Scene: my wife and I are sitting at our respective desks in the study, doing our respective things on our respective computing systems. Her: "Wow. There are thirteen miners trapped in a mine in West Virginia." Me: "What the hell are a bunch of minors doing..." That was the point I shut up and then started laughing. Then I had to explain the insanity that took place in my mind, to which my smiling bride stated, "Doofus." Doofus, indeed.

For New Year's Eve, my wife and I went out to dinner, toddler in tow. Over our meal we toasted the new year, praying it would be better than 2005, which was better than 2004, which was only slightly worse than 2003. My prayer for my family, my friends, and you, dear reader, is that 2006 is a better year for you as well. God bless, and be God's.

My wife found this dump soup recipe somewhere online, and neither of us can remember where nor find the bookmark for it. As the name implies, it's a soup made up of whatever you dump in the pot. Here's what we had for lunch: 1 can, Campbell's Healthy Request Minestrone
1 can, pinto beans (15 oz)
1 can, Ro-Tel Original diced tomatoes and green chilies (10 oz)
1 can, whole kernel corn (15 oz)
1 can, cut green beans, no salt added (14.5 oz)
In the past, we've also added a can of red beans, and a can of black beans to the mix, each of those a 15-ounce can like the pinto beans listed above. You'll need a good-sized pot to heat it on the stovetop with, and some Tupperware™ or other storage of your choice for the leftovers. Because there will be plenty of leftovers. It's very hearty, especially if you go with all three types of beans.Today's fixing fed both of us for lunch, and will give us at least one more meal, possibly two, depending upon how many bowls each of us has. If you're on Weight Watchers™, this soup is extremely low in points; two to three per bowl. Thanks to the Ro-Tel, I should have skipped taking some decongestant earlier. The green chilies cleared out my sinuses just fine.

Daryl Reaugh:

The most common eye injury in France is damage done by flying champagne corks. (It's true.) Apparently they don't retreat fast enough when it comes to avoiding bubble propelled projectiles.

Razor says, 'Let's be careful out there, and wear a visor.' And this is from a guy with French ancestry.

While testing a new product for review, you set your iPod on shuffle, and hear Hootie & the Blowfish, dc Talk, King James (old Christian metal group), Petra (the Aerosmith of Christian rock), and then VeggieTales. Just kind of throws that whole rhythm off to have Junior pop in to the middle of the mix with "Come over to my house and play!"

Last night, for my birthday, my wife and I went to see the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. Wow. In my opinion, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon nailed Johnny Cash and June Carter. No wonder the latter hand-picked the former to play them. My wife, who isn't familiar with Cash's music beyond "Ring of Fire" (written by June Carter, in case you didn't know, which my wife did not), thoroughly enjoyed the picture. She discovered she likes Cash's music, too. I'll have to load some up for her on her iPod Shuffle. Sidebar: My wife told me that Rosanne Cash, Johnny's oldest child from his first marriage, was not thrilled with the portrayal of her mother, Viv, to the point of having walked out of the screening she attended. My wife and I agree that Rosanne has nothing to worry about. I don't think Viv came off as hysterical or unhinged at all. I think she came off perfectly as what she was: a woman who realized that she was not her husband's true love; a woman who knew her husband was unfaithful, and that her life was not the least bit what she had expected it to be. Given that, I don't think Viv's actions, as portrayed in the film, are the least bit out of line. I thought the movie was great, even if they had to gloss over some more intriguing parts of Cash's life due to the time constraints of a major motion picture. This was not only a story of a man's dream to record and perform his music, it was the love story of Johnny and June. Days before we saw the film, I signed up for an account with eMusic. If you sign up now, you get 50 free downloads. Unlike the iTunes Music Store, the MP3s you download from eMusic have no DRM attached. You can burn them to a CD, load them to a music player, pretty much do whatever you want to with them, just as if you had ripped them from a CD of your very own. I used a little over half of my free downloads to get Cash's The Complete Sun Singles. This was very timely, given the material is heavily featured in the film. (Consequently, after using my 50 free downloads, I've since cancelled my eMusic account; they don't have anything else I want.) What's sad is that, at 35, my wife and I were the youngest people in the theater, and that's a real shame. Walk the Line is highly recommended, even if you're not a fan of Cash's music, and especially so if you know little about the man or his career.

This morning, we took the little phisch to downtown Dallas for the annual Neiman Marcus Adolphus Christmas Parade. He had a gas, and I hope to have photos up soon. Before the parade began, I was 34. By the time the parade was over, I was 35. My wife--who, for the record, is six months older than I--has found it fun today to refer to me as "old," and to remind me that it's "all downhill from here." Actually, looking at average age statistics for non-smoking males in the United States, I believe I have another two to three years before I reach the top of the slope and began the descent. Tonight we're going out to see Walk the Line, and once again, the Tigers are playing for the SEC Championship on my birthday. (Thank God for TiVo.)

Hugh notes Kevin McCullough's campaign to send Christmas cards to the ACLU. Ever since the little phisch was born, the Christmas cards we've sent out have been the kind where a photo of the youngun was part of the card. So we have a few boxes of Christmas cards that will likely never be used. Kevin's campaign sounds fun, and I have the materials. So the ACLU can expect a Christmas card from me this year. Probably two. Maybe three. Alright, four. Let's just say, when I get tired of signing them and filling out the address info on the envelopes, okay?

John Gruber:

[N]ext-generation consoles seem set to surpass the PC as the premier platforms for gaming, which means anyone who’s resisted switching from Windows because of the lack of games for the Mac will have one less reason not to switch. I think there a lot of guys out there who are starting to think they’d be better off with a new Mac and an Xbox/PS3 than with a new Windows PC. Years ago, when I was more fanatical about evangelizing the Mac, whenever the gaming argument came up my reply was always along the lines of "If you want to play games, go buy a Nintendo." (Update the phrase with the console of your choice.)

I've been trying to send some e-mails with attachments via Gmail, from within Safari. Frustrated, I launched the 1.0b1 version of Camino, and it worked the first time I tried. If Camino could mimic the easy subscribability of Safari when it comes to RSS and Atom feeds, there would be no looking back. Based on my own usage, Camino is consistently faster than Safari at rendering, uses less RAM over time, and remains more stable. Then Tom has to go and remind me why Safari kicks butt when it comes to designing for standards. An article in the latest Macworld has prompted me to look seriously at del.icio.us. My personal work habits have evolved to the point where I'm no longer worried about keeping bookmarks synced between two systems, but the prospect of an online backup of my bookmarks, that I could access from any where, is appealing. I'm coming closer all the time to my own personal death knell for .Mac. Anthro's eNook is so cool it almost makes me wish I didn't have enough space to get one. Almost. A happy belated to Tiffany. Finally, my thanks to Tom. He knows why.

"Get a bigger bugle!" Gosh, I don't even have a bugle, and they want me to get a bigger one? Isn't a large bugle called a trumpet?

Lileks cracks me up:

Women writing about men always seems like cats writing about dogs; they just can’t believe that sitting around and waiting for supper or intruders is what it’s all about. It has to be something more. A writer of the Dowd Brigade will ask: why does he want to go have pizza after sex instead of cuddling? A man, or a married woman, will say: because he’s hungry. No, it has to be more than that. Is he using the trip to the fridge as a hedge against intimacy? No, he’s using it as a means to get pizza. Because he’s hungry. You want him to stay, put a frozen Totinos between the mattress and the box spring before you start. We men are really and truly not that complicated, ladies.

Parents can relate:

My favorite portmanteau came from our two-year-old daughter, whose response to the question "How was your day [at daycare]?" was: "Oh, hective, very hective." We assume that it was a combination of hectic and active, but whatever the source in her mind, it remains a wonderfully descriptive word for busy family life. From Anne Beer, on the AWAD mail Issue 183, October 22, 2005. My wife thought this perfectly appropriate to our lives with a two year-old.

Now if the Fujifilm blimp captains have a blog, what's your excuse for not having one? [Via Six Apart.]

Some time in the first year to year-and-a-half of my life, my parents moved to Houston. My dad had joined the Navy for a two-year stint, and would be spending nearly one of those on a Mediterranean cruise aboard the USS John F. Kennedy. My grandparents lived in Houston, and would help my mom look after their only grandchild. My grandfather was a regional sales manager for a major tobacco company. He had season tickets to Houston Oiler football games and Houston Astro baseball games. He took clients to games. He gave the tickets away to clients, and if they didn't want them, to friends. And once my dad's time in the Navy was over, he took my dad. And me. I was only three or four, but there are two or three memories clanking around in my noggin of going to Astros games with my dad and grandfather. I remember the night they gave away baseballs. I remember hurling mine, still in the plastic bag, toward the field when the the team came out of the dugout. It was time to play ball, and I guess I wanted them to play with mine. Dad tells me I clonked someone on the head a few rows down, and cried because no one threw the ball back to me. My grandfather would sneak away and get me another one, but he didn't let me know, and he hung on to it. My grandmother tells me it's somewhere in a box in their house. You can understand, then, why I may have a little affinity for the Major League club in the southern portion of the Lone Star State. Someone--my grandmother or my parents--also has the orange Astros ball cap that I had during those years. I need to get that; it would be great for my son to wear. For the first time in their 44-year history, the Houston Astros are going to the World Series. To meet a club that hasn't been to the Series in 46 years. A historic Series, to be sure, and one that I hope is not one-sided in either team's favor. (Okay, maybe a little one-sided in one club's favor.) Biggio and Bagwell, among the last of the franchise players in Major League Baseball, are getting their shot at the championship title, and it's been a long time coming. Eighteen years for Biggio. Eighteen years he's been trying with the Houston Astros. Craig, your loyalty and hard work have been rewarded. My grandfather severely injured his back and one of his legs around the time I was five. It badly disabled him, and I remember climbing the stairs of my grandparents' house to go visit him in his bed. I don't remember going to any baseball games after that. My grandfather retired, and when we moved to Baton Rouge in the summer of 1976, my grandparents followed shortly thereafter. Their other son and his new family were living there, too, and the entire extended family was in one location. Houston is the closest city with a Major League team to Baton Rouge, and you'll find Astros fans throughout Red Stick. We still followed the Astros, but it was mainly through the stories on the sports page than anything else. It took the move in 1998 that brought my wife and I to Dallas for me to discover a love for Major League baseball, but I'll never forget the seed that was planted in the early 1970s by my dad and grandfather. Granddaddy, I wish you were here to see the Astros now.

So I've decided to give it a whirl this year, and join Danno and fifty thousand others at taking a crack at churning out 50,000 words in 30 days. Should be fun. Blogging may drop off considerably. Think you have a novel in you that's just dying to get out in the thirty days of November? Join us.

AOL is still a crappy way to Internet, in my not-so-humble opinion, but their latest commercial ("Too much information") had me in stitches.

1. Go to Google.
2. In the search box, type "French military victories."
3. Click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. [Via Tommy.]

Damien shared this gem with me via instant message. I had no words other than, "That is totally awesome."

My wife and Tom both told me about Charles Ross's One Man Star Wars. The video clip sealed it for me; if I find myself in NYC, I'll definitely have to see this, or his new One Man Lord of the Rings.

Our tyke had his first trip to a zoo yesterday. The weather was fabulous, so we trucked on down to the Fort Worth Zoo for a day with some friends and their son, who is just a few weeks younger than our tot.

Click on the photo to see the entire picture set.

Thanks to Tiff for noting Tom's birthday for the rest of us.

Tom asked, and Tiff said yes. I confess to being one of those who knew of Tom's plan ahead of time, but that's mostly because I've been annoying him about it for...well, a while. Though he had described the ring to me, I had not yet seen a photo of it. A fine job, my friend. Tom's plans were certainly more romantic than mine, but then my beloved knew it was coming. (Not at the exact moment it came, mind you, but it was something we had been talking about.) I like that the first person to know of their engagement was the park ranger; for us, it was our waitress at dinner an hour or so after I asked. Having been through the big wedding thing, I proffer this advice to Tiffany, who is already stressing: skip it. Take the money and run. Small, small, small, family and very close friends. I won't even sniffle over not getting an invitation. (Though an excuse to go to DC/Cali/wherever would be nice.) Congratulations you two, and may God bless you with a lifetime of happiness together.

Something amusing I read in RD, courtesy of BizRate Research:

56% of women and 41% of men say their pets are more affectionate than their partners. Our cats and dog can be pretty affectionate, but I would hesitate to say more so than my wife. She may feel differently about me. 45% of women say their pets are cuter than their partners; 24% of men feel the same way. Our male cat, Zane, who is an all-grey short-hair, is gorgeous. My wife keeps insisting I should find a pet model agent for him. Our other cat and the dog are cute, but I would honestly say they don't compare to Zane. But the animals being cuter than my wife? I'm not stupid. (Contrary to what you might think...)

Today, the SuperToad turns...well, another year older. We'll just leave it at that. Happy Birthday, Brian!