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December, 2008

Nothing fancy this time.

We started putting up the Christmas display in October, which meant inventing and reconstructing all kinds of things, since it's a different house, different layout and all that. The helper with me in the photo is Janelle, one of my students. We fed her pizza for lunch.
Then there was this kitten. I was coming home from work, slowing for a stop sign and this little (probably 3 months old) kitten comes marching out in front of the car. I stop well short of the stop sign to avoid squishing him. I get out of the car and scoop him up from in front of the left tire, he having gone under the car from the right side. Went to some houses, nobody home. I call Kathy and ask her if I can bring a kitten home. Well the oldest cat is 18 years old and won't last much longer. So now we have a new family member. The "middle" cat, Tinky, is used to ruling the roost. Well, this little tomcat challenges her all the time and she just screams and roars. Great fun!
I got mine, yours looks good, too!
Natives say that we've had unseasonably cold weather. I for one believe it. In addition to the wind (10-20MPH), the temperatures are below freezing, suitable for February. This part of the state is known as Windy-ana. One night it blew down several things in our display. I figured out how not to freeze to death while working on repairs -- a hot water bottle tucked inside my shirt. Doesn't help the fingers, though, that get so cold even inside those fleece-lined gloves from Tractor Supply.

Had my programming class write a program to graph the average global temperature (or just ocean or just land) since 1880. (Data courtesy of NOAA.) Interesting. We're talking about less than 2 degrees since 1880. (Hey, don't shoot the messenger! We just downloaded the data from the government!) And I know some Indiana residents who are all in favor of at least a little warming.

Oh, that sign on the right? It just tickles me every time I drive by it on the way to church.

Well, now the truck is getting a bed liner and a new topper. You can see in the photo my makeshift topper, stake sides with a tarp fastened over the whole thing. That's been our trademark here; hey, even the "poor" folks have fiberglass toppers. So we're caught up financially enough to get the liner and topper, from a highly-recommended but definitely working-class truck accessory shop down in Gas City. Can't hardly get to the place because of all the pickups parked out front. My kind of people.

As you've probably noticed, these blogs are now housed in a new domain. I went out and "bought" (actually rented) my own domain with 10 GB of disk space. AOL has shut down "hometown" where a lot of my family stuff was housed, so I'm transferring it here. AOL has shut down a lot of its "free" stuff like housing Web pages and off-site backups. Hope the E-mail accounts don't go away, but I wouldn't be surprised. I've been RBarnhart(at)aol.com for 18 years, also RDBarnhart(at)aol.com and KFBarnhart(at)aol.com (Kathy), but that may all end. Average lifetime of an entity on the Internet is around 2 years. Websites keep going away, people scream and yell when their carefully crafted home pages disappear from AOL (I've seen the postings!) -- no backups? They "lost" their several years of blogs, pictures, the whole schmear. So I bought my own site and domain name for less than $10.00 a month. And now my daughter says that "rbarnhart.us" is easily misread as "Barnharts R US". Never thought of that.

<begin commercial> The folks at harelink are pretty competent, by the way. However, if you get your own domain you have to figure out the menus and stuff all yourself. You "talk" only to the computer. But they have really good tools; I can use my favorite FTP program, the E-mail addresses are downloadable in a form you can actually edit, just vastly superior to the other Internet services. <end commercial>