THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

We are. Or rather, we were. In fact, we declared the Christmas tree post-mortem at a whopping 10:57 a.m. this morning. Yes, that’s right, the Christmas tree is already down and put away. This is not due to us being Scrooges or anything - we are still holly and jolly. It was a combination of Carolyn just enjoying clutter-free zones as well as the fact that the tree was kind of in the way of Scott wanting to play one of his new presents.

Of course the early tree removal had me wondering if we were the first people in the world to have their tree down. You know, I do enjoy me a world record. Not considering time zones and such, 10:57 a.m. local time on Christmas morning seems awful early. We thought of a few categories of people that might have beaten us:

1. Other clutter freaks like ourselves
2. Maybe someone had Christmas early and they were moving real soon or going on a long vacation and wanted to get the tree down so they didn’t have to deal with it when they got back. Though frankly I don’t think they should count - they should have their own category like Roger Maris.
3. Or maybe some poor wife had her husband electrocuted in a freak Christmas light accident a week or two ago and can no longer bear the sight of the tree and its haunting Yuletide memories.

Still, I would have to say we are at least in the top 100 of the world. It’s always nice to think of oneself as the Top 100 of anything in the world, even if it is something silly like this.

In any case, a brief recap of our day:

Actually the kids did not wake up too early. Our kids have this thing where they just do not get out of bed. They will wait up in their bed for one of us to get them. In some ways, this is very nice. In other ways (like if there was a fire) that could be a bad thing. I went up and got them about 8. Then we got dressed and ate and then it was time for the presents.

The haul:

Me: “EA Sports it’s in the game”. At least that’s what Amy calls it. Other people might know it better as Madden NFL 06 for Playstation 2. Actually since I’m the dad, I can do fun things like open my presents early, so I’ve been playing this for a few weeks. Amy and Scott really enjoy watching this and have been known to ask me to “please play EA Sports it’s in the game?” The sacrifices I have to make for my kids…. :-). When Scott saw me open it this morning he said “Wow now we have 2 of them!!” Also, Civilization 4 Warlords expansion pack, The Other Side of Heaven DVD, a T-shirt Carolyn made with a picture of me reading to the kids that says on the back “You’re the man now dog“, and a DVD board game of 24.

Carolyn: Season 7 of Seinfeld, a Gone with the Wind DVD (which she accidentally found out about a few days ago when she opened my secret hiding place that I’ve been using for 8 years (a blue bag). Guess I need a new hiding spot), a T-shirt that she had made that says “Omnivores are weird” (a take off of my “Vegetarians are weird” shirt), a shirt from her mom, a snazzy Pottery Barn chip and dip tray, a True Ceramic Pro, and Fact or Crap.

Kids (names hidden to protect the innocent): Blankets from my Aunt Marilyn (My Little Pony, dinosaurs, ducks and a handmade crocheted one), some dollhouse furniture that goes with their dollhouse (thank you eBay!), some Fusion Crew people, a Belle doll, some nice sweaters from my aunt and uncle and an Ion game console (the aforementioned game that the tree was in the way of). A few days ago, we got some things from Carolyn’s dad and stepmom including a play workshop with tools and some clothes, and also from my mother-in-law we got a new web-cam, a My Little Pony backpack and some new underwear for S. In fact, I don’t know that I have ever seen a kid so stoked about getting new underwear - he was seriously excited.

I hope that I have not forgotten anything, and I hope that you all have a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

You are, in fact, so dead to me that I will not even look up to see if your name is spelled Rachael or Rachel or some other less familiar version. Okay, that’s a lie, I wasn’t going to look it up, just to spite her, but the compulsive side of me could not possibly stand having a misspelling or grammatical error in my blog. Though now that I think of it, I’m not quite sure that my comma usage in the first sentence is correct, nor whether or not some of this rambling paragraph is a run-on sentence or something. And no, this is not an invitation to pore over this post looking for misspellings or grammatical errors. And in any case, it’s a good thing that I looked it up, because I was definitely going to go with Rachel.

Anyways, I’m sure most of you have heard of Rachael Ray - she’s quite famous. One of her more famous shows is called “$40 a day”, with the premise being that she goes out to various cities showing how you can eat all this good stuff for only $40 a day.

She first became dead to me when she continued buying various (non-food) things throughout her day and not counting them in her $40 total. For instance one episode she bought a book about something at some local bookstore and did not include it in her $40 to spend. Now, I understand the premise of the show, but still, this bothered me.

But that did not top the shenanigans that were pulled in the episode I saw yesterday. Oh no, not even close. Though to be technical, it was more Carolyn that was watching it - I was playing Civ and due to our immense Christmas tree being in the way, it has become harder to multi-task in that regard. Which is another reason why this bad boy is coming down Tuesday if not Monday afternoon, though that is worthy of being its own entire subject…

Anyway, she is in New York for this episode, and not only does she only eat 2 meals: “brunch” and dinner, in between those she goes ice skating in Central Park. So far, not that bad - you can go with 2 meals I guess. But then, she meets her (real-life) husband skating and he says something to the effect of “let me treat you to some hot cocoa.” And she gets hot cocoa for free, not counted in her $40 total. What the heck?! I can just see them planning this episode beforehand and they’re like “Hmmm New York is kind of expensive… how can we do this? I know, we’ll skip one meal and then have someone just buy her cocoa! Brilliant!”

Anyway, I do understand that this bothers me far more than it should, but at least I’m not the loser that is reading someone else’s blog about it And plus, Giada De Laurenitis is hotter, and she doesn’t smoke either (I think)!

Been awhile I know, but I’ve been busy. I guess. Those of you who have known me for awhile might already know this, but I have always wanted to run a triathlon. Maybe it’s from watching too much ABC Wide World of Sports as a kid, but it just always seemed like a cool thing to do. And now, having completed my last cool thing to do, I am looking for a new challenge in life.

So I decided to run a triathlon. One problem would be the swimming. The last time I swam on even a semi-competitive basis would be umm…. never. I can’t even remember doing a whole lot of lap swimming in my life. There is one triathlon that I have looked at before, the Little Miami triathlon, which does canoeing instead of swimming. The only problem is that it is run on Sundays, and after some thinking on the subject, I decided that I did not want to run one on Sunday, at least while there were still other triathlons to be run. Maybe once I am a world-class triathlete and the only Ironman triathlons that exist in the world are run on Sundays, then I will reconsider. In the meantime…

The one that I have chosen is run at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. It’s a 400 meter swim, a 12.4 mile (20K) bike, and a 5K (3.1 mile) run, on April 21st, 2007. So, you know, a wussy triathlon as triathlons go, but still it should be a good experience. I have set my goal for the event at 100 minutes.

Of course, after I decided to do this, I realized I would need somewhere to swim. If it was the summer sure, then I could just find a neighbor with a pool and hop their fence and swim. But in the winter, it’s a little tougher… So we decided to join the Blue Ash YMCA. It’s something that we’ve thought about several times before, but never have been able to justify the cost. It’s like $75 a month for the whole family, plus they have a $150 “joining fee”. So I went down there a week or so ago, took the tour, and then sat down with the membership people. I was like “Well, I’d like to join, and I’ll sign up right now, if you’ll waive that joining fee”. They did, and here we are. I’ve gone several times, mostly in the mornings before work, as I continue my way on to triathlon-y dominance!

I support public floggings for people that inappropriately use reply. Do you? Please advise.

So the subject of my latest rant is the incorrect usage of reply to all. First of all, there is the person that uses reply to all when clearly a reply to all is not called for:

Email 1, to 1000 people: “License plate ABC-123 has left their lights on in the parking lot”
Email 2, replying to all: “Thanks for letting me know!”

Though there is some fault on the sender for sending out an email that could be replied to all in this fashion, instead of using something handy like BCC. When I worked at GE, reply to all was actually eliminated from their mail client to avoid dumb people replying to all and clogging up the mail server.

So that kind of usage is annoying. But it pales in comparison to its opposite, NOT replying to all when it is called for.

Example: I send an email to someone at school, asking for the time of a meeting that Carolyn and I need to go to. I copy Carolyn because she is a big girl and she has her own email. The response comes with the meeting time and it is just sent to me. GRRRRR!!! Now I have to forward the email on to Carolyn. Granted, it’s not like that takes THAT long to do, but it could have been averted had the person just replied to all, when it was CLEARLY called for!

This has been happening quite a lot lately and is quite irksome