This past weekend marked the official start of the holiday season in the US. We call it Thanksgiving but it's really just a 4 day weekend to prep for the craziness of the end-of-year festivities. My family celebrated with dual Thanksgiving dinners – one on Thursday with my inlaws and one on Friday just for my wife, daughter and myself. Then came the launch of the holiday project season.

First, Brinda (my wife) decided her office needed a makeover. So we jumped in the car and headed to the huge Ikea factory store here in Houston. She got a couple of new desks, a big bookcase, some wall mounted cabinets and shelves and some lighting. I got 4 days of hard labor. She's still putting the final touches on the room late tonight. I'm putting bandages around the hammer and drill wounds I inflicted upon myself. I can build software. I'm not so clever with hand tools. I'm looking forward to the makeover we've planned for mydaughters room in December. Ikea's products are incredibly easy to put together. I just wish they came with sutures and cauterizing tools.

Once the heavy work of the office retrofit was complete I got to pull down the holiday lighting from the garage attic. If you've ever seen “Christmas Vacation” with Chevy Chase you can picture me and my 50,000 imported Italian twinkle lights balled up on the front lawn for 8 hours trying to figure out how the staple gun opens and wondering why the C-7 lights keep blowing the fuse when I plug them end to end with the C-9 lights. I won't detail the wounds received tyring to wrap said lights around a birch tree or those garnered from encounters with wildlife living under the untended plantlife in the front garden. I will say I still find it strange to be sitting on the lawn placing bulbs in plastic holders while the sound of lawn mowers echos in the distance. The grass is green, the sun is out, I'm in shorts and its bloody winter. There is something evil about Houston in this way. It's the only place where Santa's Sled has mudflaps that say “Playboy”.

I actually enjoy putting up the lights. Every year seems to get a bit more ogranized than the last and the lights get lots of nice compliments from the neighbors (some of which have traces of bourbon trailing them as they pass, but I don't think that affects their opinion of my designs). What is really fun, though, is ignoring the nasty-gram I get from the too-pompous folks at the Home Owners Association who dislike the white plastic holders sticking up from my rain gutters in February long after the lights have been removed. Apparently these also have to come down to stay in compliance with ordinances. That not withstanding, those little white plastic pointy holder things are now permanent parts of my gutter and short of Dorothy's twister are not likely to be removed by mortal man.

So now that the lights are up (mostly, there are still rows of lights along the roof that need to be positioned, not to mention all the goodies inside the house – did I mention we have three complete sets of department 56 villages taking up vital living areas too?) I'm ready to dive back into real projects. I have XNotesPlus 3.7 just about ready for release. I've prep'd myself for the start of porting of the Graphics Muse Tools to GTK 2.x and GIMP 2.x. My web site has been fixed of most major inconveniences to Windows users. I've rebuilt my GIMP gallery to use a PHP script and a slide show. XEUS will be getting a new section for my article archives soon. I've been given source dominion over the MiniMyth project and will need to get it a project page under XEUS (probably replacing XIMBlog). I've found some minor bugs in MuseSig, like you can't create an rpm cuz there aint no Makefile (there used to be but obviously I porked that one somehow) . I need to start on the rewrite of my wife's web site – BlueBugStudio.com – so she can more easily load new client projects as well as expand from invitations to general graphic design work. I've got articles due each month for two magazines now – Tux and LinuxFormat. I'm hoping to submit some fiction work to GlimmerTrain and WritersDigest contests.

And I want to start on another book.

At least I'm not bored. Just out of my friggin mind.