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I was cleaning up my e-mail today and shuffled the last messages of 2009 into my annual “Sent” folder. Out of curiosity I checked how many e-mails I wrote last year.

14,596.

That’s an average of 40 per day. Man, what would I do without e-mail?

Today marks Day Five of Laralee’s trip to Idaho with the kids to visit her family. For the past few days I’ve always had stuff to do (work, going out with friends, New Year’s parties) but today has been pretty slow. I worked on taxes for a bit– whee!– but soon hit a wall because I don’t have all of the necessary paperwork. I guess I’ll have to wait for that particular pain.

Anyway, this evening I’ve been planning the curriculum for the second-grade science class La and I are going to teach this semester. Our first class is this Friday so we need a list of lessons, materials, and a general feel for how we’re going to fill an hour every Friday with interesting, fun, and educational science experiments. Should be fun.

After a while of that I started poking around Wikipedia, because I wanted some ideas about topics we could discuss. I realized that since every article is heavily linked to related information, one can hop topic to topic pretty quickly, diving into either deep details about a particular thing, or hopping over into a completely different field. It’s actually quite fun, and this evening I’ve read about all sorts of esoteric things:

• the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt
• the Permian Extinction
• the Antarctic Convergence Zone
• the Pangaea supercontinent, and the ten or so that preceded it
• what determines the timberline on a mountain
• where the phrase “beating a dead horse” originated
• why having a certain muscle attachment on the femur allowed early dinosaurs to dominate the biosphere
• the “island of stability” in high atomic numbers

Of course not all of this will be useful for a group of a dozen second-graders, but it’s sure fun to learn something new. A day without learning something is truly a day wasted.

This graphic really doesn’t need any more commentary from me.

Ho ho ho! Chalk up another successful Christmas for the Schroeder Clan.

It all began on Christmas Eve with a night of heavy drinking:

(Root beer, that is.)

After the kids went to bed, the stockings were stuffed and a few last presents placed under the tree. This year seemed to have a bigger pile than I remember in the past, which of course was quite all right with the kids.

(This is a highly enhanced photo I took in the dark– it didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped.)

On Christmas Day, Laralee and I managed to stay in bed until almost 8:00 before the kids started screaming for us to get our lazy butts downstairs. They’d already sorted everything into piles and picked spots to open gifts, of course.

Kyra loved the fuzzy knee-high socks she found in her stocking:

(I picked those out. Do I know my girl, or what?)

Lego Bionicles are always a hit with the boys.

(Alex isn’t unhappy about the gift– he’s doing his impression of the big bad Bionicle guy on the box.)

It turns out 2009 was the Year of the Blankets. Laralee has an old ratty throw blanket that must be fifteen years old and is frayed and full of holes, so I decided it was time to get her a replacement. Normally she and I don’t get each other gifts (for any occasion) but this time I told her it was something she really needed.

(In a similar show of practicality, her gift to me was a pair of pot holders.)

This was the first of three blankets: another nice fleece throw from Kathy, and an outdoor down blanket from Mom. Luckily we have three places in the house where blankets are needed, so now we’re all set!

I picked up a couple of fun Christmas ties:

(I’d complained a month ago that I only have a single Christmas tie, so it’s nice to have a variety now.)

Zack had asked for a Gamecube and a Nintendo DS (hand-held game console), but he was plenty thrilled with a Gamecube controller that he can use on our Wii:

(The Gamecube itself was sent to Kari so my nephews could play it, and apparently they spent about ten hours immersed in video games.)

And who can forget La’s Totally Awesome Power Oxygen Base Cleaner? I have no idea what it does, but the name alone is completely cool.

After everything had been opened and we’d eaten our traditional brunch of eggs, juice, and coffee cake, Kyra ran upstairs to use the new hair crimper that Aunt Kathy sent:

(I’m sure we’ll see new hairstyles every day for a while. Laralee got crimped as well.)

Not surprisingly, the kids flocked to the Wii to play a bunch of new games:

(Kyra swings her lightsaber in Lego Star Wars and hacks yet another Battle Droid into little Lego pieces.)

And me? I just took it easy all day. Some games of Bomberman and Super Mario Bros, reading the latest book on my shelf, and just generally doing everything possible to avoid working. Nice.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Happy birthday to the transistor!

It was sixty-two years ago today that the first transistor was demonstrated to an audience at Bell Labs. After that demonstration, work on improving the transistor took off in earnest, and it formed the foundation of all computing devices today. Sometimes called the greatest invention of the 20th Century, it’s hard to imagine what our world would be like without it.

As the number of Christmas cards I send goes up each year, it becomes more and more of a chore to get them printed and stuffed. This year I did some poking around the web and found a place that will print holiday cards for a reasonable price, and (more to the point) allow you to upload your own custom images for the front and back.

Satisfied this would do what I needed, I set out to create our cards. For the past few years we’ve decided that most people probably don’t want to read a full page or two of the Schroeder Clan’s exploits, so we’ve just sent pictures. So I put together a nice collage for the back, and we all sat down one morning before school to take a family portrait for the front.

It turned out pretty nice.

Of course during our “photo shoot” the last picture was a goofy pose, and just for kicks I replaced the nice picture with the goofy one. It was six flavors of awesome.

I was getting ready to send the goods to the print company when I figured I should show Laralee to get her wifely stamp of approval. She insisted that we use the goofy one instead of the nice one. “Everyone uses nice pictures,” went her logic. And since we’re, well, us… we shouldn’t be like everyone else.

Thus we sent the goofy picture, and it immediately received widespread acclaim. I can’t even count the number of people who have written or told us that they love the cards and it was the most fun Christmas card they’d seen in a while.

I suppose this will need to become a tradition. You know how most families have nice holiday traditions like “We sit around the fire and tell everyone how much we love them”? Well, I guess ours will be “We come up with the zaniest picture we can for our Christmas card”.

But hey, that’s us.

Yesterday the weather was a bit nippy at cloudy and 40 degrees, but we played ultimate anyway. The ground was rock-hard– literally frozen– and still had patches of snow which made for interesting hazards. Making sharp cuts was almost impossible; most of us ended up doing careful buttonhooks to get open for a pass.

Late in the game I was guarding my friend Cory when he wound up for a deep backhand pass. He swung his arm with all his might… and clobbered me in the face. The back of his hand got my nose and right eye pretty much like he was boxing me and trying to turn out the lights.

The blood started gushing (all over my white shirt, no less) and I had to step off. It had stopped by the time I got back to the office, but I was quite a sight. I told Brian and Rob there had been a brawl on the field and punches were thrown, and for a second they believed it because I sure looked like I’d been in a fight.

Luckily everything cleaned up okay and despite blowing a few blood clots out of my nose for the rest of the day, no permanent damage was done.

Sadly it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to play tomorrow– we’ve got about eight inches of snow on the ground from last night and today, and tomorrow’s high is going to be in the teens. But at least it’ll be a white Christmas!

With today’s mail delivery we’ve officially gone floor-to-ceiling on our Christmas card display.

Laralee always wonders why I insist on sending 200+ cards every year, and I tell her that it’s because if I don’t, then no one will send us cards. And that would mean the card wall is really bare and boring. We can’t have that.

I was poking around a client web site and found their blog entry entitled “People You Can’t Stand on Facebook”. I guess it’s adapted from a recent GQ article, but it was one of those classic funny-because-it’s-true lists.

Here’s a funny spam message.

Wow, Best of Longmont 2009! In the Internet Host Services category! Who knew that my little company was even in the running for such a prestigious award?

Hmm, maybe I should put this little image on my corporate web site to impress visitors…