Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

Um, where did 2006 go? Here’s to a happy, healthy, peaceful 2007!

We woke up to find our car had a flat tire. My question to the car people is why even bother putting a spare on the car if the tools to get it off aren’t provided. Since I couldn’t get the spare off I placed a semi-desperate call to my friend Dave. Lucky for me, he was able to come over and help me get the flat tire off and drive me to sprawl mart to get a new tire. And wait for the hour it took them and drive me home and get the tire back on the car. For that I am super grateful! Thank you!!!
After I got home and Gilli woke up from nap we opened presents. Our tradition is to open all of the non-santa presents on Christmas Eve, then all we have are the gifts that Santa brought to open on Christmas morning. The girls were very excited about opening gifts and even were rushing to go to bed after dinner so that Santa could come.

This past week we got a live Christmas tree. So we moved our artificial tree to the girls playroom. Where they promptly decorated it with their dress-up princess shoes and a princess hat for the star.

Ah, unlimited uploads on Flickr. I just uploaded around 150 photos. I accidentally wiped the date taken info from a bunch of the pictures, which ruins the fun of this little trick I learned on Lifehacker. But loads of fun!

As an early Christmas present from my Mom I got a shiny new pro upgrade to my Flickr account. Ironically, later that day they quintuppled the upload limit on the free accounts. But I’m still happy to have the pro version, I added back the sets I had eliminated to make room for more current ones to stay under the 3 set limit on th free account. I like having more sets. Also noticed that Yahoo changed the format of their photo service as well. Nice look, but I still prefer Flickr. What I’d like to see, especially since Yahoo owns Flickr, is a way to import my Yahoo photos and sets into Flickr. Maybe they’ll do that soon.

We went shopping last night at our stuper-sprawl-mart. We were in the beauty section, but were talking about buying food. Specifically yummy yummy bacon. Bella was very excited about the prospect of bacon. As we went down the aisle she suddenly yelled “Look, there’s some bacon! Oh, wait. No, it’s shampoo.” ^_^

We took the girls to Chestnut Ridge Park to see Santa today. Gillian got as far as being next to Santa before she started crying and said, “No Santa!” Bella refused to even go near him. They did get their faces painted and did some coloring and had a fun time. More pictures on my Flickr site.

I had been hoping for a happier ending in the search for James Kim. Unfortunately that was not the case. It is interesting how the life and unfortunate death of someone I have never met has affected me. Unfortunately you hear stories like this all too often, and they sometimes just glance over you. But this was a person I recognized. Not a movie star or a musician, but a journalist. I remember watching his reports on TechTV and reading his reviews and articles online. When I heard about the search for his family I knew exactly who he was. My heartfelt wishes go to his family, his wife and two little girls. I can’t imagine what they must be going through. Things like this really make you think about what is really important.

EDIT: Here is a link to CNET’s memorial for James Kim

So I took a few self-portraits today with a webcam.

Also, if you ever get the idea that you want to sit down and enjoy a nice hot cup of cherry flavored nyquil, Tazo’s Sweet Cinnamon Spice will work nicely for that. o_0

So I’ve created a photo set on Flickr for it. Here are the 2 shots I got of Bella lighting the tree with President Hefner. They were really dark, so I adjusted them. For not really knowing what I’m doing I thought they turned out OK, but a little grainy.

Other pictures in the set include eating cookies at the Hanging of the Greens, making a gingerbread house during Miracle on Main Street and caroling during Miracle on Main Street. I’ll keep adding to the set as the month progresses until I hit my upload limit on Flickr (29% already and it’s only the 3rd).