Farewell 2010

This past year has had its challenges but has been rich in rewards as well. The many posts from the last 365 days document the ups and downs sufficiently that I don’t believe I need a summary here.

Yesterday I received a “thank you” from my mother, always a source of inspiration and timeless grace, she included a small quote from Edwin Way Teale … and, it’s so good, I’ll end my 2010 posts by leaving it here for you.

I collect many quotes and have come across Mr. Teale’s name several times, but I knew nothing about him, always assuming he was a gentle wit or sophisticated socialite from the late 1800s or early 20th century. Before quoting him on this page I thought I should learn a bit more so I was surprised to see that he was moderately contemporary (he died in 1980 at 81 years of age) and even more surprised to see that he was a writer and naturalist. I have books by Muir and Thoreau but nothing by Teale; surprising in that I read a lot and have an abiding fondness for nature.

But, that he’s a writer is evident in his concise and simple prose: poetic in meter, deep in meaning.

Last sunset, last twilight, last stars of December. And so this year comes to an end, a year rich in the small, everyday events of the earth, as all years are for those who find delight in simple things.

– Edwin Way Teale

And so I hope your year has been rich in every way, with the days to come filled with yet greater delights.

Joe’s Rant: It’s the little things

OK, I know it’s probably policy and in some measureable, but remote and perplexing way, intended to keep me safe … but what gives with credit card companies? I mean … really!

Suzy and I spotted questionable charges on our credit card and reported them as fraud. In my household capacity as “he who talks to strangers”, I coordinated with our card holding institution in resolving the problem.

Now, to be completely fair, when you think about it, getting charges held\removed from your account is nearly painless and super easy. The conversation pretty much goes:

Me: Hi, I have some charges I want removed from my account.

Them: Okee doke … they’re gone! Have a nice day.

Now, it’s not quite that simple but in a standing-back-and-squinting-at-it sort of way … yeah, it is. But getting to that point takes a bit more time.

I called the card company and, as part of getting through to a human, had to enter the 16-digit account number; following that I had to enter the last four digits of my social security number. Then I had to “listen carefully to the following choices, some options may have changed”. Fine. I listen, take notes, and usually end up selecting option 1.

Once I get to option 1 (or whatever), I hear more options and am then sent on to a human. Or a very bored something or other masquerading as a human. It’s usually a “she” with a name that’s mumbled into the phone while muzak is still echoing in my ear, lost in a breathy whisper as her headset starts picking up a voice to transmit, or obfuscated in a fog that is most charitably described as a “strong accent”.

But, I’m then talking to a person.

First question: please verify your account number.

OK … but, didn’t I already have to type this in? And, is it reasonable to believe that could be faked to the machine but not to a person?

Then, “can I have the last four digits of your social?” And, again … didn’t I already type that in?

From there I’m asked a couple other security questions including, but not limited to: mother’s maiden name, favorite pet names, the city in which I was born, and, if I’m not calling from my home phone, my home phone number.

All that is nutty but it’s mostly the fact that I’m asked to type in the same information that I then give to the operator. That’s the part that annoys me.

Overall, it’s a lotta talking to establish I am who I say I am, which makes the complete “hey, we’ll trust you and remove any charges you want removed” situation just a little odd.

And now I’m done ranting. Have a great New Year!

The ins and outs of the holidays

When we first moved into our home, we did the “lights on the house” thing. To be honest, the results never really matched the effort and I soon grew disenchanted with running strands of lights while hanging off the front deck, climbing on the steeply pitched roof, and propping ladders against the house while it rested on slick and sloping turf. Color me Grinchly.

Then we got a lighted deer and decorating the outdoors was never so easy or fun.

Some kitsch is timeless and iconic, but lighted deer didn’t seem that way to me … more a blue collar trailer park accoutrement than something I thought we’d be setting up. Then, on our annual parade of homes … Suzy and I drive around a couple times at night during the holidays to look at neighborhood lights … we found a cul-de-sac in SeaTac where most of the homes were lighted and decorated. There, amidst steep territorial views, we saw a house with somewhere around 10-12 lighted deer: they were on decks, the porch, and around the lawn. And they looked great.

Suzy then caught the bug then and there and, while I was a halting participant, I now have the bug, too. And so we now own our own herd of a dozen lighted deer.

We have two on the front lawn, three on the upper deck, two more on a back lawn, and three more out back; the final two are inside on a plant shelf overlooking our entry.

So while the lighted deer are a relatively new phenomena, decorating the inside of our home is not. I look forward to it every year and enjoy the 4-5 weeks that we have lights up.

You can find more pics of our home in my photo collection here.

More coming!

I haven’t been online much but will be again shortly! I’ve opened new email accounts, have dug into the online stat details for JoeAndSuz.com, and enjoyed a wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas day with Suzy and her family.

All merit updated but I’m also trying to clean out my old drafts from last year, and catch up on the last couple months. I’m taking off a few days between now and the New Year, so I’ll have the time … if only I use it for blogging!

Hope you all had a great Christmas and will soon enjoy a wonderful New Year!

Week of Joe, 2010

About a year ago, albeit a bit more timely with respect to my birthday, I posted the Week of Joe, 2009 entry. In it I detailed all the wonderful gifts I received for my 46th birthday from my wife, Suzanne. This year my b-day was “cluttered” with lots of activities (nearly all of it great fun), so I’m behind in writing my annual post of Greed and Excess®!

But I’m catching up and here it is … Week of Joe, 2010.

In my youth I was a rapacious reader, consuming books and time poring over stories. I liked fanciful stories when I was very young, science fiction in my teens, tending toward high fantasy in my late teens … and then college hit. Text books were my companion and somewhere along the way my reading interests tapped the “historical non-fiction” market. These I like hard science and if you can combine any of the above (and combine it well … think, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke), I usually adore it. 

One of the books I remember from my earliest reading was Fire-Hunter, by Jim Kjelgaard.

The story follows an early human (a “cave man”) in his banishment from his tribe and subsequent discovery of the bow-and-arrow, along with other inventions and realizations (e.g., over-hunting an area is bad). Kjelgaard recognized his invention introduces a “telescoping of time” and that the “developments that occur in the time-span of this book undoubtedly took many generations”, but tosses in a final “yet who is to say?” in the foreword.

Well, Suzy hunted out the book … I forgot that I had ever mentioned it … and I spent a few enjoyable hours reliving the story of Hawk and Willow. This was a wonderful gift and a nice tone-setter for the week to come!

Week of Joe is really that … a week of time in which I open a gift a day, get my pick of meals, and pretty much do what I want. Which is to say, not a whole lot unlike all the other days of my life, but with some of the things I enjoy appearing in wrapping paper. Yet some gifts are not wrapped, and those are great, too. Like the next present to come my way …

Most days, on returning from work, I’ll get the mail on the way into the neighborhood. On one such occasion, I found a Spider-man comic in the mailbox. It’s odd, because it was addressed to me but I didn’t order it.

Now, the previous year, to support some niece or nephew in a school fund drive, Suzy got me a Spider-man comic subscription. Oddly, the story had been retooled and it centered around a teenage Peter Parker, complete with blushing girlfriends, holding hands, and, of course, manic fights with all manner of bad guys. I’d read the stories and then send the comics off to my friend Pete … a comic book aficionado … so he could enjoy them with his daughter, Kate.

But, in a blog of digressions, even I realize I’m wandering! Suzy felt badly for getting me a less than age-appropriate gift and was looking to atone … I appreciated last year’s subscription and love Spider-man, but maybe I get a bit less out of the teenage variety. So, this year she did it again … but got me a great version! The “Big Time Amazing Spider-man”!! And so, for another year, I’ll get to read about my favorite web-head wall crawler!

In addition to reading bunches, I like to write; as in, with a pen, on paper, and (snail) mail them to friends and family. Long ago someone said something about how great it is to get a letter in the mail: the unexpectedness of it; the novelty; the fact that someone somewhere is thinking about you.

That must have been a formative moment because these days I will write 5-6 cards or letters a month and send them off to people. Those people are mostly my mother or uncle, but I send cards for birthdays and notes to those who I have long neglected or just want to touch base with. It’s more effort, more time, and more costly than email, but very much more worth it.

Suzy knows this and, for my next gift, she got me two boxes of note cards to fuel my habit. One had a Frank Lloyd Wright design on front, the other were abstract paintings by Wolf Kahn. Delightful outsides to inspire my efforts on the insides!

On the next day I received a new wallet. Practical, utilitarian, and absolutely welcome.

While I’ve been a trifold wallet carrier for years, she got me a bi-fold wallet and, as Bill Bryson seems to say a lot, I like it very much. The “fold in half” nature of the bi-fold keeps the wallet slimmer (think about it: folding in half doubles the thickness; folding by three triples the thickness) and that’s a real consideration for me. I used to carry a fanny pack but recently moved away from them. I personally don’t really care if I’m fashionable but I seemed to be going through them quickly and couldn’t find a new one that I liked. So, instead, I find a pocket somewhere to tuck my phone, keys, keycard (for work), and my wallet. Except now I have a slim enough wallet that I can sit on it (i.e., put it in my back pocket) without it being a literal pain in the butt!

In a show of “no aspect of your life forgotten”, Suzy also got me a collapsible cup for hiking. Whenever I go out hiking, I need to consider how to drink and how to measure water (for adding to freeze dried). If I’m on a trying outing, I’ll forego most amenities, but those are farther between these days and so I enjoy a cup. I usually carry a thermal cup but that has three disadvantages: it’s bulky, there isn’t an easy way to measure fluid capacity with it, and, ironically, it keeps my tea too hot and I either burn my mouth or sit around all night with a beverage I can’t drink!

And so I received a silicone collapsible cup: it folds down smaller than a bi-fold wallet, it has internal markings indicating fluid capacities, and it should cool quickly enough to allow me to enjoy my tea with everyone else. A perfect companion for hiking! The only question I have about it is that it’s rated at 180 degrees F … and, if I’m not mistaken, my tea makin’ water is probably north of 200 degrees F! I guess we should see what happens!

In yet another display of remembering all the things I like, Suzy had a woodworking brand made for me! Plug it in, let it heat up for 15 minutes, and I can brand Handcrafted by Joe Abbott into all of my projects. And, I have already used it while making a shipping container that I sent to my mother! Now to retroactively stamp all those projects I have about the house and yard!

In my 2009 Greed and Excess® posting I wrote about receiving a book on the Periodic Table of Elements. It’s fantastic stuff and I still go through that book. In an echo from last year, Suzy got me The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. I’d read about this book on some news website or other that I troll and am fascinated: it’s a collection of stories about science and discovery specifically around the elements. The subtitle is: … and other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements. I can hardly wait to get into it!

You might need more coaxing so allow me to reproduce the front cover flap here …

Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missiles made of cadmium (Cd, 48)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie’s reputation? And why did tellurium (Te, 52) lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history?

The periodic table is one of our crowning scientific achievements, but it’s also a treasure trove of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The fascinating tales in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon, gold, and every single elements on the table as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, conflict, the arts, medicine, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them.

There’s a bit more but, if anyone possibly required additional incentive, I’ll have to write them off as dispassionate, disinterested, or too busy reading People magazine to make time for the good stuff.

That leaves me with the final gift from Week of Joe, and it was a good one: two tickets to A Christmas Story at the 5th Avenue Theater here in Seattle. While the 5th Avenue Theater is a venerable institution, A Christmas Story has been dearer to both Suzy and I since we first saw the movie many years ago. Since then we bought the DVD and watch it yearly, we bought the Jean Shepherd book on which it’s based (In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash), and now thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation to the stage as we followed the semi-fictional story (based on anecdotes from Shepherd’s childhood) of Ralphie and his quest for the ultimate Christmas gift: a “Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time”.

And that was Week of Joe 2010, from the perspective of Suzanne’s gifts to me. I was additionally blessed this year by having my mother present who, in turn, bestowed me with additional gifts: treats from northern Minnesota, a tool that will allow me to smoke meats in the oven (yum!!), and, of course, a book: Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury (subtitled: … Seven Wonders of the Modern Age From the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal). Not only my cup of tea, but the cup overfloweth!

Out of Fallout: New Vegas

I completed Fallout: New Vegas (FNV) today. Which is an odd thing to say, really, in that I finished playing through the game a week ago and intend to give it another play through.

So, did I complete it or not? The answer lies in the achievements!

Achievements are awards that allot a player points, or “Gamer Score” (GS), for accomplishing tasks in the game or for doing things in a certain way. For instance, the game FNV has four different endings and has unique achievements for being able to play through all four ways. Additionally, you get GS by completing achievements for winning at gambling to the degree you’re tossed out of the New Vegas casinos, for finding\collecting hidden trinkets (snow globes, if you will) from across the “wasteland”, and for playing mini-games of hacking terminals, crafting items, or modifying your weapons. And, you’ll accomplish achievements for just playing through the game (completing the “main quest”) and lots of other things.

So, in this play through I netted all achievements except two: one for healing myself by eating food (as opposed to using “magic” healing potions or “stimpacks”) and another for completing the game on “hardcore” mode. I considered playing hardcore on the initial play through, but knew that I enjoyed this game and would be entertained enough to play a second time. What I didn’t realize at the time was that there were four endings to get through. And, to be honest, I’m a bit played out on FNV just now.

In addition to being a long enterprise, the game suffers in two ways: first, every time you enter a new area the game displays a terribly long transition sequence; and second, the game will sometimes crash.

The transition sequence is most notable when you want to head to a specific place a long ways away and you have to cut through a lot of “areas”. Let’s say I’m talking to the Brotherhood of Steel (BoS) Elder in his bunker and I want to go visit Mr. House in New Vegas. If I know exactly where I want to go (and have been there before), I can “fast travel”. Great! Here’s what that sequence would look like:

1. Take leave of the Elder and exit BoS Level 2. Transition.
2. Exit the BoS Level 1 to the Hidden Valley bunker. Transition.
3. Exit the bunker into Hidden Valley. Transition.
4. Fast travel to New Vegas’ North Gate. Transition.
5. Enter the gate.Transition.
6. Head to the Lucky 38 casino and enter. Transition.
7. Take the elevators to the Penthouse level. Transition.
8. Talk to Mr. House.

So, if transitions take 20 seconds or so, you’ve just spent the better part of two and a half minutes for the benefit of maybe 45 seconds of game “walking”! You don’t always need that many transitions but they happen enough that it’s a real distraction.

And the crashing! On the first day I got the game I hit a spot in which I could reproduce a crash with excellent fidelity: just walk along the desert and go in that general area. *Boom* … and I was only an hour or so into the game! While most days the game is stable, today was a bad day. I started FNV, loaded my saved game, and it crashed. I did the same thing two more times before I loaded an older saved game and played from there. In all, it crashed another three times after that. Frustrating!

But I’ll be back … because, in addition to getting GS in general, it’s considered a trick to complete all the achievements in any one game. Not impossible and, with time applied to it, most games can be beaten in their entirety. But, for a casual gamer like me, that’s not a bad trick at all. So the hours of enjoyment I’ve had with it outweigh the above problems … unless the crashing were to happen like it did today!

It should be noted that Gamer Score affords you nothing and is worthless for all but bragging rights. Pretty much mindless and brilliant at the same time!

Snowing in Seattle

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk about Week of Joe (WoJ) or the big snow from Thanksgiving. I have pictures from the snow but none from the birthday … so that decides it!

I decided to work from home the Monday after the WoJ (which I took off from work). It would allow me to catch up on a week of mail and it turns out, that was a really good idea.

The snow started early, tapered off before noon, and then began anew just after the lunch hour. And kept at it until we had a nice layer of freezing snow on top of the wet roads. Nothing like black ice with a couple inch coating of snow.

If you’re driving slowly and have a reasonable vehicle, you suffer little more than a delay in getting home. If you’re going too fast, lack skill and\or intelligence, or luck out by being around others with those detriments, being late getting home will be the least of your worries.

I’ll let the pictures speak for the experience but I will relay a short story: Suzanne called me from work and explained she was going to wait out the worst of the traffic before heading home. It was madness to add one more vehicle to the road during rush hour (which could have been renamed “crash hour”) but at 8:30 PM she made tentative steps home. And every hour thereafter we’d touch base on her progress: 9:30, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, 1:30, and finally at 2:30 she reported that she’d traveled roughly 2-3 miles of the 15 mile trip and was going to get off and try the back roads home.

This was a gutsy call: the freeway wasn’t moving but there were other travelers around; back roads promised mostly unknown and unknowable conditions. Heck, the DOT was transmitting that all streets were “green” and moving normally! But, she took the next exit and promised to call when it wouldn’t jeopardize her safety.

At about 3:30 AM on Tuesday I got a call from her: she was at the bottom of the driveway, couldn’t make it up, and would appreciate if I’d get the door unlocked and leave a clear path to the bathroom. After getting her home safely, I’d do anything!

We worked from home the next couple days and I managed to get her car into the garage on Wednesday. By Thursday, Thanksgiving, most of the snow was gone. Today, nothing but a memory and some great pictures! More out on Flickr!

A whole new home

With a title like that, I’d expect to write a bit about moving or something … but, nope, we’re still here in glorious SeaTac, WA. Home to Seattle’s main airport, seedy strip malls, and the infamous “99” (also known as “International Blvd”, “Pacific Hwy South”, and “SR 99”) … infamous due to illicit activities that were once commonplace along the stretch of this road near the airport.

And yet it’s not nearly that bad.

Schools are middling, but we have no kids. There’s a nearby private school of some modest note that we’ve supported through donations in the past. There are new neighborhoods tucked in and gentrifying the more established communities of apartments, condos, trailer parks, and one-story ramblers. And 99 was cleaned up decades ago: you see more influence from the new Light Rail transit system than you do from the sole “gentleman’s club” that remains.

We lucked out and got a place with a moderate-sized lot (about a third acre) with views of the Tukwila\Renton valley and Mount Rainer. And, while we’re close to the airport, we found a small pocket of nearly soundproof solitude. Our home is so seldom troubled by air traffic noise that, when we do hear a plane, we wonder in earnest if someone isn’t attempting to ditch somewhere!

So, along with “not being bad”, we are nearby to shopping (Costco and Home Depot see most of our patronage), chain restaurants (not just drive-thrus), and on a quick road out of town to the south. Additionally, we have found a few ma-and-pa eateries in Burien and Renton that can best be described as “gems”. In all senses of the word it’s “home” … but it’s what’s in our house that mostly makes it home.

  

For a while we’d been interested in getting hardwoods in the backroom. We had carpeting but Suzy wanted a more “finished” look. That and the fact that our sliding door to the deck entered on cream-colored carpeting, which always seemed odd to her. So, when we coordinated the details for having hardwoods installed in the backroom and the existing floors refinished, we came to the front room: also carpeted. In the end, we decided that room would benefit from hardwoods, too.

Normally we have lots of pictures from “before” and “after” but that’s because we’d done the work. For the floors, no way. We brought in a team to make it happen and then we cleared out for a week to let them have at it.

When we returned Suzy thought it would be a good time to slap on a coat or two of paint in the backroom and, to my ever-amusement, looked around and said, “OK, now we need some rugs”.

I’m not completely sure why that tickles me … we absolutely needed them. The rooms were cold and hollow without rugs or something, and tapestries have been out of vogue since the last castle was erected. It made sense. But, after getting in new flooring, it humored me to think, “OK, let’s cover that!”

But, as usual, Suzy did what Suzy does and found something unique without being weird, stylish without pushing the avant-garde envelope, and … a consideration of great merit … economical.

Our home has a "nature” décor that we enjoy and so the new rugs were picked to continue that motif. The rug for the front room looks like river rock, with raised nap for the “stones” and, while rectangular, without straight edges. The backroom is more traditional in that it’s rectangular, has straight sides, and the nap is all one length (a gloriously cushy length, I’ll add), but the pattern is reminiscent of wood grain or the striations you might find in sandstone. Just a bully job by Mrs. A!

So the house we’re in continues to be our home but we’re finding new ways to do it up. There’s another project brewing of epic proportions but I won’t speak more of that yet.

A new day

This is the time of year I look forward to: a time with no obligations!

While Suzy and I create our own maelstrom of activity, we do look forward to those days in which all (ok, “the majority”) of our debt is paid and we can relax and do whatever we wish. Those days are here. Sure, we have gifts to wrap, family gatherings to attend, and odds and ends projects around the house … but we could sleep the day away and it wouldn’t matter. So, with all that time, we’ll dig in!

I woke last night around 1 AM to high winds and wondered what the morning would bring. Nearly every year in the Seattle area, strong winds blow in, mess things up, and then head off to the mountains or out to sea. This year, they were back.

I managed to get back to sleep and arose at 6; still too dark out to see what disruptions the evening brought but not too dark for a small grey cat to feel it was his right to get out there. So, the morning weekend routine started: I brushed my teeth, pulled on some sweats, retrieved the paper, fed the cats, and harnessed “the grey one”. Over the next hour I read the paper, prepared some tea (seemed a better morning beverage than a “Rock Star”), emptied the dishwasher (quietly!), and made a little toast.

About then the big cat was sated, the little one was willing to come in, and I was ready to crank out a bit of blogging. And, from the upstairs window I could (in warmth) survey the back yard.

For the most part … nothing. We did have the stalks broken off our pampas grasses; the fake, lighted trees flanking the fountain were tipped over, a chair slid across the deck, and a deer I’d staked to the back lawn appeared to have wished for flight … but, most of these are righted easily and the worst merely require another growing season. You can’t beat Mother Nature but this is as close to a draw as you’ll get.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get on with some stories, shall we?

Halloween came and went (we had the usual ~50 kids visit) and my birthday approached. Suzy knew we’d be away on my actual birthday so she made me a cake early. I love all her baking but I’m not usually a “chocolate guy”. Yeah, it’s tasty, but there are a lot of other flavors out there that are delicious, too. And still, my all-time favorite flavor is vanilla. Go figure.

As I’d like anything she made, I left it to her … but she is a chocoholic of the highest order. So, I got the following cake:

 

And it was delicious.

Just before my birthday we took a week off from work and headed to Whistler, BC. We took my mother, our cats, and spent the majority of the week at a condo near the Village while our floors were redone here. The pictures of that week are up on Week of Joe 2010 on Flickr, but here are a few highlights:

Yes, big breakfasts make the “highlights” picture. A couple things to notice here: first, there’s a bag of Old Dutch potato chips in the background … love them from my youth (they were not part of the breakfast); next, the bacon is from Nueske’s and is delicious … if you can try some, don’t pass it up!; and then there are the eggs … the pale one in the middle did not come from our chickens … there’s definitely a difference in home-raised chicken eggs.

The other photos show a few fun “posing” shots from the outing: the three of us at an overlook somewhere above Squamish on the Sea-to-Sky Highway; my mother and I in The Village posing by the Olympic Rings that were featured prominently during the 2010 Winter Olympics; and my Momma and Suzy posing on either side of an Inukshuk in The Village.

That trip was marked by disaster on the smallest scale. Nothing terrible but lots of little gaffes and missteps. I’d detail them here for humor’s sake but I also want to let that part of the trip fade into forgetfulness. And so, I’ll move on.

But, I’ll move on later. Time to get dressed and tackle the world. That’s what’s nice about not having to do anything … you can get so much done!

Hoping you’ll have a profitable day yourselves! Enjoy!

Holidays are on us!

Over the holidays I plan on writing here a lot more than I have in the past month or so. Which shouldn’t be hard as I’ve only written a few times. Well, for anyone with even a few holiday plans or events, I can assume I’ll get a little sympathy … or at least empathy. Do I hear an “Amen”?

With construction in the house, family visiting, a birthday, Thanksgiving, and now Christmas, I’ve had a lot going on. And then work was, as it usually is before the end of the year, packed with “last minute” projects before most of the folks around go on vacation. I will be sticking around but plan on carving a little time out for blogging (at home … at work, well, there’ll be work!). As the many events before suggest, I have a lot of stories.

The one hard part is that I’m itching to do a little coding! I have a few unique opportunities here … Visual Studio 2010 was released early last year and I haven’t really “dug in”, I have a new phone and Microsoft just released some tools for the phone, and I have other opportunities, too … which I won’t go into details about. Anyhow, there’s a lot of fun to be had there.

But, for now I plan to pop a few stories off the stack, get in some quality time with Suzy, and clean off my desk at home. And, now that I think about it, that would make a pretty cool story: what’s on Joe’s desk?

Hope your holidays are starting off well and you have lots to do, too! It always makes for more fun!