Ho, ho, ho there everyone! I hope all of your holidays are turning out just as well as they possibly can, as we now move toward New Year's Day on Friday. I'm actually writing this blog on Sunday night, so that I can get it sent in and posted as early as possible on Monday. With Christmas Eve and Christmas Day taking up the whole back half of this past week, it's been a lengthier than usual amount of time since I was last here, so I have this nagging urge and need to get back at it. Plus, here on Sunday night, Barbara is off getting a massage right now, the Broncos/Eagles game hasn't grabbed me yet, and Da Boyce are sound asleep in front of the fire place, so why not?

Where to begin??? I have to go back and do some research because in lieu of the blog I've been more active than normal on Facebook the last few days, posting some short holiday updates and some Christmas snow storm photos as well, and I have to remember that only a few of you do the Facebook thing, so most of that bears repeating. When I was last here, way back on Wednesday last week, we were getting all geared up for our big blizzard, while simultaneously getting ready for Christmas. In the end, the blizzard hit hard at first, then a slight shift in the low-pressure system really changed things. And when I say "changed things" I most definitely mean for the worse.

Throughout Christmas Eve it was simply beautiful, with about 8 inches of snow fluttering down and piling up gracefully. Barbara and I went for a walk through the woods, late in the afternoon, and we were trudging down the trail through virgin untouched snow that was deep enough to come well up our lower legs. If you've ever had the pleasure of taking a walk through the woods after a major snowfall, you know the unique "blanket of silence" it creates. Everything is so pristine and so wonderfully quiet, you feel like you're the only people in the world.

When we got home, the hard-working UPS guys pulled up out front and delivered the last box with the last gift, and I'm happy to report the box contained "winner's jackets" from the Seattle race, for both Neighbor Dave and myself. Tim got one right after the race and he gets his free, of course, but the rest of us have the option of ordering them on our own, so Dave, Finkster, and I got together and figured out what we wanted (I just ordered the Seattle race only for myself), and then it was supposed to be my job to send the order in to Phoenix Custom Apparel. I procrastinated a while, then simply forgot to do it for a week or two, and then finally (about two months after the win) I sent a note to my guy at Phoenix Custom to get it done. Two seconds later, I got a "bounce back" alert that said Phoenix Custom Apparel had gone out of business. Yikes! At first, the three of us were thinking I should've gotten that order in earlier, but then we realized we might have ended up paying for jackets we never got, so we went with the flow and waited for NHRA to select a new manufacturer.

Over the course of the next few days, we discovered that Advertising Edge, out of Santee, Calif., had gotten the gig, and we made contact with Earl out there. We placed our orders, but it took Ad Edge a while to get all the necessary computer files and make the jackets. Christmas was closing in fast, but Earl went above and beyond the call by getting our jackets done by December 23, and then he overnighted them to us at no charge so we could have them by Christmas morning. That's some good customer service, if you ask me.

Anyway, the big storm was right on track to reach the predicted total of 20 inches of snow over the course of three or four days, but then we woke up on Christmas morning only to hear something odd. No, it wasn't the sound of reindeer hooves on the roof, it was the sound of dripping rain! Somehow, the front shifted and we went from 26 degrees up to 34 degrees, and the beautiful white snow turned to sleet, drizzle, and mush. It not only took the beauty away, it also compacted the existing snow into something altogether different. As I posted on Facebook, our gorgeous and fluffy Christmas snow turned into something resembling the consistency of a 7-11 Slurpee. Gross... Worse yet, once the temperature finally dropped again, all that slush froze solid. I still have areas on my driveway that are an inch or two thick, made up of solid ice.

Dave and I got to work on both of our driveways, and he made a valiant effort with the 4-wheeler, but we came out on the short end of the deal and I'll either have to eventually go out there with something sharp and solid, to break it up inch by inch, or wait for spring...

During the pretty part of the storm, I went all "artsy" with the Nikon and got some really beautiful photos, a few of which I posted on Facebook. I'll add one in the first gallery today, though, which has not yet been seen by anyone. I simply went outside around 10  p.m. on Christmas Eve, turned off the flash, and held the camera as still as possible (I don't own a tripod). The result was a wonderful shot of our decorated trees out front, with the entire photo being lit only by the Christmas lights and a soft glow in the western sky, coming from the lights of St. Paul far off in the distance. The pic actually makes it look like it was quite light out, but it was as dark as any normal winter night. Hope you like it. It took a steady hand to make it happen.

After the rude awakening by the rain on Christmas morning, we raced the cats downstairs, made a couple of cups of tea, and got to work on the tough assignment of opening presents. Christmas morning is kind of like Thanksgiving, in that the build-up and the work go on for a long time, but then it's all over in a blinding burst of frenetic speed... For us, it was all good and by "good" I mean "wonderful" and by "wonderful" I mean perfect. Santa brought Barb a new iPod Touch, a Cole Haan tote, a bottle of 2004 Silver Oak, a bright red quilted jacket with a small Minnesota Twins logo stitched on it (she'll need that at Target Field!) and lots of other fun things (including the always-popular full pampered day at the spa; a gift that's never the wrong color and always fits). The jolly old guy brought me lots of great clothes (I look positively "hip" wearing this stuff), a Sharper Image Shiatsu massage unit that fits on my office chair to do the work that normally costs you $75 per hour when a human does it, plus lots of other great stuff. Buster and Boofus also got a new toy, some new treats, and the unmitigated joy of being able to play in all the boxes and wrapping paper.

Because of the weather, the Jacobsens couldn't travel to visit Dave's family, so the four of them came over to our house to enjoy a lasagna dinner (we decided that's our new Christmas culinary tradition) and much fun. We even capped the night with a massive Wii tournament, and all I can say is that it's simply not fair for old geezers like us to play Wii against anyone under 25. Justin and Alexa proved that point, time after time, but I think us older folk held our own. If I just hadn't thrown that one meatball pitch, right down the middle because I somehow thought a slow pitch over the heart of the plate would confuse Alexa, I'd have won that one...

Oh yeah, and in the first photo gallery you'll see the newest example of "We've never seen that before" when it comes to the pond out back. After the Christmas slush storm, we woke up yesterday to see the entire pond covered in dimples. It looked like a golf ball, or maybe the top of a cracker! None of us have any idea what caused it, but it still pretty much looks that way...

Saturday night, we all headed downtown to meet our friend Mary Beth and her significant other, also named Bob, for dinner at Pazzaluna followed by the Wild's game against my old hometown team, the St. Louis Blues (pronounced "da Say Looie Bloo" by French Canadian hockey players and coaches) and were happy to witness a big win for the good guys. Funny to see them playing the Blues, though. I grew up watching the Blues, although my allegiance to them ended pretty much right after the era of Glenn Hall, Red Berenson, Al Arbour, and Barclay Plager. Despite that, though, I killed enough time copying and sketching that "blue note" logo in my school books to still get a little nostalgic when I see it.

Now on to other unrelated topics...

I know a lot of you continue to get personal notes from Adam in Hawaii, and that really warms my heart. He sent me a short letter, and in it he wrote "Aloha Bob. Who was the first person to respond to the 2007 blog call-out you made to help us? Answer: Jeff Arend. This season, I am sending out Christmas cards to everyone who helped, and who do you think was the first person to respond with a Christmas card in return? Answer: Jeff Arend." That's my boy! And that's pretty cool.

After I wrote about the trip to Springfield, and the Saab turbo-prop Annette and I flew on, I got a funny note from longtime blog reader Matt Turk. No, not the NFL punter, but a great guy who was the Sports Information Director at Simpson College when he first made contact with me, and who has now taken the big forward step of becoming Associate Sports Information Director for the Thundering Herd at Marshall University. He wrote: "Loved the Thursday blog. Just try shoving an entire men's basketball team into a Saab 340 and see how much fun that is! I still don't know how our 7-footer and our 6-11 guy made it to and from Binghamton, N.Y." Wow! Me neither, Matt... And congrats again on the move to Marshall, although Barb still wears her Simpson Storm t-shirt to the gym all the time.

Moving on now, to a wonderful series of emails I received from my sister Mary. She became the de facto "keeper of all things" in terms of old family photo albums, baseball stuff, and other memorabilia, and she chose the Christmas holidays to send us all some scans of a bunch of old prehistoric black & white snapshots from days long gone by. Tying into Christmas, there are two shots of us with a department store Santa (I'm sure we were at the old Stix, Baer & Fuller store at Westroads Shopping Center in Clayton, Mo., but you'd have to be pretty old and pretty midwestern to remember either Stix or Westroads, as the whole chain was sold to Dillards in 1984 and Westroads was demolished to make room for what is now The Galleria). She also included a wonderful and vibrant photo of my mom and dad, and looking at it I'd be surprised if they'd been married for more than a year or two, or perhaps they were not yet married at all at a time. Finally, she found a shot of my dad, in his catcher's gear, playing for the Philadelphia Phillies (so it must've been around 1951) and he looks so strong and athletic I'm mesmerized by it. This is the man I choose to remember as my dad...

Holy cow, that Eagles/Broncos game has been on in the other room, and all of a sudden it became a cliffhanger. And now I see the Colts pulled their starters in the second half and lost to the Jets, which means a variety of people on TV and on Facebook are ripping the team and bemoaning the impossibility of a perfect season. To those folks I say "What if they'd have left all the starters in and some big lineman had rolled up on Manning's leg, and put him out for the rest of the season? If your goal is to win the Super Bowl, a perfect record is really only slightly more important than meaningless, and this game was, at its root, meaningless in the big scheme of things." But that's just my opinion.

Gosh, there's lots more to write about but I guess that's enough for today... Just think, by the end of this week we'll all have to do that purposeful mental thing of telling ourselves to write or type 2010 instead of 2009. And just getting to the year 2000, which I looked forward to for the first 44 years of my life, seems like it happened yesterday.

More soon...

Wilber, out!