Rants

Tomorrow is the half day off I’ve been working extra every day this week for and me and the Mrs. are driving down to Hilton Head for the weekend. Sounds like a big deal, but actually we are staying a friend’s condo and we are bringing our DVD player and three movies to watch. We usually just hang around the condo like we hang around the house, the big difference being we can see the ocean from the window on HHI, while at home we see the neighbor’s decrepit boat that is filled with leaves.

Just got through watching “An Evening With The Dixie Chicks” on NBC. While I’m not a big county music fan, I liked this enough to stay for the whole show (which is either a testament to a good program or a statement on the amount of crap available on the other 60-odd channels.) It was actually good stuff. Put me in mind of the Eagles’s Hell Freezes Over concert of a while back. Nice harmonizing with the extra kick of a string section. You can tell it was filmed in Hollywood though, you had to be an aspiring actor/actress to get in the audience – nothing but good looking people to be seen in the whole theater, I’d have never gotten in.

Tomorrow starts the nearly daily trips at lunch to the Post Office to mail Christmas boxes to relatives in far flung lands. It is always a pleasure to stand around and wait and then have to go through the little verbal song and dance about how fast would you like it to get there, do you need insurance, or delivery confirmation. Now they have got an exit spiel too, about that did you know the Postal Service now accepts credit and debit cards as well as checks. I guess I could go to one of those mailing places, but they are hit and miss and charge more. I will just suffer and use the experience as my penance for actually not visiting family over the holidays.

I’m a sucker for Christmas Music. Not just any Christmas Music though, mostly I go for for the slightly weird and non-commercial type stuff. I own about 20 Christmas CD’s and about 5 of them come from Rhino Records if that helps. Every once and a while I pick a CD that I listen to once, and my Christmas CD that falls into this category is “Blame it on Christmas.”

Don’t be seduced by the glowing reviews on the bottom of that page. If you want a humorous Christmas CD buy Dr. Demento presents The Greatest Christmas Novelty CD Of All Time.

Not only did we miss out on the ice storm, we are now missing out on ice cubes. For the second time in the 7 year life span of our refrigerator the ice make has quit working. The first time, about 3 years ago, it was the valve that controls the water to the ice maker. You couldn’t just buy the valve you had to buy the whole ice maker kit. When it broke the other day I figured it was the valve again. I still had the old broken one, so I took it to work to see if I could make it work again. Sure enough I took it all apart, cleaned it and it worked. So I put it on the fridge when I got home yesterday and guess what – no ice. Must not be the valve. Up into the attic I went and dragged down the box with the rest of the kit. Tonight I replaced the ice maker unit itself with the new one – so far no ice. Wiring harness? either that or some thing in the refrigerator itself, because one end of the harness hooks into the back of the fridge….

I’m going to hate to have to go to ice cube trays.

I’m actually surprised that they haven’t already done that. The weather people are predicting freezing rain for tomorrow afternoon and usually around here in the wholly-unprepared-for-winter-weather south we close the schools and shut down the city government at the suggestion of cold wet stuff of any kind.