{"id":5334,"date":"2008-12-27T09:59:44","date_gmt":"2008-12-27T17:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=5334"},"modified":"2019-12-23T13:29:54","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T21:29:54","slug":"been-a-good-christmas-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2008\/12\/27\/been-a-good-christmas-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Been A Good Christmas This Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:4657,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.flickr.com\\\/photos\\\/djwudi\\\/sets\\\/72157611462539965&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20260307165156\\\/https:\\\/\\\/www.flickr.com\\\/photos\\\/djwudi\\\/sets\\\/72157611462539965&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.flickr.com\\\/photos\\\/djwudi\\\/sets\\\/72157611462539965&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-09 22:14:22&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-09 22:14:22&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:4658,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.librarything.com\\\/work\\\/1995466\\\/39575931&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:4649,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.librarything.com\\\/catalog.php?view=djwudi&amp;shelf=list&amp;sort=authorunflip&amp;sort=authorunflip&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20060224191521\\\/http:\\\/\\\/www.librarything.com:80\\\/catalog.php?view=djwudi&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-07 16:48:18&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-01 19:38:01&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-07 06:23:40&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-07 06:23:40&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:403},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>I keep hearing and seeing people grumble about this Holiday season. Between the economy sucking everyone&#8217;s spare change away and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/djwudi\/sets\/72157611462539965\/\" title=\"Flickr: Snowpocalypse 2008\">Snowpocalypse 2008<\/a> (that Flickr set is now updated with the rest of my snow photos, by the way) burying the entire Northwest coast under more snow than has been seen in a decade (or more), it seems like <em>nobody&#8217;s<\/em> happy.<\/p>\n<p>Well, just to buck the trend, we&#8217;re not doing too badly here. It&#8217;s actually been a very nice Christmas this year. Not that these things didn&#8217;t affect us &#8212; we had to <a href=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2008\/12\/08\/that-isnt-the-question\/\" title=\"eclecticism: ...that isn't the question\">scale back on our presents<\/a> a little bit, I lost a couple day&#8217;s worth of pay from work on days when we shut down, and Prairie&#8217;s been going a bit stir crazy from being cooped up in the apartment (the school&#8217;s on its winter break, so she&#8217;s not working, and she let me use the car to get to and from work, as my Alaskan-trained driving skills &#8212; <em>mad<\/em> skillz &#8212; served me well) &#8212; but it certainly hasn&#8217;t been the WORST. CHRISTMAS. EVAR. that it seems to have ended up being for many.<\/p>\n<p>When we decided not to go for the HDTV, that freed up a chunk of budget for presents. So, we got a couple &#8220;big&#8221; things (I got a new stereo, so that when we do replace the TV, we&#8217;ve got a stereo that can handle the HDMI switching and all that gibberish; Prairie got a very pretty new shiny to wear) that didn&#8217;t add up to nearly as much as the TV would have been, then went to Goodwill and picked up a huge pile of books for each of us for right around $30. Once those were wrapped, plus a few other things we&#8217;d picked up here and there (dollar stores are <em>great<\/em> for silly little stocking stuffers, by the way), we had a huge pile of presents under our tree for around half of our original Christmas budget. Not bad!<\/p>\n<p>Short sidenote: I <em>love<\/em> going digging for books at Goodwill. I&#8217;m a fan of sci-fi short story collections, and will pretty much grab &#8217;em when I see &#8217;em whenever we&#8217;re digging through cheap used book selections. This time, I found a real treasure: a 1958 edition of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/work\/1995466\/39575931\" title=\"LibraryThing: SF the Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy 3rd Annual Volume\">The Year&#8217;s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy<\/a> that includes a special section titled &#8220;Science-Fiction becomes Science-Fast&#8211;Sputnik and beyond&#8221; and on the back notes that it includes &#8220;A novelette called &#8216;The Fly&#8217;&#8211;one of the great horror stories of this or any other year&#8230;soon to be a great Twentieth Century-Fox picture in CinemaScope and color.&#8221; As much fun for the era it was published in as for the stories inside!<\/p>\n<p>Prairie&#8217;s been on her winter break for almost two full weeks now. The company I work for gets really slow and pulls back to a skeleton crew over the holidays, and since I&#8217;m &#8220;just&#8221; the receptionist\/admin assistant, I&#8217;m not part of that skeleton crew, so I get about a week and a half off of work, from the 25th through Jan. 5th. Lose a little pay, but it&#8217;s <em>really<\/em> nice to have a bit of a Christmas break! So we&#8217;re both enjoying having a little mini-vacation time.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got a couple projects lined up for my downtime: I&#8217;m going to try to get caught up on processing photos (I&#8217;ve got a fair chunk of stuff from October and November to get through), and Prairie and I are working our way through her shelves of books, adding them to the database <a href=\"http:\/\/www.librarything.com\/catalog.php?view=djwudi&amp;shelf=list&amp;sort=authorunflip&amp;sort=authorunflip\" title=\"LibraryThing: Our Library\">and formally combining our collections<\/a>. We&#8217;re at almost 1,000 books so far, and expect to be fairly easily somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 once everything in the house is entered in.<\/p>\n<p>And that pretty much brings us up to date. Enjoy your holidays, everyone. We are!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I keep hearing and seeing people grumble about this Holiday season. Between the economy sucking everyone&#8217;s spare change away and Snowpocalypse 2008 burying the entire Northwest coast under more snow than has been seen in a decade (or more), it seems like _nobody&#8217;s_ happy. Well, just to buck the trend, we&#8217;re not doing too badly here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2043],"tags":[13,193],"class_list":["post-5334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-life","tag-prairie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}