Christmas Packages

Tomorrow starts the nearly daily trips at lunch to the Post Office to mail Christmas boxes to relatives in far flung lands. It is always a pleasure to stand around and wait and then have to go through the little verbal song and dance about how fast would you like it to get there, do you need insurance, or delivery confirmation. Now they have got an exit spiel too, about that did you know the Postal Service now accepts credit and debit cards as well as checks. I guess I could go to one of those mailing places, but they are hit and miss and charge more. I will just suffer and use the experience as my penance for actually not visiting family over the holidays.

Christmas Music

I’m a sucker for Christmas Music. Not just any Christmas Music though, mostly I go for for the slightly weird and non-commercial type stuff. I own about 20 Christmas CD’s and about 5 of them come from Rhino Records if that helps. Every once and a while I pick a CD that I listen to once, and my Christmas CD that falls into this category is “Blame it on Christmas.”

Don’t be seduced by the glowing reviews on the bottom of that page. If you want a humorous Christmas CD buy Dr. Demento presents The Greatest Christmas Novelty CD Of All Time.

Why Won’t It Start

The streak of failures continues:

Tonight for no apparent reason Donna’s Mom’s 97 Honda Civic failed to start. It had started fine 2 times earlier in the evening, but the 3rd time was a charm. To ice the cake it decided to not start 25 miles from home in a quick-stop parking lot in Augusta. Plenty of battery power, it just wouldn’t turn over. Mom is a AAA member so we called a tow truck to haul the car back to Honda Cars of Aiken so they can hopefully fix it in the morning. We called a friend to come over to Augusta to take Donna and Mom home while I waited for the tow truck. Fun way to spend a Friday night. At least it wasn’t raining….

Custom Calendar

Had high hopes of the dropping the top for the drive home, but they were dashed when the sun never materialized and the temps never made it into the 50’s. I guess I have lived too long in SC as I’m now getting colder at a much higher temperature…

My 2003 calendar arrived yesterday. I had a custom one made online at Shutterfly using the 12 best pictures from the Barndoor Fan Club’s Twilight Photo Contest. You can get your own too if you want, $24 and 4 days is all it takes. Start by picking your pictures.

Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/02: 333

No Ice

Not only did we miss out on the ice storm, we are now missing out on ice cubes. For the second time in the 7 year life span of our refrigerator the ice make has quit working. The first time, about 3 years ago, it was the valve that controls the water to the ice maker. You couldn’t just buy the valve you had to buy the whole ice maker kit. When it broke the other day I figured it was the valve again. I still had the old broken one, so I took it to work to see if I could make it work again. Sure enough I took it all apart, cleaned it and it worked. So I put it on the fridge when I got home yesterday and guess what – no ice. Must not be the valve. Up into the attic I went and dragged down the box with the rest of the kit. Tonight I replaced the ice maker unit itself with the new one – so far no ice. Wiring harness? either that or some thing in the refrigerator itself, because one end of the harness hooks into the back of the fridge….

I’m going to hate to have to go to ice cube trays.

We Escape Unscathed

The ICE STORM OF THE CENTURY never did materialize. It was cold and it did rain/freezing rain a bit around here. Apparently 30-50 miles north of here got it pretty good, while we escaped unscathed. But I guess in some sort of sympathy move they closed the local schools 2 hours early. I wonder which weather forecast they were watching?

Started down, went up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/02: 333

Holy Crap! Close The Schools

I’m actually surprised that they haven’t already done that. The weather people are predicting freezing rain for tomorrow afternoon and usually around here in the wholly-unprepared-for-winter-weather south we close the schools and shut down the city government at the suggestion of cold wet stuff of any kind.