We’re home from our Christmas trip to the Carolinas. It was fun, but it’s always nice to be back.
I’m on the bed right now, catching up on some email and all of my regular reads. I hear Randall Goodgame singing “Tractor Tractor” in my son’s room. My wife is in my daughter’s room, training Trevor, our new virtual dog (the best kind) on the Nintendo DS. The cat is by my head, purring very loudly, thrilled that her people have returned.
And now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a Wii in the living room just begging to be played with. I guess I should get right on that…
This past summer, I visited (and fell in love with) Australia. I was mostly in Melbourne, but we did take a weekend trip up to Mount Buller to go skiing.
Yesterday when I was digging up that video of water going down the drain in Australia, I realized that I never finished uploading my pictures from my trip to my flickr account. I’ve finished uploading my Australia photos here.
The newly uploaded pictures include shots of St. Kilda, Melbourne, St. Paul’s Cathedral (from the outside), Flinders Street Station, the Yarra River, and the Arts Centre.
Many people here in the US mentioned to me that I should check the toilets in Australia went I went to Melbourne this past summer. Of course, they’re referring to the myth (legend?) that toilets flush one way in the Northern Hemisphere and another in the Southern Hemisphere.
The answer to the real question is no, water does not go down a drain the opposite direction in Australia. This is not theory or second-hand information. I have been to Australia; I have tested the waters; I have proof:
This is one of those posts that I hope ends up in search engines so that somebody will find it and get the answer that I had trouble finding.
I wanted to have my Facebook status appear on my blog by using the Wordpress RSS widget. I went to Facebook and found the RSS feed for my status updates, but when I put that URL in the RSS widget, it never showed on the blog. When I went back into the widget’s properties, it said that it “could not find an RSS or ATOM feed at that URL”
After tinkering with it a bit, I went to feedvalidator.org to see if something really was wrong with the feed. Turns out that it wasn’t validating. So I logged into feedburner, burned a new feed using the Facebook status update RSS URL, and now it works.
This blog post is the closest thing you’ll get to a Christmas card/letter from me. If you’re one of those sappy, sentimental people, print this post, put it in your mailbox, and pretend that I mailed it to you.
Chances are good that if you read this blog regularly, you’ll know most of what’s going on with me. It’s been a fun year, so I’ll recap the highlights.
January - looking for new job.
February - left old job and took new job. Now I keep kids safe online.
March - spring training trip with Dad.
April - moved our company from the old office building to a new one.
May - celebrated 10 years of marriage.
June - turned 30.
July - family vacation to Pigeon Forge, TN.
August - spent 2 weeks in (and fell in love with) Melbourne, Australia. My girl turned 7.
September - mostly recovered from the AU trip and the extra long hours.
October - the boy turned 4.
November - got into mountain biking. Also ate much turkey.
December - spent most of the month figuring out what this post would say.
It’s been eventful, but it’s been fun. I’ve learned a lot this year, both on a business and on a personal level, and I hope 2008 brings even more fun and learning. I could do without another job change or a month full of working 18+ hours per day, but other than that, I’m ready for whatever 2008 has to offer.
I hope you’ve had a good 2007 and that you have an even better 2008. Take time to spend this season with your family. Reflect on the reason we have Christmas (if you need help with that, click here). Tackle 2008 with much fervor, and make it the best year ever.
Blessings, hope, love, etc., to you and yours in this holiday season and throughout the coming year.
Music is powerful. I’m amazed at how it can bring back experiences to memory with such vivid detail.
When I hear The Cardigans “Long Gone Before Daylight” my mind goes back to my trip to Australia this past summer. I can almost smell the inside of the airplane. (Fortunately, I don’t smell the guy with really bad body odor who sat beside me.)
When I hear Andrew Peterson’s “The Far Country” CD, I am taken back to when I was driving back from South Carolina after the funeral of my 98 year old great grandmother. It brought out so much emotion that I was weeping openly through most of the CD. I wanted to call Andrew and thank him for such a beautiful recording, but I wouldn’t have been able to say much, so I didn’t.
Arthur Alligood’s “Far From Today” takes me to that afternoon a couple of years ago when I got in my car after a long day at work and was ready to throw in the towel on my career and go get a job selling TVs at Circuit City (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Eric Peters’ song “I Know the Mountains” takes me back to several places in my life when I needed some encouragement from a friend.
My music collection is full of songs and albums that take me back and bring out memories.
Tonight my life will be changed by music once again. I’m going up to Nashville to see Andrew Peterson’s “Behold the Lamb of God” Christmas tour play at the Ryman Auditorium. If I could make it to only one concert per year, this would be the one. When I hear the Christmas story - the real Christmas story - told in such an amazing way, I’m left speechless every time.
If you want to ride along, there are still tickets available. You just have to be at my office and ready to go by 2:30 this afternoon. If you can’t go with us, you should listen to “Behold the Lamb of God” online.
I find it rather humorous when a manager whose employees work in a cubicle environment requires them to read a book about rodents’ life in a labyrinth.
I don’t send Christmas cards. I take this approach to the holiday season for three reasons:
1. I don’t like snail mail. Why should I pay the government to carry my holiday greeting to you when email works just fine?
2. I am lazy.
3. I am a male, and I view the sending of Christmas cards as a female social activity.
While I won’t be sending you any snail mail holiday greetings, you might just get one from my wife. And if she does, I’ll get her to pick out one of the Portland designs.
(Note to wife: since you read this blog, I’m not making a note to actually tell you this.)
Last night the kids were at a slumber party, so my wife and I went out to eat and to see a movie. We got to the theater and nothing was playing that we wanted to see, so we went to Blockbuster.
We came across Perfect Stranger, a movie featuring Bruce Willis and Halle Berry. I hadn’t heard of it before, but these are 2 pretty decent actors…right? That logic worked to get me to bring the movie home, but I regret that.
To be fair, Willis and Berry did a pretty good job acting. I’m not a big Halle Berry fan, but whatever. She did ok. Bruce was more believable in his role, but his wasn’t the primary role.
Now that we’re done being fair to the actors, this was just a stupid movie. It’s one of those that tells you the ending in a way that you don’t know you’re being told, and in a way that you’d never be able to figure out. So about 2/3 of the way through the movie you think “Oh. Well, that’s dumb.” And then you figure you should go ahead and leave it on because maybe there’s a twist.
Nope, no twist. It happens just like you think it will.
So the official moreron.com recommendation: don’t bother.
Did any of you see this movie? If so, what did you think?
