A good friend told me once that any day that starts with him being able to be vertical has to be a good day. The same could be said about a new year. Being above ground and vertical is a very good thing. Over the past few days a few snow squalls have blown through leaving behind about four inches of snow. East of here in Soda Springs, which is about 1,200 feet higher in elevation, some six to eight inches of snow are on the ground. The snow is rather dry, unfortunately, having left almost all the moisture behind in the Sierra Nevada mountains where it came down in somewhat unwelcome quantities. There’s been enough snow, however, to cause me to get out the snowblower the past three mornings and get rid of the snow on the driveway. Maybe this counts as exercise?

The month of January will be very busy. I’ll be headed to Belgium on the 8th returning on the 19th. After a couple of days at home, I’ll be headed for Orlando and the Lotusphere Convention for the last week of the month. I’ve gotten quite used to listening to podcasts on my iPod, but that whole setup is built around my home PC. I need to get this stuff transferred to a laptop so that I can keep up-to-date while I’m travelling. I’ll need to figure out if there is a way to transfer my history from the home desktop computer to a laptop so I don’t end up downloading everything all over again. That’s just a waste of bandwidth.

I think I have the e-mail posting problem resolved, but there’s still one problem that currently belies explanation. I’ve put a wget command in crontab to run every hour. That is working, but I’m also getting a "file or directory not found" email being sent from the web server at the time that the crontab is being run. I’ll have to ask someone at work if they know what the problem might be. It’s pretty strange. But, because I think email is now working correctly, I’ll send one in this afternoon and see if it gets posted.

The remnants of Christmas have pretty much disappeared from around the house. The only thing left are the lights along the roof of the house that Jared put up when he visited here over Thanksgiving. The Young Men’s organization in our Ward is doing a service project this week of taking down lights and I’ve signed up. They should be coming on Wednesday which will remove the last evidence that we decorated for Christmas this year. Bradica (the dog) now has several fewer things to stand underneath as both Christmas trees are down. Why do dogs stand underneath trees and branches so that they rub across their backs? Or is it that only our dog stands underneath things? It’s also another mystery for a Sunday morning.

It’s time to head for the shower and get cleaned up to go to Church. Today is Fast Sunday — the day when we skip two meals in a 24-hour period and donate the money we would have spent to the Church to be spent on the poor. This Sunday we are being asked to fast and pray for the families of the victims of massive Tsunami’s that followed the earthquake in the Indian Ocean and to donate generously to the relief efforts. They are indeed in our thoughts and prayers and we’ll make a significant donation today.