Got out of work a couple hours early, so I hurried home and spent an hour or so digging out our plowed in car. I tried my best to dispose of the snow in a way that wouldn't just make it someone else's problem, mostly piling it against our house and in the strip between the sidewalk and the street. This fastidiousness greatly bothered one of my neighbors who harangued me for ten minutes, demanding that I should just dump the snow in the street for the plows to clean up. I laughed, thinking she was joking, which made her think I was even stupider than she'd previously assessed. I didn't have it in me to argue that any snow the plow pushed away was justgoing to end up blocking in someone else's car or street. But that's South Philly for you. Most of them will just leave their car (or cars) buried until the snow melts.

I, on the other hand, will, weather permitting, now be able to drive all over creation on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, making all my expected visits. Not to mention finally getting some Christmas shopping done.

We got about twenty inches of snow on Saturday. It was pretty fun. I walked about a mile through the winter wonderland of South Philly to taken in a matinee of Avatar with my buddy Michael. The movie was pretty fun. The effects were neat, but I think I would have preferred it without the 3-D, as that made the images lose a bit of their crispness. I expected a much better story from James Cameron and the first twenty minutes convinced me I might even get it, but the script just coasts from there. People who call it Dances With Wolves in space are pretty much right, which is funny to me since I always thought of Dances With Wolves as F Troop without the jokes.

We got in a nice walk to the grocery store on Sunday, mainly because we wanted to walk around in the snow. I made a pot of chili and baked some oatmeal cookies. We watched the first two Harry Potter movies, which K. brought home from the library, and I enjoyed them more than I expected to, although I think the filmmakers are definitely racist against Muggles.

Today is the official first day of Winter, which is awesome because it means the days are getting longer again. We're around the seasonal affect disorder corner! Unfortunately, it also makes me feel bad that I haven't started my Christmas shopping yet.

Well, I took a vacation day yesterday to do some Christmas shopping, but after the ancient car her dad gave us started leaking in the rain and got one of its mirrors knocked off by a passing car, K. decided we should go car shopping instead. It was my first time shopping for cars since I bought my used Ford LTD almost twenty years ago and the first time shopping for a new car for either of us. Since most of our driving is in the city, we decided to get a hybrid.

We test drove three cars. The Ford Fusion hybrid was an amazing car with some really neat gadgets, but at nearly 29k a lot more than we wanted to pay. The Toyota Prius was the car we expected to buy, but frankly it did not impress us. It felt too fragile and toylike, the controls too purely electronic, like playing a video game. The winner, we think, will be the Honda Insight. Not only does it drive exactly like our current car (a 98 Cutlass), it was also the cheapest one we drove. We even managed to unintentionally haggle the price down another two thousand dollars (to 19k) simply by repeating our intention to go home and sleep on it. We're still sleeping on it, and doing some more research, but I think we'll have a new car soon. The only down side is that they only offered us a hundred bucks for our old car, so instead we're going to give it to WXPN, our excellent local public radio music station, for a tax write-off.

Arrrggghhhhh!!! I can't believe the Phillies are trading Cliff Lee! I'm sure it makes sense on paper, what with Cliff Lee becoming a free agent after next year and all, but I still hate it. He's my favorite player on the team by far...

Hmmm.... let's see if I can remember how to use this here blog. Was knocked out of commission by a nasty head cold last week (no flu, fortunately, swine or otherwise). I'm usually pretty invulnerable to colds, but I guess I'm getting weaker in my old age. I will no longer tease the Martians in War of the Worlds for getting wiped out by the common cold. And I will wash my hands even more, if that's possible.

Fortunately I have an infinite capacity for watching television. I spent almost an entire day watching nothing but season one of Jericho on the Sci-Fi channel. Yesterday, I was feeling a lot better, so we decorated the tree while watching all my childhood favorite Christmas specials.

Now I'm back at work, still not feeling 100%, and facing a huge pile of things to do.