Christmas Blues

I’m sorry everybody, but I’m just not feeling it yet. Christmas is two weeks away and I have no holiday spirit at all yet. We have a tree…

…but that’s only because my step daughter and I were out voted. I prefer to wait as long as possible to set up the tree, and this year my step daughter agreed with me. With the kid schedule we have, as long as possible would have meant this coming weekend. My wife and step son wanted to put up the tree early, meaning the first weekend in December. The vote was two to two, which means my wife won. I once declared that in all moments of spontaneous family democracy, Jen’s vote counted five times. Seeing as there are only four of us in the house, that means Mom is never going to be outvoted. I rigged it so mah babie will always get her way.

So we have a Christmas tree, and we have some of our decorations up. I still haven’t gone Christmas shopping yet. Not for my wife, not for the kids, not for anyone. I am just not feeling the spirit. It sucks. I haven’t even made my own list for Santa yet.

I need to jump start my Christmas motor this week. My step daughter is singing in a school Christmas concert tonight. That might help. Last year we took the kids out for a drive looking for overly decorated houses. Maybe we can do that this year too. In fact, I have heard of one house in my home town that might be worth a look.

I was hoping to do all of my Christmas shopping online this year in order to avoid any and all crowds. I need to shop for my wife, for the kids, for my family secret Santa, for my parents and Jen’s parents, for my niece and nephews, for my office yankee theft, and for who knows how many others. It all just seems so intimidating this year. I mean, it feels this way every year, but for some reason it feels worse this year. Maybe I’m delusional. Maybe I’ve just got them mean ol’ Christmas Season Blues.

Maybe I’ll write a song called Christmas Season Blues. Maybe that will snap me out of this.

To Do List for the Next Five Days:
1. Buy at least two gifts for my wife.
2. Buy at least two gifts each for the kids, making sure to coordinate with Santa so as not to have any repeats.
3. Complete some sort of list for myself so that other people can have a clue what to get for me.
4. Write a 12-bar called Christmas Season Blues and be damned sure it has a happy, holiday spirity ending.
5. Look at Christmas lights and let the ridiculous waste of electricity fill your dumb ass heart with holiday cheer.
6. Stop thinking of holiday cheer as a ridiculous waste of electricity.

I know what I need to do… now I just need to do it.

HoHoHo.

Flickr Slideshow

This is a test to see if I can embed a Flickr slideshow into a post.

Wouldn’t it be Nice?

I’ve been sitting at my computer tonight more or less since I got home. My beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous, brilliant, amazing wife is next to me. She built a PC today and is jumping through hoops trying to get all of her software installed and all of her settings the way she wants them. I’m helping with the heavy lifting here and there.

I’ve also being a bootleg music nerd. My goal to get a copy of every show on the Rush Clockwork Angels tour is more than likely never going to be achieved, but I’m now up to 17 shows (18 if you count the DVD of the first set of the Brooklyn show, which I don’t). I’m fighting with the new iTunes and with iTunes match. Apparently we no longer have the ability to open a playlist in a separate window? Gee… thanks iTunes. I never made use of that function ever (and by never I mean I used it constantly). Now when I drag a new folder full of music into a playlist and have it upload to iTunes Match, it does not add the music to the playlist. You know, the playlist that I just added it to? I then have to go into albums and right click and select add to playlist. It gives me a drop down of all my playlists. I have about a hundred and eighty thousand of them. Yeah, that’s easier than having two windows.

Anyway, the real inspiration for this particular waste of server memory is Monday Night Football. I don’t have the television on, but I keep seeing Facebook and Twitter notifications popping up with posts about the Patriots game. I live in New England. I suppose I identify myself as a Patriots fan. I just don’t live and die by football the way 95% of my fellow New Englanders do. I want my home team to win, but I am not going to get upset if they don’t.

However, all of this football buzz is making me think…

I could really go for some NHL hockey right now. A Bruins game would sure be a lot more interesting than a Patriots game. Hell, a Columbus vs Florida game would be more interesting to me. I’d park my largess down on the coach and watch the shit out of a game like that tonight.

Thanks a ton, NHL.

The Last Long Weekend Post

Any time we go away and my D90 comes with us I have to milk as many posts out of it as possible. This is a good example of that.

Technically, we stayed at a Bed and Breakfast. In reality, we had a house to ourselves. There was a legitimate Bed and Breakfast, called Old Field House, but the building we stayed in was a single house about a half mile away from the main building. Our building was called Holiday Ridge. It had four bedrooms, a fire place in the center of the living room, a nice deck on the back of the house, a private hot tub (that was a huge selling point for us), a nearly vertical drop behind the house, and the previously mentioned spiral staircase of death and doom. It also had a full kitchen and dining room.

Here you see the futon we used a couple of times, as well as the top of the spiral staircase of death and doom.

Here we see the fireplace. Note the comfy chair behind the fireplace. It was in fact very comfy. Too comfy. Once I sank into it I had a legitimately difficult time getting out of it.

Here are the glass doors to the back deck as seen at night.

Here are the glass doors to the back deck as seen in the morning light.

This is the back deck, following Friday night’s rain. This was a really great spot, but it was way too cold to make use of it. Should we ever find ourselves back here in the summer we will definitely make better use of this.

The room felt a little dated. Not much though. The bedrooms down stairs were much more so. The furnishings could probably go for an update. We slept in the master bedroom the first night but the bed had a serious sag into the middle. The rest of the time we slept in one of the other bedrooms and it was 100 times better. Still, we did not pick this place for the bedroom decor. We picked it for the hot tub. Yes, we did.

The tub is outside, below the back deck. It’s not as private as we hoped it would be. It was private in that we didn’t have to share it. It was not private in that there was a house next door that could see it. My wife has a seriously bad back. I have a bunch of regular aches and pains in my back and my feet (and my brain, har har). The air temperature ranged from the high 20’s to the mid 30’s. Getting from the house to the hot tub took about five steps, but damn those were a cold five steps. Once we were in the 100 degree water though. All of our aches and pains washed away. We both just sat there, melting. I could have spent the whole weekend in there. Hell, I could have slept in there.

We didn’t see a single wild animal during our stay. We were hoping to see a moose, or even a bear. Assuming, of course, that said moose and bear were close enough for us to see them, but far enough away for them to not be able to see us. Get it? At one point I had to go outside after dark to put the cover on the tub. I had this crazy thought go through my head as I stepped outside that some mountain lion or something was going to try to drag my fat ass off. I figured if I got jumped by a cat I would try and flip us both into the tub. Cats hate baths, right? That would probably be enough to save my life, right? Right?

Thanks

This post serves two purposes. First, can I tag a post via email to Posterous. Second, come 9:00am tomorrow I am seriously going to be regretting leaving this little house in the mountains.

Dixville Notch

Yesterday the plan was to spend some time Christmas shopping in North Conway, and to spend some quality time in the hot tub. Instead we went on yet another ridiculously huge drive. Jen wanted to go North. She’s always wanted to go North of the White Mountains, but it takes us around three hours to get that far, we don’t have the energy to go on for another three hours. Since we were already in the mountains we figured what the hell, and pointed the car North.

After wandering aimlessly for a while we decided to head toward Pittsburgh. My step kids go there with the father and step mother roughly once a year to try and see Moose. The kids have told me many times that Pittsburgh is the largest town in New Hampshire, although only in terms of area. In terms of population… well… not so much. Just as we were reaching Pittsburgh we started seeing signs for Canadian Customs checkpoints and border crossings. We also saw signs for towns in Vermont. We actually detoured a little just so we could say that we went to Vermont, but we didn’t actually do anything there. We never made it to Canada. I don’t have a passport, and Jen didn’t have hers with her, so we weren’t going to be able to cross in anyway. We got as far as a sign that said Canada was 26 miles away.

The most interesting surprise on this drive was that we passed through Dixville Notch, NH. You have heard of that place. In fact, it got national news coverage last month. Dixville, NH is the first town in the United States to close its polls on election night, and therefore they are the first town to release its election results to the press. They only have about 20 registered voters, and they all meet in a hotel at midnight on election day. They each have a personal voting booth, and they all cast their vote and have them counted within a couple of minutes. This is legal for them to do because they verify 100% participation. Otherwise they would not be able to close the polls so quickly.

Anyway, we were driving through this particularly terrifying little mountain pass when we saw a gigantic hotel and a welcome to Dixville Notch sign. I had to pull over and take a picture. The hotel is called Balsams and it instantly overshadowed the whole election thing. Look at these pictures and tell me that this isn’t the most haunted hotel on Earth. The Overlook hotel from The Shining has nothing on this place.

It turns out that this is actually the place where the residents do their voting. Can you imagine? It must be terrifying in there! There is no way that this place isn’t haunted. Every Hollywood movie cliche tells me that there are at least 500 ghosts in those buildings and at least 10% of them are the ghosts of psychotic axe murderers.

Enjoy your stay, and happy voting!

Are you ready for the worst part? The hotel is closed for renovations. There is probably a guy, a caretaker, living in that hotel right now. He’s probably writing a novel about how all work and no play make Jack a something something, and he’s probably shuffling up to the bar to talk to the bartender who hasn’t been there for 50 years.

Creepy!

Mount Washington… I Think

We spent our long weekend in Intervale, NH. Intervale is a little unincorporated township near Conway, NH. Conway is in the shadow of Mount Washington. Now I’ve been to the White Mountains of New Hampshire a number of times, but I am no good at picking out which mountain is which just by site. Even with a map I sometimes have a hard time putting a name to what I am looking at.

Given that, there are a few hints as to the name of one of the mountains we kept seeing. First, it’s freakin’ huge. Mt Washington is the tallest point in New England. Second, it had snow on the summit. There has been very little snow in New England so far this year, but this one humongous peak had a noticeable amount. The one time I went to the top of Mt Washington it was in early October, and there was a ton of snow at the peak. Snow and thick clouds. There was another clue in the first batch of cloudy pictures… We were in the parking lot of a building that offered Mt Washington tours. Yeah, the first bunch of pics are Mt Washington. It was drizzling at our (relatively) low altitude. There were major clouds obscuring most, but not all, of the summit.

For perspective…

This morning as we were leaving the weather had cleared up completely. There were little to no clouds, and the sun was bright and shining. We came out of our road and took a right turn and BAM! there was the mountain looking like it was posing for a portrait. We pulled over and camera nerd Robbie took a couple more pictures.

River Behind Our Bed and Breakfast

When we first got to our bed and breakfast building on Thursday night we could hear a river running nearby. Unfortunately it was pitch dark and we had no idea where it was. It seemed louder when we were on the balcony out back than it did on the porch in front. On Friday morning we looked off the back balcony and there it was. I took a couple of pictures from there and posted one yesterday. Here’s another…

There was a road running right next to the river. We tried using the GPS on our phones to find the name, but we had no cell signal and no wi-fi at all, so we were very much off the grid. My wife is a software engineer. I’m a programmer. We both pretty much live on line. To be shut off like that was a little disconcerting, but in the end it was a nice addition to our get away.

We thought the river might be the Swift river, which runs along part of the nearby Kancamagus highway (forgive me if I misspelled that), but we had no way of knowing. This morning on our way home we took a guess at what road might be the one that runs alongside the river and we guessed right. Well, Jen guessed right. The chances of the river being the Swift were pretty slim as it was nearly dry at one point. We did find the spot we had seen from the balcony, and I stopped and took a bunch of pictures.

Forgive me. I just like taking pictures of rivers.

Now that I am home I checked on Google Maps and it is not the Swift. It is a short little stream that begins a mile or so ahead of this spot and ends a mile or so away when it dumps into the Saco river. I can’t seem to find a name for this little guy anywhere, but it is part of Merriman State Forest.