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Laralee forwarded me this awesome spam message.

Who knew criminal background checks could be fun? “Hey, kids, you look kind of bored tonight. Let’s go run a background check on someone! Yay!”

Today we had an awesome game of snowltimate. There was about 5″ of fresh powder on the field, which made it a lot of fun to skid around and make a few layouts. The temperature hovered just around freezing, so we were bundled up pretty well, but by the end of the game I think all of us were plenty warm.

Afterward I went back to the office and devoured an entire large pizza. I think I burned almost enough calories to offset it.

Alex received his ACT scores today. He took the test a few weeks ago– another reminder that I’m getting old: my son is taking the ACT and preparing for college!

He scored a 32.

That’s awesome. I was really impressed (and told him as much). I figure that’ll land a few scholarships, at least. He may take it again in the spring to see if he can improve; his science scores were uncharacteristically low because he ran out of time to complete all of them. Heck, maybe he could even beat his old man’s score…

It took almost seven straight hours today, but I managed to compile all of my end-of-year financials for Zing so I can start working on the taxes. I balanced it to the penny. Considering all the complexities of payroll, expenses, invoices, receipts, and whatnot… I’m pretty proud of it.

It was pretty foggy on the drive into work today.

With the fog came a thick layer of frost on everything, including the grass:

Cool stuff. Now the sun is out, so the fine layer of ice is melting away…

Today I decided to listen to Billy Joel music all day.

It’s been a while, but it’s like visiting an old friend. I love music by the Piano Man.

This evening we decided to go out as a family and enjoy a movie and some pizza. Based on input from several people, we chose to see Frozen.

It turned out to be pretty good… a nice light-hearted movie with some funny moments and fun songs. Afterward we had dinner at Marco’s Pizza, conveniently located right next door to the theater. Mmm.

Hah! That’s cool.

Ahh, another Christmas has come and gone. We had a good time opening some presents in the morning, enjoying our traditional cinnamon bread for brunch, and then playing a few board games in the afternoon.

Of course the gifts were fun:

I bought an untested board game, Small World, because it had good reviews online and was recommended by my friend Mark.

It turned out to be a good game, although we realized about halfway through that we were playing it wrong. Next time we’ll do better.

I made some lasagna for dinner and we spent the evening watching It’s a Wonderful Life, which is of course a classic.

All in all, it was a nice relaxing low-key day together as a family. You can’t ask for much more than that.

Something happened tonight that some might see as coincidence, but that I saw as providence. Pretty cool. Merry Christmas.