The Betty MacDonald Farm, recently profiled in this Seattle Times story, is our neighbor (that gravel lane mentioned is the shared unincorporated road to our house too) and the proprietor, Judith, gave us a lovely Christmas wreath the other day that she made from boxwood. (Too bad they don’t have any of the accompanying photos from the print story online. I didn’t see them and heard they were great.) Glad Judith got some good press! It was one of the fir trees Judith planted 10 years ago that is now our Christmas tree — how country is that, to have a neighbor who sells Christmas trees you can cut fresh and walk home with. We’ve said it before, but it sure is nice to have such good neighbors and friends.
Tomorrow Troy and I are hosting our annual Neighborhood Cookie Exchange Party. I love it here.
I’ve been out of the habit of updating this side of the this site. Just been too busy with the holidays, family and work. I work too much and would like to be able to relax and do other things, but I am a computer addict — there’s always one more thing I can build/fix “really quick”. It never ends. And I feel guilty when I stop and watch a movie, sit outside with the dogs, read, etc.
I am happy about the Saddam news. Sunday morning at 4:30am my pager went off because a server was overloaded. So I went to the computer to deal with it and while I was waiting to verify everything was okay, I read a post with the news. I get my world news from a recipe site. 
A few minutes later I went back to bed waking up Gay in the process and told her “they caught Saddam”. “They did?! Wow!”, she said and fell asleep.
I find lots of reasons to criticize Bush, but at times he impresses me. He impressed me with his handling of 9/11 by exercising restraint (something I couldn’t have done at the time), saying all the right things and quickly removing the Taliban from power. And now he’s handling Saddam correctly: we didn’t kill him, we captured him and Iraq, not us, will be putting him on trial. A fair trial for one of history’s “evil-dewars” is something the world needs, I think. Killing him would have sent the wrong message and would’ve made him a martyr. Bush just might be able to salvage some respect for the US from the world (and I don’t mean respect in the country music anthem “fear equals respect” way).
Moby: if you break into my house to steal my tv and end up feeding my cat while you’re stealing my tv you can’t go to the police and say that you broke into my house to feed my cat.
Europeans use the internet more than magazines now and are closing in on newspapers. The inevitable is coming faster than even I thought.
Lawrence Lessig responds to SCO CEO Darl McBride’s assertion that the GPL is unconstitutional. Clearly, SCO is in over their heads.
I’m inclined to believe that hindsight makes the Bush Administration appear incompetent, but that they didn’t have any specific foresight about 9/11. But this collection of articles is scary stuff. At the very least, airport security should have been tightened since they were apparently well-aware a hijacking would take place.
I can’t remember whose blog I spotted this on now, but it really is so delightful I have to pass it on. Not only can you click on each of those little spots and see the beautiful snowflake created by someone in the world, you can create your own unique snowflake in the easiest flash user interface I have *ever* encountered. It will make you want to make hot cocoa.
