Merry Christmas!

Santa came and brought a big play castle and Mario Kart Wii. Nate got a wool coat and the new Neal Stephenson book. Mara got a neck massaging pillow--being home with the kids gives me such a crick sometimes! Oy! :) --and "De Blob", a Wii game. Thomas got a nerf rifle, and a ninja turtle robot fighting machine. Sethie got a bus, a v-tech laptop, and an electric train.

And we all got the very best gift of all:

Corned beef hash and coffee cake for breakfast!

Oh yeah, and getting to spend this wonderful holiday together.

Uh oh. The hash just set off the smoke alarm.

Nerd Musings

I've been using Google's new browser, Chrome, since it debuted and for the most part, I like its far speedier load times than Internet Explorer. It does have some bugs, a few of which are particularly irritating (for one, it freezes out input on open tabs for a few seconds after you close a tab in the same browser window).

But here's a message I keep getting at the bottom of the pane and seems to coincide with a page taking a particularly long time to load: "Waiting for cache..."

Now, I've been out of computer science-y stuff for awhile now, but that still strikes me as huge contradiction.

Other nerds, am I out of my mind? Does this mean what I think it means and therefore makes no sense?

Captain Beard and the Frozen Snow

T and I decorated Christmas cookies this morning (a good inside activity considering the below-freezing temperatures outside right now. The snow on our lawn is frozen. The SNOW! As in, it has gone from nice and powdery to a lattice of solid ice). Actually, I only frosted the cookies in designs at T's behest and he put the sprinkles and whatnot on them. I like to see a kid throwing caution to the bitter winter wind and going random design nuts on a slew of sugar cookies:

Thomas made this one special and called it "Captain Beard". He told me it was specifically for Nate.

Can Someone Please Explain

To Fisher-Price exactly what is wrong with the following advertisement? Let's start with the very first line of copy. Hello, copy editor? You're fired.