Beer Pocket

We had dinner with Kathy and Travis at the pub Friday night. It's the first time we'd gotten together in a while. On Saturday, Your Sis finished wrapping presents while I got in my PS2 time. Oh, how I missed it so. I addressed the majority of the Christmas cards (sent out this morning). That night we went to a local Christmas party and ate platefuls of finger food while I kept my Bass Ales handy inside my jacket. The new local grocery store includes a walk-in beer cooler that features kegs of Gaelic Ale. It's like a buffet of hangovers. We left the party early and staggered home. On Sunday, she made her annual cocoa packets (almost 5), and we split laundry duty. We had leftover party wings for supper and caught up on our TiVo. A quite-ish domestic weekend. I also managed to go over my lines for Gooper, and I'm eager to try the new tact tonight.

Picture of the Day
Gossamer and Bugs bedeck our tree.


In the News
The Time Person of the Year pick (the Interneterati) is weak. There should at least be one person who embodied the access to information and resources online. A YouTube founder, the Google guys, somebody who represents this growing demographic. And I'm not sure this is really a novel development. The '90s tech boom was all about people going online to get whatever they wanted, either from Amazon, eBay, Napster, AOL or online groceries. If anything online altered the culture this year, it was the pajama media, the political blogs that affected the election with their links to information on Foley, Iraq, Katrina, and Delay.

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Iranian moderates are winning their elections today.

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On "Face The Nation" Sunday, Colin Powell said the plan to send more troops to Iraq is flawed.

POWELL: Let’s be clear about something else, Bob, that gets a little confusing. There are really no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops.

[Host Bob] SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you about that because… do we have the troops? You seem to be suggesting that we don’t.

POWELL: I’m suggesting that what general Shoemaker said the other day before a committee looking at the reserve and national guard, That the active army is about broken. General Shoemaker is absolutely right. All of my contacts within the army suggest that the army has a serious problem in the active force.