Lessons Learned During Christmas Vacation

1. Getting away from the computer (and most news sites) is therapeutic.
2. Substituting way too much Facebook time for those news sites is ultimately quite depressing.
3. Watching “Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey” and crying over it will NOT increase your man cred.
4. Having a solid knowledge of 1940s radio personalities will make watching “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” a much more enjoyable experience.
5. I have a lot of Facebook friends who are, shall we say, passionate about guns.
6. Windows 8 is not the swirling, sucking eddy of despair that some have made it out to be, though it does have its own interesting little problems.
7. Absolutely NO ONE is at work at RWMC on January 2.
8. Leaving an inverted water bottle in my spider plant at work so it would be watered appears to have worked quite well. Unless someone else was watering it the whole time.
9. The words that make up the sentence “Best BuzzFeedLongreads of 2012” make sense independently, but certainly not in that quoted configuration
10. If an astrological event such as the Leonid meteor shower and a conjunction of the full moon and the planet Jupiter occur, it WILL be cloudy.
11. Your fusspot son – who discards cheese stick wrappers everywhere and covers the floor of his bedroom with discarded toys, clothing, and assorted rubbish – will notice if you spill a tiny amount of orange paint on his carpet as you’re painting his room.
12. I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the stories at Not Always Right are either highly overdramatized or just made up. Especially those that take place in coffee shops or subway cars.
13. Thanks to Not Always Right, however, I will never write that someone “storms out” if they’re upset. Completely overused phrase.
14. The phrase “stormed out” is used so much at Not Always Right I have to wonder if the stories are edited and re-written by the same person at the site so each story conforms with the site’s accepted format. Or, conversely, that the monkeys submitting the stories are so completely in sync with the site’s style there is ne’er a variation between stories.
15. I tend to overanalyze things.
16. If your kids get an Xbox for Christmas and one of the games is the LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean they will not be impressed if the only game skill you manage to master is riding the pig pell-mell through the crowd while yelling “Wooooooo hoooooo!"
17. Dropping an Oreo in a full glass of milk and splashing said liquid all over your new keyboard is an excellent way to break it in.
18. Leaving a book you’ve written aside for a few weeks but still thinking about it on the backburner makes for a better book. Or at least more crap to shove into a mediocre book.
19. Same goes for taking a stab at writing a query letter.
20. Buying our new house in Ammon was a good idea.
21. Spending the money to have natural gas heat installed in the new house in Ammon was a TREMENDOUSLY excellent idea.
22. I didn’t do as bad a job installing the new back door as I thought.
23. People who photobomb other people: I want to be your friend.