Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn't grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he's promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he's in retirement - as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas.

Just so. Don't let the door hit you in the [censored] on your way out, Mr. Bush.

It turns out that I have fifty-four accounts, scattered here & there about the internet. Perhaps I got a little carried away.

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'm not sure how to interpret this.

Dear Quicken Customer,

Thank you for your interest in the new Quicken Financial Life for Mac product we're developing. We wanted to provide an update on where we're at with this new offering.

We started a small, private beta earlier this year to get customer feedback. Interest in this beta has been extremely high; we've had five times the number of sign-ups we had anticipated. We're very happy to see this high level of passion among our loyal Mac users.

Due to overwhelming interest in the beta, at this time we cannot accommodate your request to participate. We're sorry that we are not able to accommodate everyone who was interested in joining.

We expect to release Quicken Financial Life for Mac in summer 2009. If you have an immediate need for a Quicken product for the Mac, we would encourage you to check out our current Mac offering, Quicken for Mac 2007.

Thanks again for your interest.

Sincerely,

The Quicken Financial Life for Mac Team

It's a bit disappointing that they won't let me in on the beta, and it's more than a bit frustrating that they've slipped their release date another year. But perhaps adding a year to the development effort means that the OS X version of Quicken 2008 - er, Quicken 2009...er, Quicken Financial Life for Mac, 2010 edition...whatever they end up calling it - will actually implement all the functionality of its predecessor.

Once the chimps manage that, they can start working on feature parity with the Windows version of Quicken....

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....

The temperature is now 51°, and expected to climb into the sixties tomorrow.

By Sunday morning, the temperature will be back in the thirties.

1. You don't understand what's going on. New toys show up, and you play with the box instead.
2. You grasp that Christmas means new toys, and get excited every year.
3. You want everything in the toy section of the Christmas catalog, but you're so excited by the toys you actually get that you forget all about the ones you didn't get.
4. You have a very precise list of toys that you want, and you get really upset if any are missing from under the tree come Christmas morning.
5. You want nothing to do with Christmas. (Also known as the sullen teenager stage, though in my case it lasted well into my twenties.)
6. You realize that giving presents can be as much fun - if not more fun - than receiving them. (Also known as parenthood.)
7. You discreetly tailor your wish list, Christmas hints, etc., toward things that you think people would enjoy giving you.
8. You're a little embarrassed to be receiving so many presents, and would much rather just watch the kids open theirs.

Alas, days #9 through #12 remain hidden from me, as I have reached only day #8....

Yesterday's ice storm brought down quite a few tree branches, including one in our front yard. I suppose I should get out there and finish removing it from the tree (since currently it's still attached, hanging by a small strip of wood), and then figure out if/when the city yard-waste crews will be making the rounds.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Interesting to read a book so old that the big plot twist is that fingerprints are unique.

I've no idea what I'll be reading next. I may not have any unread books left in my ever-shrinking library.