I've never claimed to be an expert in SQL, although I've used it for some time and taken several courses in it.  I'd more consider myself a recreational user.  I have probably 10 or so databases in various places around the country that hold all kinds of information.  I really mainly used them as glorified excel spreadsheets up until the last year or so.  I've started to get alot more tricky with them.  I've been doing more with Nested Selects, Joins, concatenation and much more, but I'm getting excited about MySQL 5.0 which will add the ability to call "stored procedures".  Nothing more then a query stored inside the DB, but opens up a world of possibilities.  I use several queries over and over again and have been calling them through a function page with my most common queries.  This works, but in the grand scheme of things slows down the loading of a page.  Albiet virtually un-noticeable, the speed increase will be there and will be more evident when used on a large scale.  I'm thinking places like where I work.  We are a hosting company of sorts, only for our builder customers (and my close personal friends )   *gotta remember to work on that smiley thing tonight*, but we have roughly 150 different websites running on the same webserver so any little savings that can be multiplied by the number of websites really adds up!  Unfortunately 5.0 is still in development, but as soon as it goes stable...I'll be upgrading!!!

The weather appears to have cleared up today..a day ahead of schedule.  Joni took a ride out to the house last night even though it was raining, to see what progress they might have made.  Not surprising they didn't do much.  The weather channel said we'd have heavy rain all day today, but it was beautiful at lunch time; I even managed to squeeze in a run.  So I'll probably head out to the house tomorrow to see what kind of progress they are making and snap a few more pictures.  I just hope the hurricanes can let up enough for them to get it built and let us get in the beginning of December!