Walkin' in an Essex Wunderland

So, I figured I would post about what is goin on right now while I rock out to some Mashups (currently Beastie Boys vs Dandy Warhols). It turned out to be a very green Christmas, green as in money. I basically had told half of the family not to send stuff, to just send cash (well, check....can't really trust those postal workers ) It actually worked out that all of the close family just sent cash. While that means less "stuff" to open on Christmas day, it really is what we needed this year to pay down some debts (the year of hellish car repairs + getting a back deck). Combine that with the fact that we are ahead on the mortgage, have cut down our electric bill in the last few months, now have a 15% discount applied to our cellphone service, we are getting in MUCH better shape financially. (BTW - I am now listing to "One Vision" by Queen and picturing part of the movie Iron Eagle in my head.....hell yeah!)

So, anyway, right now, my sis is in town from Cairo and is staying with us and borrowing Kl0pfer for a few days before she flies down to Fla and then after she gets back from Fla, which means we are tooling around in the Jetta. That's all fine and dandy (we hadn't been driving it much since the great blow-out back in July/August) except that the CEL went on on Monday....I mean seriously...WTF???? From the looks of it, it was just the misfire coming back again, and it cleared itself and didn't show and problems today when we were driving it. It currently has around 84,000 miles on it, and the rabbit has just under 50,000. It would be nice to trade in the Jetta on a MkVI Golf TDI in the next year or two, but I doubt that finances will support that as comfortably as we would like.

As with last year the Christmas card from Mom & George included the surprise of a new pup (this time, a 6yr old Swissy Rescue). They took him in so he wouldn't be put down at the shelter. Speaking of Christmas, this year we are hosting Chrissy's family at the house, so for once, we don't have to go anywhere...not Fla, not NJ.....no where. It will be a nice change. I think next year we will try to hit up Fla for Christmas (hopefully I will have more leave available next week).

I am going to try to put some time into adding more content to mikecrutchfield.com sometime in the next couple weeks. Not sure if I will get to it, but I will try. Need to think about what I want to add and where. I have thought about leveraging the server to have web cams in the house that I can monitor remotely for security reasons. It would be cool, and since the server is in the house, it wouldn't have to constantly be uploading images.

Well, this is an unusually long update for me (at least by normal recent trends). I am gonna jet for now, but if I get around to adding content to mikecrutchfield.com, I will blog about that here as well. For now, I will leave you with am image of a winter wonderland: