Holiday Time

We just got back from a nice long Thanksgiving weekend down in Chatham, VA with April's parents. It was great to escape the city, enjoy a delicious home-cooked Thanksgiving meal thanks to April's grandparents, and spend some quality time with the family. Even Mabel enjoyed having some open space to run and getting spoiled by the Travises. Another highlight of the weekend was watching the Hokies beat up on UVA on Ronald's beautiful HD-LCD-TV while enjoying the company of Megan Redd perhaps one last time before she moves to California (like everybody else we know, it seems).

After a surprisingly easy drive up through VA and then up 95, we got back, unpacked, cleaned up a little bit, then didn't waste any more time before putting up the Christmas decorations. This was of course accompanied by listening to the two greatest Christmas albums ever created, "Snow Angels" by Over the Rhine, and the Beach Boys Christmas Album (I still know about 90% of the words to this album from the millions of times the record was played in my house in my childhood Christmases). I've always said that you need to wait until at least after Thanksgiving to start putting up Christmas decorations, listening to Christmas music, and getting in the Christmas mood, so the timing was perfect tonight. Here's a shot of our tree and stockings in the living room:

What's on my Google Reader?

Since I haven't been generating a whole lot of original content for this blog lately, I figured I'd post a list of some of the feeds I keep up with on my Google Reader. It an easy and convenient way to keep track of blogs and news feeds that I like to follow.

• CNN.com - Recent Stories - My favorite place for current news.
• philly.com - News - Local Philadelphia news stories.
• Phillyist - News and stories about what's going on around Philly.
• ESPN.com - Recent sports news.
• Damn Interesting - Stories and essays about topics that are damn interesting.
• Real Live Preacher - A preacher in Texas who writes essays about life, church, and Jesus.
  
• Post Secret - A very interesting art project where people mail in postcards with their deepest secrets. Warning - contains some R-rated content.
  
• The Dilbert Blog - Thoughts from Scott Adams - the guy that writes the Dilbert cartoons.
  
• The Daily WTF - Funny stories about the things that go on in the software industry.
  
• I Can Has Cheezburger? - Cat-themed geek humor. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I get some good laughs out of this site - April makes fun of me for it. It has its own language and inside jokes that you'll have to get used to.
  
• Straight Cash Homey Dot Net - Pictures of people wearing ridiculous sports jerseys.
  

I hope that gives you a few enjoyable things to look at. I'm going to try to put up a clips feature on the blog soon so you can see the stories and blog posts that I found interesting and tagged as public in my Google Reader. Does anybody have any other good feeds to recommend?