Off to Harmony

The last week has been pretty busy, what with various Chanukah, birthday, Christmas, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Eve Eve celebrations. Now, with barely a rest from all that, Lacey and I are getting ready to head out to Camp Harmony for the rest of the year. So I'll be out of all contact unless you want to send owls to the Santa Cruz mountains. I got a flu shot this year to hopefully avoid last year's ickiness and survive all the way to January. Happy New Year, everyone!

Last Waltzes

As much as I like The Corrs' rendition of Erin's Shore (and as rarely as I stay late enough to dance to it) I still think that the last dance of an evening should be a cross-step waltz. Fast waltzes are fun and everything, but there's nothing like a really nice cross-step to just make me absolutely, contentedly melt. That's when I feel most complete, satisfied, and relaxed (the perfect time to go home and go to bed:-). Case in point: two heavenly waltzes with Jessica, who happened to be in town this weekend, at FNW last night. That's what makes cross-step one of my favorite dances.

The Funniest

I can blame Jen for leading me to my newest source of continual amusement. TheFunniest.info is a web-based voting project to find the funniest image in the world. The more you vote, the more of the pictures you get to see, and some of them have gotten me laughing pretty hard (some favorites include the monorail cat, the pirate keyboard and "receive bacon"). You can see the current top winners here.

(And by the way, this project is run by the guy who does xkcd, which is itself full of wonderfully funny things.)

Where Is Your Christmas Money Going?

I like what the Seva Foundation is doing with their gifts of service. You make a donation to provide a poor family in South America with clean water in their home, or to get eye surgery for a blind person in Tibet to see again, or one of many other options. Then Seva provides a gift card that you can give to your recipient. Now granted, you could always donate to any charity in honor of somebody else, so it seems that all Seva is really adding here is the card. But it's the decision to frame the donations this way that is so brilliant, and it brings philanthropy into an entirely different realm of spending, putting it (hopefully) more in view of some people who might ordinarily spend much more on a batch of Christmas gifts than on donations to charities. Any amount of money that can be diverted from ravenous December purchasing to creating serious quality of life improvements in less fortunate communities is money well repurposed in my book.

So I'm just going to put this out there as an option for anyone who hasn't yet spent all of their Christmas budget. I realize there are still lots of very useful, meaningful, traditional gifts to give to your friends and family, and I also realize that it's just plain old fun to do that sometimes. But consider adding in some gifts of service, from Seva or from any other organization that's significant to you. Maybe for the person who has everything and is impossible to shop for. Maybe for someone who's made an important difference in your life, to show them you're passing on the positive influences in the world. Whatever the case, you know it's a gift that will be put to good use.

Finally!

One of the ironic things about working at Blogger is that I had to wait an awful long time to get to switch to beta, because I've got an unusually large number of blogs of various types that weren't all supported initially. I just now got to convert everything, though, and I'm pretty excited. First off, I'm going to mess with the template a bit to get it converted over to Layouts. So if things start looking a bit different, that's why. I'm going to mostly just reproduce the same design for now, but I'll probably get around to doing more interesting stuff later.