This time of the year, there are lots of Christmas displays out. I’ve seen tons of them. Large and small, religious and secular, tasteful and gauche, beautiful and ugly. But this year on my bike rides I saw a new category – whimsically humorous. I don’t even know what the opposite of “whimsically humorous” is, but there’s no doubt that’s the category for this display. There’s no sense in trying to describe it. You simply have to see it. That brings me to my other topic for this paragraph – pictures. I tried sharing pics through Picassa. That seemed to work for a while until some people told me they couldn’t see them. Then I tried attaching them to Emails. Again, some worked, some didn’t. Now I have a new solution, as you can see here!

The second picture is a “digital zoom”, so it’s a little pixelated. What you can’t see in the picture is that the snow man and penguins shake in the breeze as if they were shivering. Way cool!

I’ve been lucky to get several rides in this week, including another 40-miler. Saturday was a no-go due to winds that were consistently 20 MPH, with much higher gusts. I doubt I will get any rides in for a while, because Christmas starts in a short while when I pick up Mark.

Ed Geisendaffer died late last week. I went to his viewing Monday afternoon and ran into some people from Westinghouse. I saw one of my old supervisors, John Asenzi, and the man who was the director of engineering, Bill Patalon. Bill told me that Tony Chaprnka filed for retirement the previous week. I called Tony Saturday, but I haven’t heard back from him yet to get the details.

Another thing I did this week was to learn about WordPress. This is one of the most popular software packages for running web sites. It started out as being blogging software, but it has since grown to be a very capable package. I got interested because Re-Serve found a possible position for me at ACY (Advocates for Children) in Baltimore. ACY wants to re-write their web site in WordPress. I applied and got a phone interview scheduled for Jan 3. I thought it would be a good idea if I figured out what I’m signing up for. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but my solution for sharing pics just happens to involve WordPress.

Tuesday we had a major catastrophe. I punched a microwave button and it snapped, sparked, and smoked. At first I thought it was just a light bulb that had shorted. That’s rare, but it happens sometimes. And one of the light bulbs had exploded. But the next day, I learned that the microwave cooking function was dead, dead, dead. As soon as Danita got home Wednesday, we went out to buy a new one. The appliance store near us could install it Friday. That taken care of,  we had to eat dinner out. One can’t eat dinner at home without a microwave! We went to try a new pizza place, but it was way too loud, so we went to our reliable Tino’s for pizza. Thursday we still didn’t have a microwave, but that’s our normal night for eating dinner out anyway. The store called Thursday evening and said the installers would come between 8 and Noon Friday. That was great. Friday about 6:30 AM, we got a call. The installers were on the way and would arrive in half an hour. That’s no problem for us. We were both up and dressed. But it’s a slow time of the year and Danita was taking her time getting to work. We had to hustle to get Danita off to work (so her car wouldn’t be blocked in by the truck). It turns out the installers had an easy time of it. We have an above-the-range microwave. These are held up by a metal plate on the wall plus two bolts that go through the cabinet above the unit. The new microwave used exactly the same bracket as the old one. The installers were gone by 7:30 – half an hour before we were told they might come. We weren’t complaining. With all the holiday traffic, it was nice to eat dinner at home Friday.

Of course, as we now know, the world did not end this week. I actually learned something about the Mayan calendar. 20 days make a uinal, 18 uinals (360 days) make a tun, 20 tuns made a k’atun, and 20 k’atuns (144,000 days or roughly 394 years) make up a b’ak’tun. Uinals, tuns, and k’atuns are cyclical – when one ends, another one starts. But b’ak’tuns are linear. The third world started on Aug 11, 3114 BC, and would end after 13 b’ak’tuns on Dec 21, 2012. Thus the Mayan “prophecy” that the world would end. The irony was that the Mayans weren’t predicting when the world would change. They were predicting the world would *not* change for a very, very long time. As we know, the Mayans were very bad prognosticators, and Cortez had nothing to do with it. Nobody knows why the Mayan civilization collapsed. But as Doonesbury pointed out, everybody’s still here, unless you’re Mayan.

I hope everybody is doing well, has a merry Christmas, and a wonderful New Year.