MichaelandChrissy.com

It’s that time of year again!  Every Christmas, we send out festive cards with an annual update letter and a family photo to our friends and family.  We paid a visit to our favorite photographer, Mandy, at the local Wal-Mart.  We always request Mandy, since Aiden smiles easily for her.  She can even make Gavin smile on cue, no easy task!

We normally buy all the images on a CD, along with the copyright permissions.  However, the price was of the CD was double this year!  It’s still less expensive to buy the CD than to order prints for all of our Christmas cards though.  And Chrissy always orders 11×14 prints of the boys for our living room through Shutterfly, which you can’t do without the copyright permission from Wal-Mart.

I recently started listening to a weekly horror podcast called Pseudopod.  Although I also listen to podcasts on ColdFusion programming and GTD productivity, Pseudopod is different in that it’s more like a collection of books on tape.  Episodes are self-contained and range from fifteen to forty-five minutes in length, just the right amount of time to enjoy one or two on my way to work.

Professional voice actors read each short story, and they’re pretty talented overall.  It’s always cool when the voice actors differentiate the voices of each character in the story.  There aren’t normally many characters in each one, but it makes the reading that much more creepy.  I would recommend giving Pseudopod a listen.  Here are some of my favorites so far to get you started:

Episode 137: The Reign of the Wintergod (caution: vulgar)
Episode 142: Camp
Episode 150: Break the Vessel
Episode 164: Linda’s Appointment

Special thanks to David Perry, since I stumbled upon Pseudopod via a link on his web site.

I’m not a particular fan of the Old Navy logo, but I do have some of their hoodies in my closet.  One of the people that I follow on Twitter, @CorrinRenee, recently had a contest on her blog to hawk colorful Old Navy ruffle tops.  I left a snarky reply, completely not expecting anything to come of it.   See me be snarky:

I’ve been known to sport an Old Navy hoodie.  But I won’t wear the ruffles.  I will give them to homeless children who will wear them for me.  And dance for my amusement.  Dance, little ruffle-wearing homeless children, dance!

As it turned out, the homeless children were my own!  Corrin chose the winners of the giveaway by random number (my comment was number 31), so we won a coupon for $45 off of a $100 purchase.  The downside was that it expired in two days.  That wasn’t a problem though…

I got the notice on Sunday morning and, by Sunday afternoon, Chrissy had racked up a $200 charge at Old Navy.  She bought a lot of clothes for the boys, some that won’t even fit until next year.  The checkout girl said that this coupon was very rare and wondered where we got it.  So thanks, Corrin, for helping us dress our homelessful children!