Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice and Merry Yule, y’all!

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

– Luke 2:8-20 NIV

So far, this Christmas is turning out much better than last year’s. I’m hoping the trend continues.

Jim let me open one of my presents from him this morning: a Philips Fidelio docking speaker. I’ve been wanting a speaker/player for my iPhone and he got me a NICE one! It hooks up to my iPhone to play tunes off it, or I can hook it up to my MP3 player. It can also charge my phone and sync up on my pc with a USB cable. It’s much nicer than the ones I had been looking at, and so I brought it to work with me today to play with it.

A new toy! YAY! Teehee!

We’ll be heading out of town tomorrow and will be in and out all weekend. I hope everyone has a safe and very Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, and Merry Yule!

Humpday Hilarities

Today’s funnies are courtesy of Cookie:

Is sex work?

A U.S. Marine Colonel was about to start the morning briefing to his staff. While waiting for the coffee machine to finish brewing, the colonel decided to pose a question to all assembled. He explained that his wife had been a bit frisky the night before and he failed to get his usual amount of sound sleep, so he was a little tired. He next posed the question of just how much of sex was “work” and how much of it was “pleasure?”

A Major chimed in with 75%-25% in favor of work. A Captain said it was 50%-50%. A Lieutenant responded with 25%-75% in favor of pleasure, depending upon his state of inebriation at the time.

There being no consensus, the colonel turned to the PFC who was in charge of making the coffee and asked for his opinion. Without any hesitation, the young PFC responded, “Sir, it has to be 100% pleasure.”

The colonel was surprised and as you might guess, asked, “How so?”

“Well, sir, It should go without saying, if there was any work involved, the officers would have me doing it for them.”

The room fell silent.

God Bless the enlisted man.

A young man named Dave received a parrot as a gift. The parrot had a bad attitude and an even worse vocabulary. Every word out of the bird’s’ mouth was rude, obnoxious and laced with profanity. Dave tried and tried to change the bird’s attitude by consistently saying only polite words, playing soft music and anything else he could think of to ‘clean up’ the bird’s vocabulary.

Finally, Dave was fed up and he yelled at the parrot. The parrot yelled back.Dave shook the parrot and the parrot got angrier and even more rude. Dave in desperation, threw up his hand, grabbed the bird and put him in the freezer. For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked and screamed. Then suddenly there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard for over a minute.

Fearing that he’d hurt the parrot, Dave quickly opened the door to the freezer. The parrot calmly stepped out onto Dave’s outstretched arms and said “I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions. I’m sincerely remorseful for my inappropriate transgressions and I fully intend to do everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable behavior.”

Dave was stunned at the change in the bird’s attitude. As he was about to ask the parrot what had made such a dramatic change in his behavior, the bird spoke-up, very softly, “May I inquire as to what the turkey did?”

Humpday Hilarities

Today’s funnies start with this one, the latest edition of Simon’s Cat:

This one is courtesy of I Can Has Cheezburger:

This one is courtesy of BlackFive:

These next few are courtesy of dear ol’ Cookie:

HOW TO SAVE THE AIRLINES:

Dump the male flight attendants, no one wanted them in the first place. Replace all the female flight attendants with good-looking strippers! What the hell!! They don’t even serve food anymore, so what’s the loss?

The strippers would at least triple the alcohol sales and get a “party atmosphere” going in the cabin. And, of course, every businessman in this country would start flying again, hoping to see naked women. Because of the tips, female flight attendants wouldn’t need a salary, thus saving even more money.

Muslims would be afraid to get on the planes for fear of seeing naked women. Hijackings would come to a screeching halt, and the airline industry would see record revenues.

This is definitely a win-win situation if we handle it right — a golden opportunity to turn a liability into an asset. Why didn’t Bush or Obama think of this? Why do I still have to do everything myself?

Sincerely,

Bill Clinton

Hey, he’d have MY vote!

HOW TO STOP THE CHURCH GOSSIP

Dorothy, the church gossip, and self-appointed monitor of the church’s morals, kept sticking her nose into other people’s business. Several members did not approve of her extracurricular activities, but feared her enough to maintain their silence.

She made a mistake, however, when she accused Harold, a new member, of being an alcoholic after she saw his old pickup parked in front of the town’s only bar one after noon.

She emphatically told Harold (and several others) that every one seeing it there WOULD KNOW WHAT HE WAS DOING!

Harold, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment. He just turned and walked away. He didn’t explain, defend or deny. He said nothing.

Later that evening, Harold quietly parked his pickup in front of Dorothy’s house, walked home, and left it there all night.

(You gotta love Harold!)

This last one is courtesy of Geekologie who posted a cute bit that combines the elements of two movies I love — Star Wars and The Princess Bride:

Humpday Hilarities

Today’s funnies start with this one from Dave:

English to be Changed to Euro-English

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”.. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”.. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl.

And this one from SenorGIF:

They apparently hate junkmail as much as I do!

A date which will live in infamy

I wasn’t aware of the date until I’d gotten to work this morning. Had a fight with the husband last night so naturally I’ve had very little sleep and am not quite “all here” today. My apologies for the tardiness of this post.

I’ve spent most of my lunch hour scouring favorite news blogs and local news sites. And honestly, I’m disheartened to see so little mention of today’s anniversary, if any at all. Not even Google has anything up.

I’m very disappointed in you, Google.

On the other hand, Bing has a very nice image of the memorial displayed with interactive tidbits and links. National Geographic also has a nice multimedia medley.

Thankfully, there are a few blogs covering the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941:

• Remembering Pearl Harbor: Retired Birmingham doctor honors first black Alabamian to die in WWII
• Pearl Harbor Day to be marked quietly by survivor
• December 7th, 1941, “A Date which will live in Infamy.” “The Song of the Seabee’s”
• Air Raid Pearl Harbor. This Is Not A Drill
• Remembering Pearl Harbor: 69 years
• Morning Cup of Links: Pearl Harbor Day

As I’ve said before, my faith teaches forgiveness, and I am the first to admit that perhaps I need to practice a bit more of that. But forgiving a wrong does not also mean forgetting it altogether. George Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

It’s been 69 years, America. Have we learned anything yet?

To those of you reading this: Hug your soldiers and veterans and thank them for us.

Holiday appropriate

It being the first day of December, I thought I’d put on the ole holiday dress-up for this site. Simple, but pretty nifty I still think.

Our Thanksgiving was fantabulous. Jim, Jess, and I loaded up the car and drove down to Jacksonville to surprise his aunt for her 75th birthday and spent Thanksgiving with his family.

IT. WAS. AWESOME!

Seriously, it was nice to finally have a family get-together where I didn’t have to stress over which parent to please, or what topics to avoid, or dreading what awful insult might be uttered from a particular person’s mouth, … We just sat around and chatted about family, food, and football. We ate a TON of food — including fried turkey, my favorite!!!

There were pies of every kind, and cakes, and ice creams of every imaginable flavor. There was baked turkey and stuffing. There was fried turkey. There was supposed to be a smoked turkey too, but it was accidentally burned, LOL! There was a plethora of cream cheese filled veggies, eggs, and other goodies. There were baked beans, and homemade mac ‘n cheese, and potatoes with gravy. (and God, I’m starting to get hungry just thinking of all this food!) We ate until our bellies felt as if they’d explode, then later we’d eat some more. We sat outside (and the weather was soooooooo nice!), watching the kids play football in the front yard and caught up on family that couldn’t make it or that were out of town.

It was great seeing some of Jim’s family that I’ve met over the past few years again, and even more fun meeting those I’d heard about but never met in person. I’m pretty sure my folks would have looked down on many of them, but I don’t care. These were my kind of people: simple, loving, and just plain fun.

There were a ton of kids around Jessie’s age. One particular set of cousins (twins, they were so cute!) latched onto Jessie and looked up to her, so of course she just soaked in the attention and all the funnery. In a way, it made me miss the old holiday family gatherings that my family used to have when I was a kid. Perhaps next year we’ll either do something similar up here, or just go back down there again!

We had originally planned to swing by to see my folks on the way home but that didn’t pan out. Part of me was worried about that, because (understandably) Jim didn’t want to go. Can’t say I blame him. I was dreading the visit for the very same reason: my father.

I am hoping to stop by and see them soon though, or maybe take them out to dinner. Jessie hasn’t seen them in so long, and I am hopeful that we might can just enjoy a nice night out for a change. There’s probably not a snowball’s chance in hell it will be as nice as I’m hoping, but I’m hopeful just the same. Maybe Christmas will be nice … I may be setting myself up for a disappointment, but hope is all I have and I have my claws dug in deep.

Hope y’all had a good one, I know I’m thankful that we did.

Humpday Hilarities

Today’s first funny is courtesy of my Cotillion sister, Kat:

AIRPORT BODY SCANNER SOLUTION

Wonder why nobody thought of this before?

Here’s a solution to all the controversy over full-body scanners at the airports: All we need to do is develop a booth that you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have hidden on or in your body. The explosion will be contained within the sealed booth.

This would be a win-win for everyone.. There would be no racial profiling and the device would eliminate long and expensive trials, the person’s desire to kill himself would be satisfied…

This is so simple it’s brilliant!

I can see it now: you’re in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system, “Attention standby passengers, we now have a seat available on flight number…”

And this one is from my mother:

GENERAL PUBLIC NOTICE:

Re: My Dog

“Please be advised I am sick to death of receiving questions about my dog who mauled 3 Muslims sitting on a rug next to my back wall, 6 illegals wearing Barack Obama t-shirts, 4 Democrats wearing Nancy Pelosi t-shirts, 5 phone operators who asked me to press 1 for English, 9 teenagers with their pants hanging down past their butt cracks, 8 customer service desk people speaking in broken English, and 10 flag burners.

For the last time … THE DOG IS NOT FOR SALE!!!”