Ornaments Down!

Down with the Christmas ornaments today, which was a pretty big enterprise in fact, given the amount of ornaments we have on three trees.  Maddie and I dismantled the Star Wars tree, and we were packing up the main tree in the living room, and then the piano room tree, which takes a little bit of time as well.  Lots o' trees!  The Nativity set gets packed up, and there are other decorations too - we'll bring the trees themselves downstairs, but for now we're satisfied with the amount of work we finished up.  It took a bit of time - we spent a good part of the day cleaning the house, vacuuming up tree needles and straightening the house where we could. 

This morning Maddie did have Team Edge, and that would in fact be the first Team Edge of the year.  It went well, and it was fun.  I was over at the thrift shop where I picked up a few vinyl records, and due to an extreme wait (the credit card literally got stuck in the machine for twenty minutes), they gave me everything for free, including a few new Christmas CDs to add to the collection.  

So as you can see above, sales of jewel case CDs have gone down quite a bit since 2000.  No one told me about this!  All joking aside, I just like to hold on to tangible products, rather than have virtual items dependent on internet settings and electricity.  Yes, you need electricity to play a CD or a DVD.  But still, I'm just a guy who likes to get a physical item with artwork, photos and graphics.  Sure, that takes a bit more real estate in the house.  But that's the weird thing about our generation.  We have to get a new car fairly soon, and they don't have actual CD players in them anymore.  Which means I have to figure things out to adapt, I suppose.  Anyway, until then, I've got my CD players and the Blu-Ray/DVD player and I can play things without worrying about bad signals or whatever.  Maybe this year I learn to adapt, but then there's also this fun chart above - it's showing a small uptick in purchases of CDs.  And crazy enough, there's been a big trend in vinyl sales.  Believe it or not, more vinyl records were purchased in the previous years than CDs.  Just some interesting things as we move forward into the future.  I'm clinging to the past, one reason being that I have all this physical property and it wasn't exactly an easy thing to just start over again.  But the other reason again is that I just like a book shelf with books on it, versus all this virtual cloud stuff.  One could argue that I've made the transition with this blog, versus actually writing things in a book, and I suppose you're right.  But at the same time, with the writing, I actually started this in 2009 when things were on their way to digital already.  So there's that.

Anyway, speaking of "online," I was walking in Australia again this morning too.  Also, I was proofing some material of your upcoming "Exodus" series that we're returning to in March at KidPak.  Should be fun!  We'll be diving into the book of Exodus, and coincidentally, there's a new online course Mom and I will be taking with Exodus too.  Should be great stuff!

Tonight we concluded our Jurassic-a-thon with my least favorite entry, "The Lost World."  It has its moments that are fun, and it does advance the overall story with InGen, which of course creates a whole lot more trouble and/or adventure.  We saw that tonight, and we're keeping up with our other daily viewings of "The Chosen" and a quick episode of "Napoleon Dynamite," which we're really liking.  So sad there's only six episodes of this!

Our fast is doing well.  Mom's soup entries have been so good, and the Factor food we've been getting has been good for Mom, along with some wonderful vegetarian options for me.  It's a good quick meal, and it's really delicious.  

Tonight we read from our book, moving things along before bed.  We got to sleep on time, as we've got a big day at church tomorrow.  Prayers, then moving the plush entourage down the hall to get tucked in.  Goodnight!