Now that Blogger is owned by Google there are more hoops to jump through to create posts on the blog. I had to transfer my account to my Gmail account and now have a longer and harder to remember login sequence. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to this other than the fact that Google can now plaster my website with Google ads. I haven't seen any so far but if I do I will be mightily ticked off. Blogger used to be such a nice easy thing to do. Trust Google to mess that up.
If you are looking for something to do to while away the hours between careers the best thing I have found is installing Christmas tree lights. Now, putting the lights on the tree is no problem, takes maybe half an hour at the most. No, the ultimate in enjoyment is when you take your two strands of twinkly little lights out of the box and unravel the rat's nest mess they are in, stretch them out on the floor and plug them in. Why plug them in, you ask. Well you have to see if they are all working. And that's where the danger lies because invariably all the lights will come on except that one little section in the middle of the strand. So now, the next hour and a half will be spent crouched down on your knees until blood flow to your legs stops entirely, testing each and every bulb in that section in a socket that you know works. And when they all check out OK you go through them all again because the section still will not light. You finally find the one bulb that has one of the leads torn off so that it won't work and after futilely looking around you find that you have no spares, which means a trip to Crappy Tire for a 5 cent bulb which you can only buy in a pack of 100's which will invariably be lost by the time you go through this whole episode again next Christmas. I actually found some spare bulbs yesterday as I was going through all this but they were not clear ones like the rest on the string so I replaced the duds with red ones, brilliantly concluding that I could still install them on the tree and the next time I'm at Crappy Tire, I can pick up the spares and I can tell exactly where they belong in that mess of twinkly lights on the tree. My bet is those red bulbs will still be in that rat's nest when I pull it out of the box for Christmas 2007.
Now I must go and finishing polishing up the 2006 Christmas edition of the Chronicle so that I can get the Christmas cards out in time for Christmas.

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