- It’s an absolute delight to see Christmas through a child’s eyes.
- DaughterGeeding can be just too precious sometimes, and I certainly don’t deserve her. Driving home after the Christmas Eve service we were teasing that the weather was really bad where he’s at and there was no way Santa could see through the snow while flying. This was just an attempt to get her to say that’s why Santa uses Rudolph as she’s been watching it quite a bit, but instead, she said, “Well, that’s okay. As long as we are all together as a family, that’s all that matters.”
- I’m surprised that the 24-hour Christmas music station continues to play Christmas music after Christmas. Surely they take a huge ratings drop after Christmas.
- On Christmas Eve, Santa, in a Lowe’s truck, dropped off a new washer and dryer and hauled off the washer and dryer my father bought in 1992. I think he really got his money’s worth out of those things as they never malfunctioned until about a year ago. That thing washed my clothes from high school, college, as a working adult, and my kids’ clothes, and the last thing from my childhood home in Mineral Wells that I continually used. In a way, I felt like it was the last piece of my youth to let go. Lowe’s offers free delivery but with a catch, you have to purchase all their accessories even if you don’t need them, like water and dryer vent hoses. The installer saw my hoses were just fine and gave me his unopened package and told me to take it back and get a refund. Just the water hoses was over thirty bucks, and yes, I did tip the installer.
- I watching Working Girl for the first time and was quite surprised at all the actors I recognized – Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Melanie Griffith, Alec Baldwin, Joan Cusack, Nora Dunn, Oliver Platt, Kevin Spacey, Olympia Dukakis, David Duchovny, Ricki Lake.
- I also watched and pleasantly enjoyed the 2015 movie Vacation with Ed Helms and Christina Applegate which is a sequel, remake, and reboot (per IMDB) of the franchise with Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo. Chris Hemsworth is also in the movie and plays a DFW weatherman that is married to Audry who lives in a Plano mansion. He attempted a Texan accent but for me it sounded more like his Australian twang. As much as I enjoyed and laughed at the movie, it did bring me down as I realized I’m very much like Russ and his father Clark. We sacrifice higher paying jobs and other things to spend more time with our family, often don’t feel respected by them and others, get laughed at doing well-meaning stuff, get overlooked, fall on our face trying to fix things or make things right, feel our wives could have done better, people lack confidence in us, and others are reluctant to join us in things we want to do.
- I watched Vacation by renting it on Google Play and casting it from my phone to the Chromecast on our television. While it was playing, I picked up my phone to check something and noticed that my phone would show the actors and their character names as they appeared on the screen, continuously. This is probably old news for everyone else and available on other devices, but I thought it was pretty darn cool. If I wanted to know more about the actor, all I had to do was select him or her.
- The coolest bit of trivia from the movie – During the opening credits there is a brief still of the late John Hughes and his family on vacation. John Hughes was the writer of the original Vacation (1983), European Vacation (1985), and Christmas Vacation (1989).
- The dogs woke me up in the middle of the night to go outside and relieve themselves. It was a full moon out and the weather was nice, so I thought I’d step outside as well and embrace the solitude. I looked up at the roof of our backyard porch and saw what I thought was a black cat staring at me. It didn’t fear me one bit, and for a while, I couldn’t shoo it away. It disappeared for a bit and reappeared at the other end of the porch roof, and then decided to climb up the roof of our two-story house and then climb the chimney. I promise this wasn’t a dream, but it was a surreal experience. The next day I got an email from our HOA saying beware of a bobcat that was spotted in the neighborhood, so maybe what I thought was a black cat was a bobcat and me and the dogs got lucky.
- Our area had a lot of bad storms recently, but my area didn’t get the brunt of it. If you follow local meteorologist Pete Delkus on Twitter, he went after people that called him out for interrupting a spare bowl game for severe weather coverage.
- Pictures of Pete Delkus baseball cards when he was attempting a career in the sport.
- Until I read and saw the picture in this tweet from @WestWingReport, I thought JFK was the last acting president to ride through Dallas in an open top car, but it was Gerald Ford. That lead me to do a little research and I found this DailyMail piece which stated the Ford campaign wanted to use it in a commercial, but it was a turn off for focus group since it was just 13-years after the death of JFK. In particular, this line from the commercial bothered them, “When a limousine can parade openly through the streets of Dallas, there’s a change that’s come over America.” You can see the unaired campaign video in the link provided above.
- Dallas Observer – The Good, The Bad And, Of Course, The Ugly: Dallas’ 2015 Quotes Of The Year
- The Guardian – Jesus statue’s promotion to army general vetoed by Guatemalan president
- Florida news – Woman arrested for riding motorized cart through Walmart while eating chicken, drinking wine
- It was cold yesterday, but I ran the AC a lot more than I wanted last week.
