08:51 – Happy solstice/christmas/hanukkah/festivus/kwanzaa or whatever to any of my readers who celebrate a holiday around this time of year. Barbara is heading over to her parents’ new place for the day. Colin and I will take the day off and have a Heartland marathon. Well, I’ll watch Heartland while Colin pesters me relentlessly to throw the ball.
Netflix streaming here died about 7:00 yesterday evening when AWS collapsed. I was finally able to get it working again a few minutes ago. This is the second or third major outage in the last six months, which should serve as yet another warning to anyone foolish enough to use cloud-based services for any mission critical applications.
09:31 – I did get this shot last night of a reindeer up on the roof. Sorry it’s so blurry, but those things move fast.
Looks shopped to me. Sorry to tell you, but the blurriness is a common sign of photo fraud and no one is going to take you seriously unless you can provide the unretouched, high-res, non-blurry original photo.
His hand was shaking from all the Christmas excitement, no doubt.
I had Netflix up earlier in the day yesterday; watched the last episode of “Jericho,” finally; I figure that it is a fairly realistic portrayal of some of the issues we may face after TSHTF in this country, but I sincerely hope it won’t take 23 nuked cities to get there. The cities will be in bad enough shape without that. Also, Lennie James carried that show; Ulrich was mainly chewing scenery and looking rough.
Dunno if Netflix was up last night; we only have the streaming, no DVD deliveries. We listened to a Montreal froggie station that broadcasts quality classical music and Christmas stuff with very few commercials, which are in Quebecois French and blessedly short, mostly station IDs. We apparently have nothing even close down here within our range.
Merry Christmas to the one or two fellow Christians on this board (are there any other Roman Catholics???) and best of the “holiday season” or whatever for everyone else, which I wish y’all anyway the rest of the year, too. 21 here today and a bit of sun has appeared; we’re expecting a snowstorm tomorrow night and Thursday and another one on the weekend, so it will be interesting to see how it comes down in this little micro-climate by the Lake. Pellet stove is blazing merrily away but even Mrs. OFD now acknowledges that we should probably have a tank of oil standing by as backup; we’ve otherwise been winging it so fah.
Koshered/brined the turkey overnight and did the stuffing; the veggies, etc. are on everyone else. And back to the plantation tomorrow morning, remaining on-call for the duration of this year and covering for people on apparently infinite vay-cay and personal time. Once we get in a little better financial shape this next year, OFD is seriously considering his own vay-cay for the first time in at least a decade. Maybe sea-kayaking/camping off Newfoundland/Labrador while also scouting bug-out sites….
I hate it when Santa Comes. My roof is aluminum sheet at the reindeer dent it up significantly.
OK, here is a follow up to the issue on when to tell the kids that Santa Claus is not real (related article in paper this AM).
So, in this context it is a question of WHEN not IF.
But, also of significance today is Jesus Christ. Why do we not tell the children that this is also a made up story?
Sure. Five different writers made it up out of whole cloth not long after the events described and the story was so boring, dull and clearly false that it was collected, preserved and handed down for nearly two-thousand years. Meanwhile archaeologists keep finding interesting materials in the lands where the events took place which tend to corroborate them here and there.
If we’re gonna inform the kidz about made-up stories, we could do worse than begin with American history textbooks, most of which are as accurate as the tales concerning the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Or show them any current MSM nooz show on the tee-vee. Or any speech by a politician or member of Congress. Have them watch as the President’s lips move.
As I’ve said before, there is considerably more evidence for the existence of Sherlock Holmes.
Speaking of Sherlock; we watched the episodes thus fah of the new Sherlock, and while they’re fun to watch and have the wizard technology going, we feel that the older series with the late Jeremy Brett are better and more faithful to the books. So we’re now watching those, in order.
Uh oh, you might want to have the buyers of your future bio lab kit warn the recipients if I am reading this correctly:
http://xkcd.com/1151/
But wait….there’s more:
Summoned into court to testify, you are asked to swear to tell the trunth and nothing but the truth…. with your hand on the Book of Hearsay (had to be careful not to typo heresy)!
Then if you are asked “how do you know that?”, and you reply: “Bob told me.”
The laywer will shout: “Objection, your honor, that’s hearsay!”
Please, do not try to cover your self by saying: “But, your honor, I swore on the Bible is hearsay and non-truth.”
And so, in a few weeks there will be a presidential swearing-in which makes me think of how much we have progressed from the era of the Tribal Chief and the Witch Doctor.
Merry Christmas! Actually, the birth of Jesus Christ is a noteworthy event even though we are not sure of the actual year much less the actual date. However, the secular holiday is my favorite holiday, not because of the gifts, but seeing our families. With our disabled daughter, we just do not travel much anymore because she is so uncomfortable for long stretches in the car.
The most important thing about Christianity is Jesus Christ’s life and our striving to be like him. So simple yet so hard to attain. To my fellow Christians: He is risen indeed!
BTW, my particular brand of Christianity is Church of Christ. Until recently, we only supported the secular Christmas holiday. However, in the last 10 years, some of the more liberal churches like mine are now celebrating the birth of Christ with a Christmas eve worship service and candle lighting ceremony. It is OK, nothing great for me but the wife really likes it.
this is a test…
Apparently I can’t post anything with a link in it again. Oh well.
I am down here in Port Lavaca with the temperature at 74 F. The wind is blowing 20+ mph out of the north and there are whitecaps on Lavaca bay. It is suppose to be 30 F in the morning. I’ll believe it when I feel the cold.
I am up here about a hundred feet from frigid Lake Champlain, with temp now at 12 and dropping. There had been whitecaps earlier this week but now there is ice. We have snow coming tomorrow night and Thursday, with the Accuweather liars saying more than a foot here. We shall see; I’ll believe it when I have to shovel it.
Merry Christmas to one of my tiny handful of fellow Christians on the board here…pax vobiscum, sir, and tell your son I say “Welcome home, bro!”
I just had to re-do the weather audio for the radio project, and we are to get blizzard conditions because of a weird low pressure area moving up from Texas tonight through the Tennessee Valley and into the Ohio River Valley. Foot of snow minimum is forecast for from 03:00 to 19:00 Wednesday. I can see it over Arkansas right now, and moving this way. Nothing yet visible up in OFDland, though. Looks like we will get hit worse this time than he will. The weekend may be different, however.
A big, broad Canadian high pressure has pushed the jetstream down into the Gulf, so I won’t be surprised if it is very cold in Port Lavaca tonight.
Everybody stay warm!
OFDland, i.e. Retroville, will catch it tomorrow night and the following day, most likely. But who knows what we’ll get a hundred feet from the Lake, which is really an inland sea.
7 degrees here right now at 21:41.
Off to the Land of Nod now, and then off to the server plantation in the AM for more fun and games, probably the only loser drone in the buildings. I should bring in a couple of movies and my headphones and run ’em on VLC on my RHEL laptop…
Damn Global Cooling ™!
Down here in the southern paradise we’ve had some warm days, one fairly hot (39 C), and then back to coolish again. Just about froze my butt off at Christmas dinner at my niece’s place. Why don’t y’all send over Al Gore for a while to provide some hot air for us? (Just so long as you agree to take him back.)
Port Lavaca was 33 F this morning. Very unusual for a city next to the worlds biggest hot tub, the Gulf of Mexico. PL is going to be 34 F tonight so already dissipating. However, Sugar Land is going to be 28 F tonight so gotta run go check the outside pipes on my office property.