Reducing Randomness on a Winter's Eve
Well, it's New Year's Eve, and we've already passed the leap second (it happened about 4 hours ago as I write this).
The kids are watching the centennial edition of Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve Whatever. At least some of them are. Half of them are asleep. Or maybe all of them are half asleep.
I'm actually working now, closing down one client's services at his request--he is shutting down some parts of his web service as of 2359 EST--and taking backups. And playing a little bit of Bejeweled.
I'd right now be uploading a few pictures: one of a thoughtful Hanukkah gift from my wife to the family (a sign that reads "Beer, It's What's For Dinner",
hanging now in the kitchen), and some nonlinear shopping at the local Key Food,
(the price on the left is for 18 eggs, the price on the right for a dozen; neither of these are sale prices) but I'm finishing up a year of serious mechanical malfunctions:
- Wetware breakage, as son #3 broke his leg in school in a freak accident jumping off a chair. That was early on in the year...everything else happened since October.
- My laptop died unceremoniously a few weeks ago, prompting me to hurriedly purchase a replacement
- The replacement, of course, came with Windows Vista Home Premium. I tried, really honestly tried to upgrade to Ultimate "seamlessly" and "live", only to find out that it repeatedly broke installed programs over and over (one of which appears to be the Palm Desktop software that I'd use to synchronize my Treo with my laptop. Guess where all my pictures are?) There goes 3 weeks of productivity down the drain.
- We had more sewer backups--twice--nothing as bad as last year's dump, although there was still enough icky stuff to ruin a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps the line was clogged with all my lost productivity from the item above.
- Tonight, when I went to rent some movies to watch this evening, I found that the magnetic stripe on my credit card couldn't be read--FAIL--which was just icing on the cake following....
- The pièce de résistance: finishing it all off, our car decided to up and die on us twice in the last few weeks, this last time prompting us to realize that it's a sign from above to get a new car.
"Would you like some cheese with that whine?"
Of course, we did have our high points: son #1's wonderful Bar Mitzvah on Purim was wonderfully planned by my loving wife and executed by Son #1 himself. My sister gave birth to my second niece, Kaia. And we actually did have a wonderful family trip to Québec, Montréal and Ottawa this summer; partly business and partly pleasure (our first family vacation since 2003), and the high point of the end of the year was our annual fire-hazard known as Hanukkah: