So the other day Laura and I were sitting in our living room and Laura noticed some movement in our (very late to take down) Christmas tree.  As it turns out, it was a butterfly.  It must have cocooned in our tree before it was chopped down in North Carolina and sold to us by some boy scouts.  We quickly captured it and set it outside and then realized that it was supposed to be below freezing that night and didn't figure a newborn butterfly could handle it.  We put it in a container for the night and Laura let it out the next day in the sun.  The light hit the butterfly and apparently dried its wings and got its blood circulating.  Laura looked it up an apparently it's a Pipevine Shallowtail.  Here is a picture Laura took after it flew away.

So I hit 100,000 miles on my 2001 Jetta the other day.  Kinda surprising that the check engine light wasn't on in this picture.  I do need to go get an oil change and I do suspect I need new front brake pads and my rotors turned.  Gotta love having car maintenance payments after the car payments are already over.

One thing I didn't know about Tuscaloosa (home of the University of Alabama) was that there are very few (no?) roads that go over or under the main railroad line in town.  So what's amusing is when something large happens (like Alabama's graduation lets out - congratulations to Katie by the way) and everyone races to their cars and gets in them and then promptly gets stuck because the city is bisected by a stopped train.  A very long train.  One amusing thing about this train...  they seemed to load the train incorrectly - the larger cargo container is on top of the smaller one - sticking out on each end.

So you all let me down...  Buzz didn't win the mascot challenge this year.  Even worse, the most frightening mascot ever won, Herbie Husker.  I'm still convinced that the Nebraska students wrote a program to submit the millions of votes Herbie got that shot him to the top of the rankings.  That or the stereotype is true and there really isn't anything else to do in Nebraska.

This picture just cracks me up...  Wilson showing off some tub.

Ever wondered how people without SUVs or trucks get 8 foot Christmas trees home?

So for Thanksgiving we managed to put up accent lighting on the house.  For Christmas we added a lighted wreath and garland around the door, and candlesticks in the windows.  We had them all hooked up with X10 so we wouldn't have to run around and plug everything in (and we could put it all on a timer).

So in case any of you are getting random charges on your credit cards, I think George has figured out how to place orders online.

I broke out my Christmas tree again this year...  wasn't quite as prominent as the one last year since I couldn't put it on top of my cube wall to be viewed across the whole company.  I had to settle for it just being seen by people walking by my office.

So Laura and I got a bunch of pansies and violas for our front yard and spent quite a few days before Thanksgiving making our house look a little more colorful.  We found quite a few interesting items in our yard that were left behind by the builder, but probably the most disturbing was the large hunk of concrete that was left less than two inches from the surface of our flower bed.  Our neighbor Max was kind enough to come over and help us remove it (he more or less did it as we stood around looking at how huge the boulder actually was).

So we've been told repeatedly by our various friends that the Winn Dixie near us is very shady.  Not only have they greatly reduced their selection of quite a few products, but they apparently don't mind selling expired products.  Here is a picture of the cheese we got back on October 21.  It was dated August 25.  Kinda scary that they didn't check for expired dairy products for 2 months.

We have a squirrel that routinely comes to sun himself on our back deck.  He will lay there with his arms and legs around the railing just being lazy:

So I'm driving through Bessemer, AL (just west of Birmingham) and I notice this sign.  Unfortunately I took this picture from my phone while the car was moving, so it got a little bit skewed as it went from top to bottom.  Just in case you can't read the sign, it says "Gold Teeth 4 for $70, 6 for $100".  Very disturbing.

Here's a funny one with a boat being towed by a truck on top of a truck...  somehow they loaded the whole thing on the top rack of a car carrying big rig with the boat trailer hitch still attached to the smaller truck...

This is a picture of Laura's family's ferrets.  Their names are Noodle and Loki.  The picture is so bad I can't tell you which one is which.

 

As some of you might have noticed (or not noticed - the beauty of RSS), I haven't updated my blog in quite a while.  Well, to sum it up, I haven't had a whole lot of time recently.  I have been keeping pictures of things I wanted to share with everyone, so over the next few hours (or worst case few days) I'll be posting what has been going on with us recently.