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The Events that are: My Life

Things that go on in my life that cannot be catagorized somewhere else, sort of a catch-all

The Advent Conspiracy

Jesse Shoman pointed me to this quite a few months ago:
Click for YouTube Video

For a couple of years now, I’ve really dreaded buying gifts. It’s not that I don’t like giving, because I do. The part I don’t like is giving meaningless gifts just for the sake of giving something.

From www.adventconspiracy.org:

The story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love.

So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists.

And when it’s all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas?

What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?

Welcome to Advent Conspiracy.

If you watch the video (which I think is pretty good), they say that American’s spend $450 Billion on Christmas every year. I was a little bit skeptical of that number, but I did some research and for 2008, the National Retail Federation predicts that $470.4 billion will be spent this holiday season1. There’s also a footnote that reads, “NRF defines “holiday sales” as retail industry sales in the months of November and December. Retail industry sales include most traditional retail categories including discounters, department stores, grocery stores, and specialty stores, and exclude sales at automotive dealers, gas stations, and restaurants.”

Personally, I think the $450 Billion number is high, but I believe that the point is still valid.

1 Source: http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=573

Be Back Soon

In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m done with the Fall 2008 semester. Final grades will be posted to Blackboard on Tuesday (I think).

Graduation is tomorrow (Friday) and I’ll be going to that and then some graduation parties. I’m thinking about skiing on Saturday morning and then I head down to Colorado Springs to see a couple of my cousins dance in the Nutcracker.

I’ll pack on Sunday morning, head to church and Old Chicago’s in the evening, and the retire for the night.

I’ll be leaving first thing Monday morning, back in Seattle by Tuesday evening.

No Shave November

As I’ve done for the last few years (see this, this, and this), I participated in No Shave November again. I think this will be my last year.

I ended up trimming it, which means that I’m keeping a beard for time being. I like to call it my Beard of Power. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Also, finished up Senior Design (for this semester at least) and Machine Design today. That’s seven of my 19 credits wrapped up.

DSC_6069
Nikkor 50mm || 1/60 || f/1.8 || ISO640 || tripod

Happy and Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving was different this year. We’ve almost always had it at my parents house in Seattle. Even over the last four years I would fly back to have Thanksgiving in Seattle. There have been two times when we haven’t had it at my parents house: 5th grade (1996) when we had it in Idaho and another time we had it at a family friends place.

This year we had it at my Aunt’s house. My whole family was there (4 people), my mom’s sister and her family was there (another 4), my mom’s other sister and her family (6 people), my mom’s brother, my dad’s brothers’ family (4 people), and Grandma.

20 people and 5 dogs. It was pretty packed.

It was nice to be around people. A little over whelming to be around 20 people.

Hilarity ensued when we launched into a massive game of telephone pictionary:
DSC_6062

The Dream

I had a dream last night. I dreamt that I was back in Seattle at UPC. I was walking around and I saw Earl Palmer. The events of this dream take place just a few weeks after he had left his position as Senior Pastor. I ran over to him, and his eyes started to well up. I hugged him and started crying, just thanking him for being such a good pastor and for our talk this summer.1

I remember feeling happy that I was able to cry. I’ve been very emotionally drained these last few weeks. At times I’ve felt like crying, even wanting to cry. But nothing ever came out. It was refreshing to finally be able to cry, even if it only was in my dreams.

I wonder if he had the same dream.

1 In real life, I never got to say goodbye and thank before Earl left.

Comment Stats

TDavid over at Make You Go Hmm has been playing around with mySQL to get stats on his users comments. I also enjoy looking at pretty numbers (always being careful to remember they mean absolutely nothing), so I did some digging in my own comments database.

So here we go:
First up, total posts by year:

The blue line is all comments. The red line is all comments minus the ones from the WordPress plugin related pages, which are typically help related. While this year isn’t over yet, I highly doubt I’ll get to 2007 or even 2006 levels of comments.

Top ten commenters of all time are

  1. Andrew Ferguson (595)
  2. quinn (108)
  3. staples.jeff (107)
  4. Audrey (69)
  5. Matt Matteson (43)
  6. Peter (42)
  7. CrazyBarbour (40)
  8. laura (34)
  9. Amelie (23)
  10. Ryan “Artoo” Goodwin (19)

I was going to post the leader board for each individual year, however people changed their emails and the way they entered their names in the comment fields and I really don’t want to fix all of them to get accurate results.

I’m kind of stumped as to why 2006 was such a good year for commenting. Interestingly enough, this year has seen more comments per a post, which I think is good. Thoughts?