End of November

So it's the last day of November, and Christmas is coming soon. But I don't feel it. I'm just not in the Christmas spirit yet, and I don't know why. Here are some possible reasons:
1) We're moving, so we haven't gotten the Christmas decorations out yet.
2) It hasn't snowed anything more than a flurry or two yet.
3) The economy is so bad that it's hard to think about spending money frivolously.
4) Work is so busy right now that it's on my mind a lot.
5) I'm getting older.

I don't want to accept #5, so it must be one of the others, or maybe all of the others together. And a couple of things DID happen a few days ago that has STARTED to get me in the Christmas mood. First, my kids each gave me a Christmas list. Second, we drew names for presents at my family's Thanksgiving get together on Thursday, and that gives me a couple of kids to shoot for. And the kids that Meredith and Natalie drew are both about 2 years of age, which is a GREAT age for presents. They're pretty much going to like anything that we get them.

So maybe I'll start getting into the Christmas spirit for real soon.

I'd better. There are only 25 days left!

REALLY Red States

Every day there's another story about the state of the U.S. economy, and every industry in America, it seems, is asking for government money--usually in the hundreds of billions of dollars--to fix the problem.

The problem is, though, if you add up all of these requests for money and all of these government plans, you start getting into totals that are multi-trillion dollar totals. And I don't know--maybe the U.S. is so big that it can say, "What the hell! What's a trillion or two dollars here or there?" But I don't think so.

Another thought that occurred to me is that--at the rate we're going--sooner or later the U.S. government might own EVERY supposedly "private" industry in America. Once that happens, how is it any different from communism? And maybe that's been people's plans all along. Look at Henry Paulson in the photo to the right. Go on. Look at him! Doesn't he look like a commie to you? (And notice the red tie? It's a symbol! I bet that pattern on the tie--which is too blurry to see in this photo--is a hammer and sickle!) He could be sitting right beside Nikita Kruschev in that photo and he'd fit right in! The commies have infiltrated our government, just like we feared for all those years, and now--when we're distracted by a little economic challenge--they're using that distraction to take over our country!

Commie Bastards!

Couldn't Stop Myself

As I predicted, I was unable to take off the entire day on Thanksgiving. I was planning not to do ANY kind of moving on Thanksgiving. I was just going to rest. But I ended up spending about 2 1/2 hours cleaning out the delivery truck we'd borrowed (It was pretty dirty, especially in the cab) and filling up the truck for the first move this morning. So I failed at relaxing for an entire day. But it's not my fault! Really!

First, Thanksgiving dinner was so early that we were back home by about 3:00. And that meant there were hours left in the day. I couldn't just sit around.

Second, I decided that I WOULD just sit around. I'd watch the football games. But I turned on the first game and--as expected--the Lions were getting blown out. So I didn't see any reason to sit around and watch a game unfolding pretty much the way I was expecting it to do (The same could be said for the second game, too). Why waste my time doing this, I thought, when I could actually be working? So I went and started loading up the truck.

It's not the biggest truck (It's maybe the size of the smallest U-haul truck), but it's still pretty big. Our dining room was filled with boxes, but I put every box in the dining room and all of the boxes in storage in the basement in the front 1/3 of the truck and still had space to spare, so I loaded up a few bookshelves and most of the outdoor furniture we own (which is going to be a problem for us as we have only a small patio at our new house and we have enough outdoor furniture to fill the entire patio two chairs high. We're even leaving some behind!). We fit so much in this first load that we're going to do later this morning, in fact, that I'm worried we may move too much too soon and have all day Sunday to do nothing but lament that most of our stuff is at the new house but all of the big stuff is at the old house.

Then again, I've been conistently wrong about how long it would take me to do most things in this process. I honestly thought I'd paint all three rooms that we painted on Friday, Saturday, and MAYBE Sunday morning, and it took until late Wednesday to finish. And Tuesday night I sent Lisa a text message that said, "Cell phone dying. Will be home at 12:30." It was more like 1:30. That's pretty typical for me.

So don't be surprised to read a blog entry in a day or two that talks about how I didn't get everything done as quickly as I thought I would.