Silly organizational project of the day: assembled a list of all the web sites where I have accounts, bookmarked them all on delicious.com, and tagged them all with my_account.
It turns out that I have fifty-four accounts, scattered here & there about the internet. Perhaps I got a little carried away.
Sunny today, but also cold: a mere 21° as of 1:00pm.
We're all on vacation this week: no preschool for Sam, no school for Jake, no work for me. (Poor Jennifer doesn't get vacation. If anything, she works harder when the rest of us are home.)
For most of December, my eating & exercise habits have been quite irresponsible, but now I'm trying to get back on the straight and narrow: more visits to the fitness center (for thirty minutes on the treadmill, plus occasional sets on the weight machines); fewer cookies; less fudge, ice cream, etc.
I've been having fun with my new toy: an Amazon Kindle. So far, I've bought only one book - Fleet of Worlds, by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. The Kindle is a good size, is easily held, and - unlike many Kindle users - I haven't had any problems with accidental presses of the next-page button.
I wish the Kindle told me how much storage I'm using. It says there's 181MB of internal storage available, plus 483MB on the SD card I installed last night; but how many books will that hold? (More than I'm likely to buy any time soon, I suppose.)
The other big hit of the year: a Wii. Jake is a big fan of the Wii Sports boxing game, while I've been wasting quite a bit of time on the bowling game. We also have Guitar Hero, which is buckets of fun. I'm pretty good at it, too, at least on the Easy setting.
The downside to the Wii is that games are expensive: $50 each seems to be the going rate. Various places rent games, but at $10 that's not much cheaper than buying them. The library has Wii games, but they're very much in demand and can't be reserved: so there's no telling which - if any - might be available at any given time.
(Another downside: we now have more video gadgets than our television - er, Jennifer's television - has connections. To watch movies, we have to unplug the Wii and plug in the DVD player. We may have to buy a home-theater receiver thingy, just to have someplace to plug in all the toys. Egad.)
Christmas this year was relatively quiet & unstressful. We managed to spread our various trips and visits out a bit, so they weren't all packed into a day or two. (I can remember years when we had dinner in Arlington Heights on Christmas Eve, and opened presents in Normal on Christmas morning: too much driving, not enough sleeping.)
And now it's New Year's Eve, with 2009 rolling toward us all like that boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do I have any words of wisdom to sum up 2008, or any resolutions for 2009? Alas, no.
We're off to a party this evening. (Will we stay until midnight? Don't count on it..) Tomorrow we'll take down the Christmas tree, and put away the decorations. After a few more days of vacation, it's back to preschool / school / work, and a few weeks of winter doldrums until Valentine's Day.
Things perk up after that: Valentine's Day, Jennifer's birthday, Jake's birthday, Easter, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Jake's last day of second grade, Father's Day, Independence Day, Jake's first day of third grade(!), the nine-and-ninety August birthdays, Labor Day, Grandpa Bob's birthday, the ISU Homecoming parade, Grandma Rice's birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve. (And many others I've forgotten, I'm sure.)
2009 is going to be a busy year....
I see just as many liquor bottles discarded along local streets & walking trails now as I did last July; but I'm seeing considerably fewer condom wrappers.
I'm not sure how to interpret this.
Today's high: 62°, with frequent rain & occasional cloudbursts, thunderstorms, etc.
The temperature at 9:00pm was still 53°, but by 10:00pm it had fallen to 39°. (Over in Bloomington, it's 30°.)
Winter took the day off, but it surely has returned....
Twenty-four hours ago, the temperature was 27°.
The temperature is now 51°, and expected to climb into the sixties tomorrow.
By Sunday morning, the temperature will be back in the thirties.
The twelve days of Christmas:
Alas, days #9 through #12 remain hidden from me, as I have reached only day #8....
...and I've been reading that silly Clement Moore poem to Sam every night at bedtime for the last month, it seems. Two things about it are really starting to annoy me:
First, it's got some unreadable clinkers in it, e.g.,
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
Second, its description of St. Nicholas -
...a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver....
- doesn't match the traditional Santa: a large fellow in a red suit & black boots (which image started as a Coca-Cola advertising campaign, escaped from its creators and lodged in the collective unconscious).
Two more days, and it'll all be over - until next year.
My Flickr account is two years old (or is it three?); so far, I've uploaded a little over nine hundred (906, to be precise) images and/or videos.
Keeping this synchronized with iPhoto is proving rather tedious: every week or so, I have to find all the Flickr pictures that came from my phone, and download them to iPhoto.
I felt very clever for coming up with the idea of tagging the phone pictures with 'to_download'; but that scheme only works if I remember to remove the tag once I've downloaded the pictures. Alas, I'm not very good at doing that.
There ought to be a way for iPhoto to subscribe to my Flickr photostream, and automatically fetch any new pictures that show up there (i.e., that weren't uploaded to Flickr from iPhoto itself).
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of my departure from the University of Illinois.
I think my official graduation date is either January or May of 1984, but I was long gone by then.
It's strange to think that so much time has passed. I've gone from callow student to middle-aged townie - the sort of person my earlier self would surely have mocked, if I'd noticed him at all.
I don't spend much time on campus any more. Perhaps, eleven years from now, Jake will be a student at the Big U, and he'll be embarrassed by his doddering old Papa, dragging him around an unrecognizable campus, boring him with stories of how things were so very different way back in the 1980s.
A just-made batch of fudge is cooling on the stove. It smells delicious.
We had to wait until the kids were in bed - though young Mr. Sam is still very awake, judging from the sounds on the monitor - because a potful of 234° sugar syrup is just too dangerous when there are small children underfoot.
Our Christmas baking over the last few weeks has managed to keep ahead of our Christmas eating, so we have a stockpile of goodies. (Even gingerbread cookies, this year's experiment.) Alas, the fruitcake is already gone, so if any of the loyal readership (either of you) was hoping for some - sorry, maybe next year.
