Early this Christmas morning is bright and clear, the nearly-full Snow Moon setting in the northwest.

We'll have Christmas music on the radio on for most of the day. I bought a set of wireless speakers to bring music to the other rooms. The speakers have worked very well. For a while, 10 or 15 years ago, I ran speaker wires to various parts of the house. That was fine as long the furniture stayed in place. Moving anything meant a rewriting job. We live in an old house with several additions. Running wires in this house is really a professional's job and I'm not one. For background music, the wireless speakers are fine.

The radio station is playing classical renditions of various types of Christmas music, including familiar carols. I learned most of the Christmas carols that I know in elementary school. (I learned 'Deck Us All with Boston Charlie'.) At that time, we received more Christian instruction in public school than I did at church (Unitarian). We sang to 'O Christmas Tree' in German ('O Tannenbaum'). We also began each school day with prayer. It was a different time.

This will be a fun day. Some of our visitors we've not seen since last Christmas. Sandra and I won't get to talk long with many people, but everyone will likely have a good time. Good parties take care of themselves. We reminded Mike's kids to bring a football. I can still throw a decent pass, but I've got no business trying to run against these kids.

Life is good.

Houska Joulua (although some parts of Finland use Hyvaa Joulua). Next week we'll tackle Happy New Year.

My family celebrated the holiday on Christmas Eve. We gathered, usually at our our house, to have a meal and exchange gifts. We weren't very religious people and so didn't always go to church services later in the night. We had dinner at my grandparents' house on Christmas Day.

I don't recall that Santa Claus was a great part of all this. For one thing, in order to let him come to the house, we tried having me take a nap in the afternoon. That didn't work so well. Other ideas on how the presents got there soon took hold.

This evening we'll go to Mike and Lynn's for Chinese food. The adults in our families don't exchange presents, so we'll gather for food, fellowship, fun, and the last part of the Vikings-Packers game.

My stepfather was a neurosurgeon. We have one of his scalpels, which we use for carving.

The strong winds last night blew over our little tree. The winds done their business, bringing in much colder weather, and have settled down nicely. We'll get the tree in place again. A calm weather night is in the forecast. The rain melted all but a few clumps of snow We have a brown Christmas, but we can have a football game in the back yard between dinner and dessert tomorrow.

Today is a cooking and preparation day. We want to get much of the food prepared in advance so that we can enjoy tomorrow's company. It's easier to make gravy when you don't have an audience offering suggestions.

Our new little printer worked well last night. We were able to print pictures of Sandra and Joe's trip to PEI in the late summer. Sandra made an album of trip memorabilia as a gift for Joe. We still have a way to go to learn how to manage all those pictures - which ones to print, which ones to publish, which ones to archive. Printing's the easy part. A software engineer once told me, "Before you can process data, you have to manage data."

I was the last person in our group and one of the last people in the building to leave work yesterday. I was making good progress and didn't want to set the work aside in an imcomplete state for the long weekend. I reached a place where it'll be easy to start again next week. The office will be empty next week. About only people working next week will be the contractors. The permanent employees have to use up their remaining vacation time before the end of the year or lose it.

It's time to get cooking.

We have a small Christmas now. It's outside, on the picnic table, visible from both wings of the house. Woody decorated it with the big, old-fashioned colored lights and it looks great.

When I was a kid, two or three years old, parents grew tired of my playing with the ornaments and nearly tipping the tree over. So, they put the tree in my playpen.

Don't let on, but Mike and Lynn have been hiding the kids' Christmas presents at our house. Sandra and her mother have done a magnificent job wrapping the presents. In addition to wonderful toys, clothes, and Red Sox memorabilia, they bought some spiritual books to bring the holiday back to its original intent. So, to see if we've got this straight, Mike and Lynn bought books such as The Stations of the Cross, while I bought a copy of the aforementioned Linkin Park/Jay-Z mashup (the PG version).

This will be a quiet day at work. Tomorrow's a company holiday and a number of people are taking today and most of next week off. I started on some very interesting work yeserday (using UML to model an information set, for those of you who care about such things). I'll try to get to a good stopping place this afternoon.

I have to do some shopping on the way home and am already steeling myself against my wild-eyed fellow shoppers. This has been a nutty week for commuting as well. Yesterday I listened to the traffic report on the radio for the first time in many weeks, wanting to know about the two mile backup on Interstate 495. (An accident on the Mass Pike jammed up traffic all around.)

Tom, Pamenter has often said that every person who owns a personal computer becomes a system adminstrator, whether the person wants to or not. (He also says that system administration is a lot easier with a Mac.) We bought a small color printer so that we could print some digital pictures. Unpacking and setting up the physical printer was a snap, about five minutes of work. The software was another story. The need for new software was brought about by the plug-and-play USB connection that gave a hieroglyphic error message. Finding the right drivers on the HP site was the major challenge. A search for my specific model number turned up nothing. The search results kept bringing me back to a site where I could buy another printer of the same type I already have. At the end, I did find the software, a version 6.0 of something that showed version 7.2 while it was running, and we now have a working printer.

We saw our biopolar friend recently. The police visited her again. There were reports from her neighbors that she was making too much noise during the night. She says that her windows were closed and that they were all wrong. When she visits people, she stays a long time and leaves hosts looking like they'd been dodging highway traffic.

It was nice to find a little Patriots bib in the laundry, left here during a visit from Cassandra.

On this first day of astronomical winter here in the northern hemisphere, I renew my gratitude that I don't work or live outside. It's cold, very cold. One time, many years ago, I was hitchhiking to Toronto (it seemed like a good idea at the time) and stood outside overnight on a night such as this in Syracuse, New York, waiting for a ride. Finally, as the day broke, it warmed up enough to snow. I was lucky that I was just cold. On a similarly cold night a few years later, a friend had a bit too much to drink and fell asleep in a snow bank. He lost most of the fingers on one hand to frostbite.

After getting off to such a cheery start, perhaps we should try again.

I had a nice, long phone conversation with my cousin last night. We hadn't talked for quite a while. She lives in central Florida. Her house was in the path of three hurricanes this year. The repairs on their roof were completed just a few weeks ago. I spent quite a bit of time with her and her sister when they were growing up in New Hampshire. We enjoy each other's company and say that we'll be in more regular contact. But, then, a few years slip past us so easily.

Yesterday afternoon I received an invitation for a job interview in downtown Boston. Unfortunately, the invitation was for today and I can't get away from work. I'm hoping that another day next week will work out.

Most of the area schools have closed for the day, including the district that covers our town. Grumble, grumble. We have 2-4" (5-10cm) of snow of fluffy snow, the kind more appropriate for a broom than a shovel or snow blower. When I was a kid, it was six inches of snow, minimum, before they'd consider calling it a snow day. And this was before road salt was so widely used. The road crews used sand. We lived on top of a small hill. On snow days, the neighborhood kids would get brooms and sweep off the sand from the roads so that we could go sledding.

The forecast says that we're in a bit more snow, followed by a cold and windy night. The National Weather Service has issued a wind chill advisory for tonight because of strong winds and temperatures around zero F (3.2 hectares). When we get a strong northwest wind, the kind that brings in cold weather like this, we're apt to get a downdraft in our stove. The two parts of the house, our house and the MacGregors' wing, form a canyon and the stove pipe is in the middle of it. The wind gets strong enough that it can blow out the fire. Adding another eight feet to the chimney would take care of the problem, but the engineering would be difficult and the results aesthetically unpleasing. Better, I guess, to have the occasional puff of smoke in the room.

My father's cable TV is installed. When we visited yesterday, he asked me how he could switch between the cable and his old antenna. I asked why. He wasn't able to find one of his favorite shows, Seinfeld. After a bit of experimenting with the remote control, we got the TV set up so that he could get to the station that carried Seinfeld. He's still not too sure of it all, but he was impressed that the Weather Channel carried the weather conditions for the town next to him.

We saw some friends this weekend, people with whom I used to work. With good friends, you can pick up conversation where you left off.

Happy Birthday, RSM.

I've started mixing the new wood in with the seasoned. The general guideline is that you should have half of your wood supply left by the end of January. We're far ahead of that pace and will use up our seasoned wood before the winter is done. It's ok to mix some green wood when you've got a hot fire. Most days, with Sandra's parents around, the fire is going nearly around the clock. I'll start it in the morning, but there are usually still a few glowing embers in the stove.

The cable company finally got around to completing the installation at my father's house. He's still not convinced that it's a good deal. More to the point, he's convinced that it's not a good deal. We'll see. One of the major reasons for arranging for cable is that the Celtics games are shown only on cable. The Celtics are playing decent basketball. Their losses have been just by a few points, particularly on a rough West Coast trip. They're one game out of first place (in a division where no one has a winning percentage).

It's a given, and should surprise no one, that shoppers during the week before Christmas are, without a doubt, off-the-road, wheels-in-the-sand, and heading-for-a-cliff bonkers. That said, they weren't that bad yesterday. I went shopping, mostly for groceries, but also a couple of gifts while I was at it. I expected the unexpected and had a pretty good time. I was the only white guy in the rap section of Newbury Comics and the only person over 50 in the whole store.

My shopping trip was part of the preparation for our Christmas family gathering. My father has opted out. I don't blame him. We'll have about 30 for dinner. In a previous life I worked as a short-order cook for nearly five years. As a result, I have some experience preparing food on a large scale. Unlike brother-in-law Scott, however, the food that I prepare is strictly utilitarian - simple meats and vegetables. Sandra saw our next-door neighbor yesterday; he gave her more detailed instructions on how to prepare the top-round roast that we'd ordered from his shop. The day will be fun. We have lots of people on our side.