Merry Christmas!

It looks like we had about 3" of snow last night. It looks beautiful outside. It looks like Ohio is getting hit with winter storm warnings in Toledo and freezing rain followed by a nice covering of snow today. We are are not forecast to have any more precipatation; just a nice benign covering of fluffy snow.

Yesterday afternoon after work we stopped at Menards to pick up a box of artificial logs. We had talked before about buying a smaller artificial Christmas tree so we would be more likely to set it up. Takes up less room; not as big of a chore to haul it upstairs, set it up, decorate it; doesn't take up as much room. So we wandered over to the Christmas tree section, just to look, not to buy, and they already had all of their Christmas items 50% off. We got this really nice 4½' tree for only $12.50!

We are so in the 21st century: we picked up a string of Christmas lights, and the bulbs were all LEDs! You are going to start seeing LEDs in more and more applications. They are already very common in traffic lights, and as brake lights on trucks and buses. They use less energy per llumen hour than incandescent, and last for years and years and years. The LED Christmas lights are on the tree, but you can't see them in the picture because the flash from the camera overpowered them.

The fish fry went well last night. We made the beer batter too thick though, and we ran out, plus it was thicker than I would have liked. When I saw that we weren't going to have enough batter, I made sure that I did all of the fish first. The fish tasted very good. Cod.

Last night after dinner we put a fire in the fire place and watched Death to Smoochy. It was very good. The cover has Robin Williams on it, but the main character is actually Ed Norton, who is Smoochy. (I just noticed now that Ed Norton is on the cover too in his Smoochy costume. My eye was always drawn to Robin William's face and I never really paid attention to the lower right corner of the picture.)

For today we rented "Finding Forrester" and "Y tu mamá también". Translated to English it means "And Your Mother Too." It is a Mexican film and has gotten a lot of attention. It is been on more than a couple of film critics top 10 movies of 2002 lists.