Merry Christmas!  I hope yours was Merry and Happy?  Mine was, thanks for asking.  It was great having our oldest daughter Nicole and her finance Chris with us; the past few years they've both been in the Navy, posted in Sicily, and not able to celebrate with us.  And we ate a lot, and drank, and ate a lot more (chocolate!), and exchanged presents, and it was all very fun...  and I did a ride, Rockstore, in a really fast 1:39 (for which I give credit to my new long warm jersey, not the chocolate :)...  and Meg and Alex and I saw Avatar (2nd time for me) and it was great once again.  What a fantastic movie!

Gerard Vanderleun takes a serious look at gifts.  He describes a small wooden box with simple objects, each of which has a personal meaning.  In a similar way I have evolved a metaphorical box with imagined tokens, each representing a friend.  I sometimes take out the box (in my head) and examine the objects to treasure my friends.  As I live my life I keep adding to my friend collection.  It is the most valuable thing I own, and nobody can ever take it away.  I thought about that today, while riding; what a coincidence to come back and read Gerard's post... 

What does Santa do on Christmas Day?  Either cycling (above right) or sailing (left)... 

From Slashdot: the science of Santa.  Important work! 

More Pre celebration...  so we're all at my mother-in-law's house yesterday night, sitting around opening presents and eating chocolate (!), and we don't have any Christmas music.  Oh no!  We try playing a channel on the cable box, but it's really lame Christmas muzak.  What to do... wait a minute, my Palm Pre has Amazon's MP3 service... so I search for Christmas and get like 3,000 hits, and the second most popular album is Bing Crosby singing Christmas classics.  All right!  I buy it - tap tap - and the songs download - poof, done! - and I plug the Pre into the stereo, and off we go.  Bing singing White Christmas, it doesn't get any better.  Have I told you how much I love my Pre? 

Looks like about 2/3 of the U.S. had a white Christmas!  Cozy and fun for many, but a headache for some, especially those traveling back from "going home".  Out here in L.A. it has been cold (40^o, brrr!) but no sign of snow :) 

Powerline: the climate change scam, a concise summary.  I know, weather isn't climate, but when you dig into the science of climate you discover there doesn't seem to be any climate change.  The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934. 

It's time again for the amazing Harbin Ice Festival in China.  Stunning.  Someday I must go there to see it in person...  Wow.  The way they light up the ice from underneath is amazing.
(kind of reminds me of all the flora on Pandora, in Avatar :)