ERIC'S RULES FOR HOLIDAY LIGHTING

1. 1. Nativity scenes shall only include the following characters: baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, magi, shepherds, angels, various barnyard animals, and the popular "with a tale as big as a kite" star. Santa Claus was NOT present at the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ! Neither was Ms. Claus, the Grinch, Frosty the Snowman, or Rudolph.


2. 2. Many people seem to believe that simply lighting a character makes it suitable for holiday decoration - this is not so. The lighted lawn flamingo, gnome, college mascot, football player, or frog is just an amusement for your other times of year.


3. 3. A lighted Santa head suspended from a flag pole outside your door is NOT festive. It's just creepy.


4. 4. Inflatable characters seem to be popular these days, and it is important to make sure they are fully pressurized and completely weighted down. Otherwise you may have scenes of "Santa on his back after a hangover," "Frosty contemplating joining Jenny Craig after staring at his stomach," or "the Grinch doing something completely inappropriate to the Holiday Polar Bear."


5. 5. Look at your neighbor's house. Then look at the other houses on your street. If they ALL have the EXACT same holiday stick-in-the-ground Santa/Christmas tree/"We Wish You A Merry Christmas," that you got from the kids in the high school band that wanted to make money off a few pieces of plywood, then maybe it's a good idea to sit this year out and use this piece for 2005.


6. 6. If your entire house is lit in blue, then it is NOT festive. It is Superman's Fortress of Solitude


7. 7. One Christmas train is neat. Two Christmas trains are fun. TEN is over the limit - your house is not brought to us by Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!!

ENOUGH

I'm not smart enough. I'm not good looking enough, not strong enough, fast enough, coordinated enough. I'm not smooth enough, charming enough, or tactful enough. I don't exercise enough. I don't give enough. I don't love enough. I don't resist enough, and I don't give in enough. I don't sing well enough, speak well enough, write well enough, draw well enough, think well enough.

I don't succeed enough. I haven't used enough of what's been given to me. I've fallen to the same temptations over and over again enough to make any of you wonder if I'm Christian enough. I don't preach enough, pray enough, witness enough, or study enough. I don't discipline myself enough. I haven't got enough to do enough to make enough of a difference to think I'm worth enough.


But thanks be to God.

Through Him, I AM ENOUGH.

CROCHETED CHAOS

My mom is an avid crocheter (crochetist?), so I felt inspired to post this:
BBC NEWS | Mathematicians crochet chaos

The idea for the "Lorenz manifold" model came to the couple during the Christmas break two years ago.

Dr Osinga, who learnt to crochet when she was seven, was relaxing by crocheting some hexagonal lace motifs.

Prof Krauskopf asked her: "Why don't you crochet something useful?"

Eighty-five hours of work and some supporting steel wire later, they had something almost a metre across which looks not unlike a big Christmas decoration - which is what they are using it as.

I GOT ME A NEW TOY

A couple actually:

• Toy Numero Uno: Get you some Firefox. If you haven't yet, you're really missing out and exposing yourself to all sorts of internet diseases and maladies.


• Toy Numero Dos: Proceed to download the Mouse Gestures extension. Wave your mouse around and conduct your browser like Beethoven at his 9th Symphony (albeit you won't be deaf when you do it).


• Toy Numero... oh, dangit, what's "three" in Spanish again?? I should know this...: Assuming you already have a blog, go download the BlogThis extension. Makes creating quick blog entries faster than a... um... fast...thing...by incorporating a new item into your right-click context menus.

And while I'm at it, an interesting quote from Patagonia's manifesto on ChangeThis:

Gerald Amos, a member (and of the Haisla Nation in Kitamaat, northwest Canada, recalls a friend of his father who would leave home in the dark to paddle to his trapline four miles by water. He would spend the day walking the lines, checking and resetting the traps. "Along the way back to the boat,during the late fall and early winter, the coho salmon would be still in the creeks that they passed, so they would stop at one of these creeks and take a couple of coho, which they would clean and pack home in their backpack together with what-ever animals they had taken in their traps. The fish provided them with their supper later that night."
Such lives are often called subsistence, which brings to mind the barest, hardscrabble survival. But there is another way to look at them. At Patagonia we choose to call them “economies of abundance.” In an economy of abundance is enough. Not too much. Not too little. Enough. Most important, there is enough time for the things that matter: relationships, delicious food, art, games and rest.
-- Yvon Chouinard (owner of Patagonia)

CAN I HAVE A MOMENT HERE?

"For loving God is keeping his laws: and his laws are not hard."

- I John 5:3, Bible In Basic English

It's the holidays, so sorry about the long gap between posts. Look at me, always apologizing - I'm such a people pleaser.

I'm not going to make it a habit of delving deep into religious issues, but I think I get an exemption on this one, because it has more to do with faith. I came across this passage recently as I was reading the Bible on my PDA (an excellent idea, by the way. I've got 5 different versions available all in the same place - that's another post sometime.) and I just stopped down on it. I couldn't help but think "are you sure?" I think most of the time I see the walk I have as a Christian as hard, not easy. Of course, then I remember that this was written by a man who spent the last part of his life in exile on a remote island, denied access to his family and most of his friends.

So here's my question for you - whatever your belief, do you think keeping its laws is hard? Even if you're a hedonist and you seek only to pleasure yourself, 24 hours a day, is that hard?

Just a thought that came to mind. Thanks for listenin'.

MAYBE I WAS JUST IN TIBET FOR A WHILE

Hi everyone. I'm taking a look at my own blog (I like to call it a "retro-blogo-spective"), and I see it's been a while since I last posted. Yeah, um... sorry about that.

But the good news is that I've got PLENTY to talk about - a huge, glorious accretion of blogable ideas that have been floating around my head. So, with deference to my less-geeky friends, let's bust out the fun of the HTML unnumbered list:

• Have you ever seen that guy? You know him. He wears long-sleeved button-up shirts all the time, and always has one too many buttons undone. Without an undershirt. See, there's the button at the collar used for strangling hapless males and for incorporating the shirt into a "tie & suit" configuration. That one can be open, not a problem. But then, there's the NEXT one. THAT, my friends, is part of the shirt - part of what's keeping it on your body as a modest article of clothing. What do you gain by undoing it? You're trying to impress the ladies with a little more...WHAT? The average man just doesn't have the same kind of blessings as the average woman there, so what's the deal??




• You know, occasionally I visit some random web site that a friend has fowarded to me, and I get a little chuckle from it. However, I recently realized that many of my friends may not have ever found these little gems of online gold, where they could receive chuckles of their own! So I list them here, my friends, an offering of my generosity. Try not to enjoy them all at once.
  
  
  1. BadgerBadgerBadger - a pointless, random, and I think fun endlessly repeating Flash movie.
  
  
  2. Zombo.com - I dare you to find the point where this site repeats.
  
  
  3. Astronomy Picture of the Day - not so much a funny web site, but some INCREDIBLE pictures come through here every day. Most of them are PRIME wallpaper candidates.
  
  
  4. Digital Blasphemy - another great place to get wallpapers. I think I used one of their pictures for a class project once...
  
  
  5. Jib-Jab - home of President George W. Bush and Former Presidential Candidate John Kerry's thrilling rendition of "This Land Is Your Land." I hope they come up with more stuff now that the election is over.
  
  
  
  
• So I went to the doctor's office recently. And, as you know, this whole process involved a LOT of waiting. Being a mind of constantly restless motion, I don't do well with waiting, especially those moments after the nurse has seen you, and she leaves you alone in the room with those fatal last word - "The doctor will see you in just a minute." Let's get real, it's NEVER a minute. So what do I, the admitted PDA computing geek that I am, do to cope with these moments of blank-white-wall boredom? I pull out my trusty PDA, and within seconds I'm listnening to MP3s through the on-board (and remarkably good, all things considered) speaker and playing Zap! 2016. Imagine the look on my doctor's face when he enters the room to the sounds of Basement Jaxx and seeing me cheer at my success in destroying virtual alien ships. Good times.

"And the music keeps on playin' on and on..."

YOUR KITTEN IS A WHAT?

So here's your crazy story of the day - my dear wife goes to take our lovely kitten to the Vet. No, no, that's not the crazy part. Anyone can do that. The fun begins when the vet turns the cat OVER. Why is this so amazing, you ask? Did the cat then spontaneously combust? Was there a little tag on our kitten's belly saying "Open Other End?" Did the cat land on it's feet, even though it was being held up-side down? Well, let me start at the beginning:

Ember, our cat, came from the pound. Folks, if you're going to get a cat, rescue one from the pound. Trust me, once you go there, you'll want to rescue all of them in some ill-fated "101 Dalmatians" inspired manouver. This, my friend, is a bad idea, because you will become the "woman with 100 cats," even if you are a man. However, anything you can do for one or two of them will make a difference, especially for your new furry companion.

But I digress.

You see, we rescued this very cat of ours for two reasons: it was a young kitten, and it was a girl. Getting a girl cat was an important part, because my dear wife didn't want the cat claiming property rights over everything we have through the distribution of bodily fluids, if you catch my drift. So we went to the pound, got this adorable little black kitten with strikingly blue eyes (they've since turned gold), which was identified as a girl.

The crazy part is that when the vet turned our dear kitten over today, he discovered that this is indeed NOT a girl cat. We have a BOY. Apparently, it's very hard to tell the two apart until things have developed, and we'd just reached that point. And honestly, that makes sense. I mean, how many babies would you be able to tell their gender if you saw two side-by-side wearing just a diaper and no silly bows in their hair or color-coordinated clothes? Now, you can tell a boy baby from a girl baby even before they're born, but they don't have fur. So, happy for me, there's another man in the house. At least until he's neutered. Because we listen to Bob Barker.

Sorry if this all rambles a bit. I'm writing it on my PDA late at night in bed, so there's not much power of cohesion left in the ol' grey matter.

**UPDATE**
If you'd like to see some pictures of Ember, click here, here, here, or here.