This excellent weblog has just sucked, like, two hours of my life away. But it was worth it. I now have a burning desire to accumulate lots of obscure German designer board games. 🙂

I braved the hordes at the post office today to send off the last of my Christmas cards and packages. There I discovered that a new law went into effect today: anyone sending packages over a certain size must provide ID and have it recorded. I’m all for preventing terrorism and stuff, but why introduce this ten days before Christmas? All it did was double the waiting time and hassle everybody from the customers to the clerks.

You know in Amelie, when she returns the box of childhood treasures to Dominic Bretodeau? I feel like him right now. Thanks to the internet, I managed to track down my favorite holiday song of all time: Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. (Actually there are several versions of it, all from the same album, but my favorite one is the one with the “Christmas bells, those Christmas bells…” chorus.) I don’t think I’ve heard this song in twenty years. I can close my eyes and remember listening to it with my Dad on the stereo one early Christmas morning. It’s nice.

Some SMC chick (i.e. a girl from my university‘s sister school) has made it through to the second round of American Idol auditions. I got a laugh out of reading her comments. She literally mentions her religion in every. single. sentence. “God gave me a little place… When I sing it’s like God gives me a whole new voice… It’s like going to Church… My faith in myself is zero, but my faith in God is 100.” Dude, I almost hope she does get on the show. I’m sure it can only be improved by the addition of a fervent (and crazy-sounding) Catholic.

I’m selling an autographed CD, if anyone’s interested. It’s Ben Lee’s “Something Borrowed, Something Blue” EP.

New Poll: Do you send Christmas cards? I’m one of those people that always buys them in November and then somehow never gets around to actually sending them. I’ve got a whole stack in front of me waiting to be addressed. So yeah, I’m sending them this year, but they’re never going to make it in time. *shrug* It’s the thought that counts, right?

Jakob says in the future, we’ll all be Harry Potter. Interesting.

As expected, Australia pounded the Poms again in yesterday’s one-day cricket match. For those of you interested in this sport (which I am rapidly becoming obsessed with), check out How to Explain the Rules of Cricket. It uses a pie-eating analogy. (Yes, it’s a joke. But it actually still kinda works. I think my baseball-analogy would work better for Americans, though, if I ever get around to writing it.)

Since I’ve had a couple requests for it, here’s my Amazon Wish List yet again. I’ve added a whole bunch of stuff. Sadly, I did not add a TiVo or a Segway.

Bow down before the Queen of Putrescence! I just cleaned out the “worm buckets”, which are two plastic buckets we keep under the sink for vegetable scraps. The theory is, once one is full, you start filling the second. By the time the second is full, the first has “broken down” (i.e. rotted) a little bit and you dump it on the worms. Then you start filling that bucket all over again. Unfortunately in reality I tend to forget about the buckets for weeks and weeks. Finally today I broke down and opened them up. It was – hands down – the nastiest sight I’ve ever seen in my life. One wasn’t too bad, and I managed to hold my breath long enough to dump it in the worm farm. The other though… *shudder* Something we put in there bred slugs. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject. Never ask me about it again. I took care of it. Now I’m going to go take forty-seven showers.