Ups and Downs

The coffee looks like I messed up the math — I mean it is seriously strong coffee. Typing may become a little jittery soon.

Went to Kohl’s last night (it’s a department store chain). All their Christmas decorations and related items were marked down 50-55%. Not only does the Christmas season seem to come earlier every year, now the Day After Christmas sales are coming earlier, too. If stuff is half-price now, what will it be December 26th?

I bought a cool Christmas stocking holder. It’s St. Nick with a long trailing list of naughty and nice kids to serve as the hook for the stocking. Half-price.

There are holiday lights up all over the neighborhood, of course. And, as always, there are some idiots leaving them on all night. Get a timer guys; how hard can it be? We are expected to turn our porch lights off in this neighborhood at 10PM (unless we need them, of course.) We get to see the stars that way.

The chicken club tacos at Chili’s are pretty good.

Last week I saw a young woman I’ve known for several years. She was carrying a small dog. Apparently this Jack Russell went with her everywhere. Inseparable.

I learned last night that she had broken up with the guy who gave her the dog. And he took the dog back! I suppose the only good side to that story is that his taking back the dog confirmed the rightness of the breaking up.

NewMexiKen did spend a lot of time yesterday redoing some of the underlying code for this site. You may notice I’ve added an Astronomy Picture of the Day thumbnail and link, and an Albuquerque weather sticker. (Right sidebar.) I failed at getting either Picasa Web Albums or Flickr to work — that is, to load thumbnails from them to this page. Anyone know the secret?

Don’t forget to send Cat a postcard.

And this, your most important assignment today, go read Bill Moyer’s talk at West Point. Allow time to recover.