on getting the Monday after off from work... perhaps one of the Presidential candidates should run on that platform.

One of the bad things about living so close to the shore is that I get far less snow than I did when I lived farther inland. I like snow (and have already blogged about wanting to try out my snow tires) and will even go out and make a snowman if conditions are right. This photo is demonstrates that. It was taken quite a few years ago (pre-digital), and shows Steve and I with a colossal (if not terribly refined) creation we built in our parents’ back yard. I remember that it wasn’t easy to lift the giant snowballs that make up the shoulder area, and the one for the head wasn't a picnic either. I’m not the only one that likes to make art in the snow, either - Jazzy loves to roll over and make snow angels. If we get a good snowstorm soon I'll be sure to video her making one and post it here.