I worked, of course; instead of the "one or two" calls I was told to expect, there were a whopping six, and I just don't know how to cope--
No--that was an easy day, and the only way it would have been easier would have been if I had not been working. I'm happy with it.
Took lunch an hour late and spent it putting the bird in the oven. Perfect timing: the bird was done perhaps ten minutes after I knocked off for the day. I sat here at the computer and peeled and cut the potatoes with my headset on.
Dinner was lovely; the bird came out perfect, and everything else was easy-peasy and extra-tasty. I did not expend too much more effort on that meal than I did on an ordinary home-cooked meal. Alton Brown's roast turkey recipe makes cooking a turkey simple, and if you get a turkey with one of those little poppers in it, it's virtually foolproof.
Among other things, Mrs. Fungus gave me a copy of Tales From The Loop which I am going to thoroughly enjoy. It's by this guy, Simon Stalenhag, whose art I previously mentioned here.
It's an RPG now, and it's being made into a TV series, so wahoo!
* * *
Fiddling around with LEDs from the spare string of lights, I found that the orange (spare) LED works fine with about 3v and whatever current a pair of AA batteries supply, but the blue LED I pulled out of the string has no problem with the voltage and current from a 9V battery. On 3V, it's barely lit at all.
Now, the first couple of times I tried lighting an LED with a 9V battery, it fried the LED in short order. The provenance of this battery is uncertain, but it didn't pop the blue LED. It is true that blue LEDs tend to want a higher forward voltage and more current than red, yellow, or green ones do. That's because the Laws of Thermodynamics require more energy input for the same amount of light output, because the higher frequency photons take more power to generate.
In 8th grade (I think it was 8th grade) I made a little reading light--I've talked about this before--by rubber-banding a somewhat-used 9v battery to a Radio Shack DPDT knife switch, then wiring the battery to the common terminals and a trio of LEDs (one red, one yellow, one green) to one of the switched terminals. The school had no dedicated study hall room, so kids in study hall were distributed across the various classrooms. Mine was in a 7th grade science class, and the teacher spent a couple of weeks showing movies, so I whipped this up to enable me to read. I had, after all, seen the movies the year before, and they were boring educational movies to begin with.
So the lights would go off, and I'd flip on my little book light and read, zero fucks given about what other people thought of it. Heh. It was bright enough for me to read by, but the light mostly went one way (towards the page I was reading) and wasn't enough to disturb the class. The science teacher thought it was a pretty neat idea.
That's right: I invented the personal book light. Itty Bitty Book Light, give me money.
I used it until the battery went dead--that's how often that gomer showed movies--and in fact ended up using a second one. That lasted until the end of the school year. The battery would last a good long time, because LEDs just don't draw that much, not even three in parallel; and the current--split three ways--wasn't too high for the LEDs, but just enough to make them reasonably bright.
* * *
They want to rename the Dan Ryan, call it the Barack Obama Expressway or something stupid like that. If they do that I'll still go on calling it the "Damn Ryan". But that freeway is enough of a clusterfuck that naming it after the SCOAMF himself might not be a bad idea.
* * *
Of course we had a fire in the fireplace last night. Once it was going pretty good we put the Yule Log in, and it went up nicely; and at last I put in this enormous chunk of oak that I'd gotten from Og lo these many years ago, and it burned very nicely for a long time.
It was part of this load:
The log I burned last night was very big and I thought, when I was unloading that truckload of wood at home, "Put that one aside for Christmas," so it got put in the garage--and there it remained for years. When we went to bed about 1 AM, it still had weak flames, I whacked it with the poker and it crumbled into coals, and flared up a bit. When I got up to hit the can perhaps an hour later, there was still a red glow in the fireplace.
That was an excellent log. Probably, being out of the weather is what made it so. Nice and dry.
* * *
A lovely Christmas, all told.