Category: Uncategorized

Since both Laralee and I are terrible at coming up with gift ideas, it was great when she thought of something pretty cool for her mom.  As a family, we all sat around reading classic Christmas stories while Alex recorded them on his Mac.  He then did a little audio cleanup, converted them to MP3 files, and we’ll burn them to a CD for mom.  She can then listen to her grandchildren telling stories– many of which are from a collection of Christmas tales that she gave us many years ago.

I, of course, picked the most classic Christmas story of all:

Today we worked on mailing our annual Christmas cards… all 221 of them!

Last year at the annual white elephant Christmas party we attend every year, someone brought an amazing gift: a Blankeez family-size snuggie. It was absolutely hilarious.

As it turned out, it was just an empty box because the whole thing is a gag.  This year, as I consider what to bring to the party, I’m wondering if a similar gag gift would be appropriate.  I found the Extreme Chores video game pack, as well as Connect-a-Cord:

But I feel like the best one is going to be the iArm:

Apple fans will especially appreciate it.  Hah!

I just had one of those customer service experiences with ThinkGeek that put a smile on my face and made me want to share how awesome they are. I’d purchased a t-shirt for a Christmas gift, and the one they sent to me isn’t what I ordered. I jumped on their online chat tool and had the following conversation:

Thanks, Janna and ThinkGeek. That totally rocks.

I’m listening to an 80’s rock Shoutcast stream today while I work, and Loverboy’s “Hot Girls in Love” just came on.  For some reason, as kids we made fun of it by calling it “Hot Grits in Love”.  On a whim I checked the internet to see if “hot grits” has some kind of deep meaning.  According to the Urban Dictionary:

Since Natalie Portman probably wasn’t even born back in the days my friends and I used that term, I guess we were way ahead of the hipster curve.

Bonus points if you know what a Beowulf cluster is. Yes, I built one many years ago.

At 11:00 today it was sunny and 55 degrees outside.  Gorgeous, especially for December.

I had lunch with a friend, then a meeting with a client.  At 1:00 it was overcast, windy, and the temperature had dropped 20 degrees.  Tonight they’re expecting wind chills well below zero, six inches of snow, and for the next few days the high is in the teens or less.

Wow, Colorado weather.

I found this little book in a pile of old stuff from my desk.

I’m pretty sure it’s from Mom, many Christmases ago. And, funny thing, it’s still apropos.

I found this nice letter from Kyra, circa age 4 or so.

For the past few days, as I sit at my desk in the basement, little baby spiders have been parachuting down from the ceiling right in front of me. I’ll be watching the monitor and suddenly notice a little black dot slowly descending in front of it, or I’ll feel a little tickle on my arm and notice a spider crawling on it. They’re really tiny– probably a couple of millimeters across at most– so it’s not like Arachnophobia where giant deadly spiders are attacking me. But it’s still a little disconcerting.

The only thing I can figure is there’s a nest or something in the air vent directly above my desk, and they’re jumping out of there in hopes of finding a new home. Unfortunately for them, the ones that land on me are meeting an untimely demise. After all, I can’t let them live because they’ll scurry into a corner of the basement and grow to become giant deadly spiders.

Today I’m cleaning out the crawlspace, and I found a box full of my pay stubs from the distant past.  I have no idea why I even kept all of that stuff, but it was interesting to look through the stacks and think about those golden days.

After graduating from UMR in the spring of 1995, I started my first “real” job at Hughes Information Technology Corporation. At the time, my salary was $759/week– almost $40k/year. Wow. It was more money than I knew what to do with.  I still remember opening the offer letter in college and being floored by the prospect of that kind of money.  When you’re used to a weekly budget of $20 to buy pizza, it’s a big change.

Giddy with the prospect of being a bachelor with so much money, I immediately bought a new bigscreen TV. Well, it was 32″ but back in 1995 that was huge.  Of course with a new TV I needed a new VCR.  That led to a new entertainment center.  Oh, and since my trusty 1982 Nissan 300SX had died the day after I moved to Colorado, I bought a new car.  The expenses kept mounting because, hey, I had money!

Four years later, I left Hughes (then Raytheon) for a consulting job in Boulder.  My salary had ballooned in those four years, and after three promotions I was doing pretty well.  The funny thing is how no matter how much you make (or don’t make), your expenses tend to fit your income.  By then I was married with two kids, and didn’t seem to be putting any more money into savings or whatnot.  In fact, it seemed like money was always tight.  We had a mortgage, car loans, student loans, credit card bills, baby stuff to buy, and on and on.

Now it’s fourteen years later, and every month we look at our credit card statement and ask ourselves, “We spent how much?”  To be clear, we have a good lifestyle and don’t have to worry about whether we’ll be able to afford food next month, but we’re hardly extravagant.  We don’t go on international trips, we don’t drive fancy cars, and we live in a nice but modest house.  I still find it baffling that our expenses have risen right alongside our income.  How does that happen?