New President, New Hope

We have a new president, and I'm very excited to see what the future holds with the new administration. I know that it will be a lot of work to undo an eight-year-old tangled mess, a job akin to removing a million toothpicks from a giant haystack covered in glue. But my excitement is not just about that undoing, but also the doing of new actions to make America and the world a better place.

Sure, that's a very optimistic view, but that's what change does... to me, at least.

And one of the biggest changes that I realized after the inauguration was how I perceive and feel about the leader of our country. For too many years, I felt that our (now former) president was like a drunken bus driver with the music on too loud and a total ignorance of the brake pedal. The best I could hope for was that he literally didn't kill us all and that eventually the bus would run out of gas. Add to that a feeling of embarrassment, disbelief, and at times, outright hopelessness, and that's what the president meant to me.

It had been so long that I didn't realize how I felt until that feeling changed on Inauguration Day 2009. There's a new bus driver now, and even though we've barely left the station, I now hope that we're going to a better America. I feel excited, hopeful, trusting, and inspired now that Barack Obama is our president. Could those feelings change? Absolutely. But it's nice to feel this way now, and to believe that while those feelings can change in the future, they won't have to.

It's the start of a new era, and the hope it brings simply feels good.

Congratulations, President Barack Obama! And congratulations, America!

Penguin Logic

That sounds about right.

That sounds about right to me.

If my wife has her way, sparrows beware!

I'm watching some TV with my wife and we just saw a cat food commercial. She then said the following:

Huh! They make cat food out of the meat we eat. Lamb, beef, whatever. How come they don't make it out of the meat cat's eat? Like birds, sparrows.

Our kid doesn't stand a chance of thinking like a normal person, does he?

My cat may have submitted this LOLCat

I have a fuzzy cat who becomes 300% fuzzier in the winter. When I brush him in his winter coat, the comb/brush is full of tennis ball-sized clumps of gray fur and he gives me a look. I never knew what that look actually meant... until now.

(from I Can Has Cheezburger?, of course)

Happy Merry New Face 2009!

Sure, my wife and I have never had a Christmas together until 2008. This "Christmas of Firsts" was very nice, especially since our son had no idea what was going on so any presents we gave him this year we can give him again next year.

That's called "efficiency."

Along the same lines, since our son lacks the manual dexterity to actually unwrap presents, we just took some of his toys/presents and put them under the tree, unwrapped and facing in towards the tree stand. Instead of my wife or I unwrapping those presents, I merely turned the box around, feigned surprise, and showed the present to the baby.

I believe his reaction was gleeful surprise. Or gas. Or both.

The point is that Christmas was nice. I hope your December 25th was nice, too.

What really rocked was celebrating the end of 2008. I tolerated the cold for one holiday seaon event, but not for both. For Minute One of 2009, the three of us went to Miami. Exaltation! Celebration! Wahoo-itation!

What a fantastic week it was! The baby got passed around more than the common cold, although ironically he managed to avoid getting a cold. His father was not so lucky. But we had lots of good Cuban food, loud music, a bit of dancing, and lots of wonderful and joyful ambient warmth.

I even got to play two sessions of Rock Band in two different venues. Now I know how Neil Peart or that guy from that one-hit band feels like when touring, complete with fruit baskets in my dressing room. Well, fruit-scented potpourri in the bathroom, but that's close enough.

But that week is over, and all I have to show for it is a bunch of awesome presents, 17,000 new baby clothes, just as many pictures, and this blog post. That's a pretty nice haul.

So with that, I'll close out 2008 and start up 2009. I hope you have a wonderful year full of laughter, happiness, interesting internet surfing, and more laughter.