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There’s still no shortage of things I’m trying to squeeze in before Christmas. My church is having a Christmas program where people can sing a song or play an instrument, read a poem or verse, put on a play, or something related. I was going to play Silent Night on the saxophone, but a little girl wanted to sing Silent Night. Girls first. I decided to play Kenny G – Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas on the alto sax. I know it’s not a Christian song and doesn’t mention the birth of Jesus, but it’s something I think I can play that I also could find a backing track for that sounded professional. When practicing last week, I discovered a problem with the sax that I couldn’t figure out how to fix myself. It’ll be going in the shop today or tomorrow. If it’s an easy fix, they’ll be able to do it while I wait. Otherwise, it’ll take a day or two. It would be nice to have a professional sax, but it is what it is – and the price was right. HERE’s a pretty cool sax, but look at that price. I wouldn’t have enough money to buy it if I sold both the car and the van – and this isn’t even a very expensive sax! THIS SAX retails for $11,000! It would be cool to have a vintage sax from the ’30s or ’40s, but they aren’t cheap, either. I guess I’ll have to keep on dreaming. I’m still playing bass guitar at church on Sunday morning, and also Wednesday night. I’m definitely not bragging, because there’s nothing here to brag about….but I think I’m getting better each week – but still have a long way to go.

Wayne Matthews performed a 1-man play at church today. He’s a great guy that I’ve known the past 5 years or so.  The homeschool groups hire him to direct and produce their plays, and he does a fantastic job. We were talking after chruch, and he mentioned a recent production he did at a local college. It was his largest and most complicated production to date. He said there were over 200 lighting scenes, a remote controlled something or other that they ran on stage, some origami animals that he had fly overhead. It would have been great to see the play, and even better to be a part of the production. It sounds like it was fun to put all the technical things togethter.

Christmas lights are coming along…….very slowly. There are still just around 13,000 lights up. I haven’t actually had any powered on yet, but did try to get some lit few days ago. I think the COM port on the computer was set to the wrong baud rate. I changed the baud rate to 57600, but haven’t given it another shot to see if any lights come on yet. This is high on the list, so when I get some time to work on this again, we’ll see what happens. There’s still a lot to do and I’m hoping I can get it done and some sequences playing before Christmas.

With the recent snow, I’ve been thinking about getting a couple snowmobiles. Joe,the owner of Apex Auto and Repair in St. Bonifacius, the guy that’s been working on the vehicles and who I recently bought tires from, is a snowmobile guy. He has a couple that I can pick up pretty cheap. He has access to a ’95 Polaris 500 and an older Yamaha Exciter 340. Gotta see how this fits in the budget.

Speaking of budgets, I received an email at work saying we’re not getting any raises again next year. That’s the second year in a row with no raise. The bonus is also up in the air at this point. If there is going to be a bonus check, I’ve heard they’re talking about getting them out in January this year – due to the merger of Century Link and Qwest. I think they want to pay bonuses before Century Link gets too involved and has a bigger influence in our daily operations. Work has been going OK. There are a lot of changes happening and it’s not real clear what they want outcome of all those changes to look like in the end. Some belive they are trying to close down our group and spread the work to other parts of the company. This is happening, but we’re also getting new (though more secretarial-type labor) products to support. I can’t see a clear direction where our department is going. I guess mid 2011 is the expected time to complete the sale of Qwest to Century Link, so we’ll probably get a better idea after that.

Today the lake froze completely over. Not a drop of water to be seen, other than in its frozen state. Check out the video of the geese on the lake yesterday. They remind me of all those penguin movies where they sleep on the ice and move in large groups. It looks like you can double-click on the video to get it to start, and after a little bit, it will start playing. Single-click to get it to stop. Or, you can click on the download video link.

Download Video

Download Video

The snow is flying. The roads are slippery but the car has new tires. The van will get new tires next week. Hopefully the weather and roads will be acceptable for Thanksgiving travel over the river and through the woods. I was able (had to) run the snowblower today. There wasn’t a lot of snow on the ground, but shoveling 250 feet of driveway is out of the question.

I put up some more lights today. There is now a grand total of 13,600 lights up in the trees. None of them are connected to the controller boards, but it’s a start of yet much more work to do to get a light show running this year.

I actually started yesterday, but did a lot more work today. I have the Mega-Tree set up with lights, but haven’t extended the pole or connected the lights to the contr0ller board. There are 4000 lights on the Mega-Tree. I also have 6 mini trees in the yard. The mini trees have 600 lights each, or 3600 in all. That makes a grand total of 7600 lights up so far. Only 12,400 to go. Yes, my goal is 20,000 lights this year. I guess if you count each LED on the Portaflood lights, there will be 1134 lights on those 7 flood lights – but I think I’ll just count them as 7 lights…..or since each light has 3 colors, maybe I could count them as 21.

It’s a sunny, semi-warm day so it would be great to spend all day putting up lights, but I’m working tonight and need to get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a busy day and will have to find some time to sleep. Saturday, I’m taking my bass guitar to a guy to check out a hum that it’s making. Saturday night Holly and I are going to a concert. Sunday is church and I need to play in the band. Sunday afternoon is the Vikings game and then it’s back to work Sunday night.

There’s snow on the ground, the calendar says it’s nearly Thanksgiving – and I just started putting up Christmas lights yesterday! This is worse than last year and I hope I can get it all done in time for THIS Christmas.

Christmas time brings more than the usual memories of Jessica and Erika. Because they came home to us December 20, 2008, Christmas will now always be a hard time for me. I still miss them more than I could ever explain and I still think of them daily. Since they were taken away in January 2009, life has sucked. There’s so much pain that goes with losing children that only someone who has gone through it can understand. There’s also the continuing conflict at home with the rest of the family that makes life hard. I honestly never expect to see an end to my regret and sadness regarding our adoption failure. It was not my choice. I wanted to keep them – Jessica and Erika are my daughters. They are out there in the world somewhere – I don’t even know where they are or how they are doing. Tears are still not an uncommon thing for me. I try to keep busy (actually, I have a million things going on) to keep my mind off of them as much as I can. It’s too painful to think of them all the time, yet I never want to forget them. If I am too idle, I think of them too much and can become lugubrious.

Well, on to other topics. I bought a battery for the 4-wheeler, which fit perfect except the terminals were backwards, the positive and negative were on the wrong sides. I had to make the positive cable longer, which after buying all the parts to do that, cost almost as much as the battery did. It’s working great now. I cleaned the carpet in the house (cat peeing in the basement) and will have to get rid of the cat and buy/install some new carpet soon. That free cat has cost us about $3000 so far over her lifetime. The car got a new tie rod end and 2 tires. The van needs 4 tires and we had a flat 2 nights ago. We’re getting a cord of wood for the fireplace delivered this morning. I’m playing bass guitar in the church band on Sunday morning and Wednesday nights.

This Thanksgiving and Christmas season, let’s all try and find someone to bless. You may know someone who lost a job or a home. There’s always homeless shelters and soup-kitchen type places that can use donations of time and money. There are plenty of families here with a parent away at war that can use a little help this time of year. Let’s put someone else’s need above ours. This should be a year-round thing and not just be a Thanksgiving or Christmas goal. I’m going to try to be on the lookout for another’s needs.