New Year's Eve

I vividly remember the day I stayed up past midnight and woke up that morning feeling like I had been hit by a truck.

In college, missing out on sleep was no big deal. All night cramming sessions. Midnight trips to Denny's.

Then came that fateful day when my body decided to strike and officially label me as "old."

I've never been the same since. That's why I am excited to continue a family tradition I have. This is one that we have in place purely for the sanity of the grown ups.

Tonight, we're setting our clocks forward a couple hours to trick the kids into thinking it's midnight.

They can have fun thinking they're staying up late and I can get the rest I'll need to function the next day.

Win. Win.

How To Article of the Week

This week: How to Cook Grasshoppers

... No thank you.

I like the song in this video

I don't want to get all sappy on everyone, but I really like the song on this video. It reminds me that I shouldn't neglect giving a gift to my Savior this season.

And as great as the Wii is, I'm not so sure that kind of a gift would work. The song reminds me I should be a better person to those around me because that is the gift that will mean the most.

My Favorite Christmas Tradition

You know the inevitable let down when all the Christmas presents are opened?

You can have the most altruistic attitude about giving instead of receiving, and there is still a little deflated feeling once it's all over on Christmas morning.

My family has a tradition I wrote about last year, and it has become one of my favorite traditions.

Click on the link for the full explanation, but this tradition is called the "White Envelope." It never fails to give a perfect ending to gift giving on Christmas morning, and I walk away from the whole experience feeling completely satisfied.

There are a couple sticks in the mud ...

(Tangent)
That's right, isn't it? Sticks in the mud? My internal grammar alarm isn't going off, but it doesn't look right for some reason.
(End Tangent)

... in my family, but for the most part, people are willing.

It's seriously my favorite part of the whole day.

Christmas Scavenger Hunt

It was Christmas, and I was 8.

I had opened up most of my gifts, including a Where's Waldo book and a Dino Rider (now there's a blast from the past), when my parents gave me an envelope. It held the first clue in a scavenger hunt that eventually lead me to the storage room.

Inside was a cage with my very own hamster. (My dad was allergic to pretty much every kind of animal, so this was the best I was going to get.)

It was instant love, and I'd spend the next 2 years with that little guy riding shotgun in my shirt pocket.

But the real question is, what did I name him?

I named him Waldo because of the book I got that same day.

Feel free to ooh and ahh at my dazzling creativity on that one.

How To Article of the Week

This week: How to Boil Water

Yep. Someone actually spent the time to write this and publish it to the Internet.

I guess boiling water is more of a science than I thought.

California Propaganda

Everyone is a lemming in one form or another.

And sometimes it surprises me how many of my current opinions have been shaped by what I heard as a kid.

Some (translate: almost everyone) would say I'm gullible.

(Tangent)
Did I already mention I fell for the "Did you know that the word "gullible" isn't in the English dictionary?" thing? ... Twice.
(End Tangent)

I grew up in California, and one day while I was in elementary school, we had a slide show about our state.


It was one of those filmstrips with the accompanying tape that beeped when the AV monitor was supposed to move the filmstrip forward.

(Tangent)
That last sentence made me feel kind of old. Does anyone use those anymore?
(End Tangent)

The presentation covered California's economic development, agriculture, military bases, history, the kitchen sink ...

Years later, I only remember one sentence:

"If one state in the union had to survive as their own country, California would be the best equipped to do so."

I guess the brainwashing starts early on the West Coast.

And I think they forgot about all the water that gets pumped to southern California from Colorado.

Going Overboard

My family has a tradition of giving friends and neighbors pumpkin chocolate chip bread for Christmas.

(Tangent)
Emphasis on the bread.

It's WAY better than pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.
(End Tangent)

This year, we made 43 loaves, and we didn't even make it to all the people we wanted to.


(Do you like the plastic pitcher and cereal box accents in this picture? We thought it gave it a homey touch.)

I'm sure everyone who got one would have preferred something healthier, but it's tradition.

(And I love eating the leftovers.)

Why can't I think of these things?

I was mesmerized by this video.

Moron, party of one?

As you've probably figured out, I can be a little dense sometimes. Thankfully I put up a good smokescreen and got my wife to marry me before she figured it out, but it can get me into trouble sometimes.

So, my daughter is obsessed with movies (I wonder where she gets that addiction ...), and as a result, we've occasionally let her watch one on our portable DVD player so we can finally have something non-Barbie/non-animated/non-sing-a-long on our regular TV.


(Tangent)
Portable DVD players are LITERALLY the best invention EVER. I don't even want to think about how annoying it must have been to be trapped in a car with me when I was 3 years old. It's amazing I survived to adulthood.

Seriously, they are AMAZING. Last night, we delivered some holiday treats to friends, and let our daughter watch a DVD in the back seat while we drove all over town.

Aside from the muted sounds of Aristocats and Sleeping Beauty, it was blissfully silent.

If you have a kid and don't have one and have a few bucks, GO. BUY. ONE. NOW.
(End Tangent)

A couple weeks ago, we had our daughter on the couch, cuddling up with our portable DVD player and letting her watch Barbie Fairytopia: Magic of the Rainbow for the 834th time, when she decided to have one of her life-is-too-hard-for-me-so-I'm-going-to-lash-out-at-the-nearest-inanimate-object-and-take-out-all-my-frustrations moments and threw the DVD player on the floor.

When I went to pick it up, the screen was black and all it said was "Line-In."

That's when I lost it.

Knowing Christmas was fast approaching and we would need the DVD player as our only link to sanity in the next car trip, I flew out the door in a rage, hoping I could get Sony and Best Buy to fix it before we had to leave.

I explained the issue to the Geek Squad and specifically mentioned the "Line-In" problem.

(Tangent)
The Geek Squad crew looked like, between the three of them, their collective age was 19.
(End Tangent)


After they took it with plans to ship it to Sony for repairs, I still had to cool off a little more, so I finished my Christmas shopping.

After a week of shipping and waiting in the repair queue, we got a phone call from a Sony technician.

Do you know what the problem ended up being?

There was a little switch on the said that got flipped. "Line-In" meant it was waiting to display an external media source.

Leave it to me to ship my DVD player across the country (and maybe even the world) so that some guy can flip a switch.