This past month has seen me in a rather fierce non-writing mood, thus the lack of entries. Not sure why. I'm not in mood to write at the moment either, so this is a bland update.

I may stop journaling, I'm not inspired to do it much more, as you've seen. Maybe it's Facebook taking over. It's fun to post more frequent one-line entries and interact with lots of people in that environment. We'll see.

Where to begin for this month's entries? Randomly I suppose.

Full Leather Jacket: After many years of wanting a leather coat, I finally obtained one. My heretofore winter jacket has seen better days and is pretty shabby by any standard with its frayed cuffs and hems, holes in pockets, and other signs of age.

Thanks to our family JC Penney connection, I saved quite a bundle on the new coat a couple weeks ago. It happened to be on sale for 55% off normal price, and with a special coupon for another 20%, it posed a deal I could not pass up. It goes great with my fedora!


Work: Productivity-wise, this month has been superb for me. The development of a new web-based campus map system has come along swimmingly to rave reviews of internal users and a few very concerned folks on campus. It's actually much more than a map, serving as a geo-referential interface to campus.

It has a basic map, but many overlays for different features, such as dining units and lactation rooms, but it also ties into several databases for searching and offers links in and out so others can use it to reference their locations quickly and easily. I've had a great deal of fun working on that project over the past couple weeks, and all of it done without the usual formal business-practice overhead.


Weather: We've had a couple of winter storms come through. After one of them, our car got stuck in the driveway because the snow was too deep and the ice beneath it didn't provide enough traction to push it clear. We discovered the chains for the tractor didn't fit, so we shoveled some and parking it at the end of the driveway for a couple days.

Shelley put chains on the car later and drove it around in loops to clear a path. Then we bought the proper chains for the tractor and found out they're not enough. Weights may or may not help. That's next to try, or just calling someone to plow for us. For now we can just drive through the 8-10 inches or so we have out there well enough for the moment.


Holidays: Shopping is done as of today. Bought our tree from a nearby farm yesterday. Finished decorating it tonight. Used the reciprocating saw to chop it down to size: good tool for that purpose! Looking forward to Christmas morning and seeing Kelley tear into her gifts.


WoW: Leveled from 70-76 over the course of the month. I'm setting it aside for a while to work on my game, mostly. It's lost some appeal, unfortunately, as well. I have a gift-card subscription to use with it so I'll finish leveling up to 80 at some later point.


Kids: Kelley had a couple weeks of not napping at school, we're unsure why. This meant for some trying evenings but she seems to have worked out of that, although not completely. Celia's in the cooing and smiling phase, so it's more enjoyable to be with her - more of a person to interact with. Today Kelley and Celia had a great time playing together: Celia in her door-frame hopper seat and Kelley pushing and bouncing her at at the same time. Big smiles and lots of laughs all around.


Movies: Netflix finally released their free online viewer for Macintosh so I've watched a couple titles that way. They have 10-12 thousand movies and TV shows for viewing online and about 10% of our to-watch list can now be seen that way. So far I've experienced quite a range of quality through about five titles, from just okay to really pretty good, image-wise.



OK, tired of writing, time to get to work. Or read a book in front of the fire.