Today included: a Christmas Carol party with hordes of cheerful people, mulled cider, mulled wine, a surprising number of children who somehow all fit into in the room with two small kittens, two hours or so of singing, and a "bonus reel" of songs including Tom Leher's Christmas Carol:

Also I walked to market, did a strategic run of 5? 6? errands by car, and took Rover to see the Christmas lights (and Christmas smells?) in Victoria Park.

To cap the evening off, I replaced the clogged freezer-drain tube in our fridge which was causing pools of ice and leaking water. For which I owe a debt of gratitude to Matt of ApplianceVideo.com for their youtube video which exactly described the fix; much more completely than the 1 page of instructions from Whirlpool. The video saved us over $100 on a repair bill- Whirlpool sent the part for free, so yay for that. But they were going to bill quite a bit to install it, and one of us would have to take time away from work at a busy time of the year.

So, yeah, I will happily install a fridge part at 8pm on a Saturday to avoid that hassle. And it didn't even harsh my holiday spirits. As Tom Leher put it so well: "Angels we have heard on high/Tell us to go out and buy..."

And Monday I hope to perform a similar operation on my Macbook Pro: the video describing a memory and hard-drive upgrade make it clear I have all the experience I need to do that myself, after hours using work tools, versus a considerably more expensive trip to the Apple Store. (The most important caution here is using anti-static mats and clips, so I don't fry the memory). Thank you macsales.com for your videos, even though I didn't buy anything from you either.