It took an unbelievable amount of toil and expenditure, but in a week we have managed to convert this house from a wreck full of horrible junk into something suitable for Christmas, if only barely.

Note the Domo in the tree.

The Christmas haul: entirely books for Tino, in part because some presents are probably waiting for us on the porch back at Tino Manor East. I expect that that’s mainly books, too, for two reasons:

1. Amazon has made buying books easier than buying anything else, and
2. There’s a shortage of new and amazing gadgets on the market. I could really use a new computer, but there are compelling reasons not to buy one right now — particularly if, as I do, one uses a Macintosh.

Where’s my flying car?!

Comments and Trackbacks are still turned off as they present opportunities for what are effectively DOS attacks by would-be comment spammers. Movable Type’s comment-spam-rejection tools have got much better — they appear to be doing the right thing very nearly 100% of the time — but they are so resource-intensive that the computer will get wedged for hours at a time after a particularly intensive spam attack.