Welcome to 2013

Hello everyone and welcome to 2013. I hope your new year is going well so far.

I am writing this on my/our new Nook tablet. It's quite a nifty device and the kids are not allowed to touch it.

We finally packed up the Christmas decorations and took the tree down. As I was wrapping the tree in a tarp, shoving it in the back of the van, and finally disposing of it at the township-sponsered Christmas tree drop-off, I was struck by how odd the whole Christmas tree tradition is. We cut down a perfectly good tree, place a lot of shiny decorative objects on it in our homes and allow it to slowly die (though we keep it on "life-support " by watering it). When our holiday is over, and the tree is as good as dead, we remove the decorative objects and unceremoniously dump the tree corpse in a huge pile of other tree corpses. December and January are months of massive coniferous genocide.

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I'm taking a break from this post for now, but will try and get back to it later.

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I'm back...and reading the first part of this post, my do I seem to have a cynical view of Christmas. Really, I don't. But when one stops to think of it, some of our holiday traditions are a little odd.

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I can't believe I misspelled "welcome" in this blog post title and had to correct it.

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As you may already know from reading this blog, I'm a bit of a music nerd. Recently, I have been listening to, of all artists, Michael Jackson and Frank Zappa. Quite a contrast there. My wife, as sort of a goofy joke, gave me as a Christmas gift, MJ's Bad album. It's not...er...bad. The thing is, I liked Michael Jackson's music as a kid and loved his Off The Wall album, which I begged for and received on my 12th birthday in March 1980. (Okay, hold that train of thought. Taking a break again--more later).

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One of these day, I may actually get back to what I was getting to re: Michael Jackson and Zappa. (Heck of a combination, eh!).