Tuesday...UPDATED

UPDATE...I should have remembered this earlier.  I'm making 1.1 Son-in-Law of the Day.  He's a birthday boy today!  Happy Birthday, Dad!  In the archives of this computer, I don't have many pics of 1.1 to choose from that don't include his whole crew.  So this is one from earlier this year.  Make it a great day!

It was 14 degrees here when I drove to early coffee.  I'd say that that was getting into the season.

If you took 1) the fiscal cliff, 2) cyber Monday, and 3) the BCS out of the daily news, would there be any?

And Powerball is getting to be even bigger. That means that the split on my winnings within the fam is thus also getting bigger.  Life would be pretty nice if we had to worry about that allocation!

I finished a book last night that was certainly as close to a waste of time as any reading exercise could be so described.  In The Moon of Red Ponies by James Lee Burke.  Really not sure how or when I had acquired the paperback, but it had been sitting around my house and I decided to get through it over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Torture.  By the time I was done, I had forgotten the original premise from the beginning of the book.  The reader was left with poor resolutions for all of the various conflicts that the author presented among the book's characters, none of whom were particularly sympathetic.

The primary reason that I stuck it out to finish the book was my conscious attempt to balance my literary leisure time away from crosswords.  I think that it is fair to state that I enjoy the mental gymnastics required of the Friday/Saturday NYT puzzle much more than processing the story presented in most novels.  From an educational standpoint, I think that reading is much more beneficial to the life-learning curve.  Getting better with crossword solving pretty much means that you get better at crossword solving.  Period.

It looks like the progression in my out-sourcing efforts will extend to my (non?) Christmas lights on Maplecrest.  My Perfect Neighbor and spouse (Judy) were finishing the hanging of their own display on Thursday and there was a little repartee back-and-forth about maybe I needed some help with my lights.  My response was that I would welcome their participation.  I strung the extension cord from the garage outlet to the front of my house and left the four boxes of lights that I had in my basement on the steps to my side door.

Judy stopped over Sunday to ask for some direction on a tax question for her retired father, and asked about the lights when she was leaving.  I told her that I was not going to be offended if she elected to finish the task.  I'm thinking that the warmer weather in the next couple of days may produce that result.

The advertising airtime freed-up by the end of the election season seems to have been taken over by the car companies touting their Christmas "deals".  (Maybe my earlier suggestion to short media companies was premature.  A better post-Christmas idea?)  The higher end cars are always promoted as the perfect gift for a spouse or girlfriend.  Really?  What's wrong with a coffee-maker?

I'm scheduled for continuing education at the iWireless Center in Moline tomorrow through Friday.  As a reminder, CPA's have an annual requirement of 40 hours of continuing education, which essentially translates to five days per year.  We all need an update course for new tax rules each year.  I've reached the point where I try to limit my travel for these programs, and the University of Illinois has this three-day deal that is both local and relatively inexpensive.  Plus, it tends to be well put together.

So the blog will probably come to you from the middle of those classes the rest of the week.

Happy Birthday to @srh4.

BCOT