Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

We went out and got our tree last night. Erin was big enough to ride the carousel with Karen, although she didn’t really know what to think about it. I don’t think she liked it all that much, but she also could have been grumpy because it was close to dinner time.

When we brought the tree into the house today we discovered it was quite a bit larger than the tree we had last year. It was funny because even though we went to the tree farm a few days earlier than last year they hardly had any trees left. When we picked our tree out I thought it looked kind of small. I guess I was wrong about that, it almost didn’t fit through our door.

Here’s the tree pre-decoration:

While I was out of the house working on my final paper the girls and Karen got the lights on the tree:

Erin had a bottle with me and then I put her to bed while Bella and Gilli trimmed the tree:

Because I like playing with our new camera and its cool macro setting here is a close up of Bob and Wendy, the girls thought it was funny to put those ornaments together like that:

The finished tree:

I started a set on Flickr for the Christmas Season 2008. I’ll be adding pictures there as I can.

Karen was trying to get shots of Erin putting on her own hat, but Gillian kept wanting her picture taken in various silly poses. I think this one was pretty cute

I also liked the action shot of Erin laughing

I had to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America for one of my classes. The funny thing was that I wanted to read that book anyway and I still want to read its sequel Bait and Switch. So I guess I picked the right program to study.

Anyway, it was a very good book. I highly recommend reading it, it was fascinating. My professor shared with us this clip to day and I figured I’d post it. Apparently there is a “dramatic-documentary-musical” called The American Ruling Class that this clip is from. It has a catchy little song at the end

I saw that gas is now $1.99/gallon in Fredonia! Whoa!

I wonder if this had something to do with it?

I just finished reading an interesting article on increasing crime at Chuck E Cheese’s (link). If you are not familiar with what a Chuck E Cheese is, check this article on Wikipedia.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that some of these places serve alcohol. At what point does the thought let’s get drunk at a child’s brithday party enter into the mind of a rational adult? Why is beer and wine even an option? This is a place for kids to have fun. Suck it up and deal with the noise and have fun with the kids or don’t go. Don’t get all drunk and rowdy. Also, adults picking fights with little kids? Seriously? How much of an entitlement prick do you need to be to do this? Let the kids have fun without having to deal with violence.

Today I thought I would remember the lesser recognized of the Kurt and Courtney grunge era. Courtney Love and Hole had some really good songs. Although I heard Nirvana first I became a fan of Hole long before I became a fan of Nirvana. Here are some of my favorites, although it seems that most of the versions online are live, which is equally awesome but sometimes more difficult to hear if you are not already familiar with the song:

Guy: He bought her a really nice necklace.

Girl: How can he afford to buy that?

Guy: 1. He’s black. 2. He’s gay. 3. He’s ….

I was tempted to turn around and follow them to hear the rest…

I just came across this and had to give it an honorable mention.

This clip always makes me laugh

Greenpeace posted version 10 of their Guide to Greener Electronics. How does your favorite company rate? I am thrilled to see that Dell has been Greener than Apple for all 10 iterations of this guide. Apple reminds me a lot of the current Green trend. Since it is now fashionable to care about the environment they will do it. But otherwise they wouldn’t care. I hope this fad will pass. Not because I don’t care about the environment, because I do. But I am tired of all these self-righteous people going overboard with their overzealous implementation of all things Green whether they make sense or not. Green is the new PC and while being politically correct makes sense it was taken to extremes too.