I got pulled over today for running a stop sign. I didn’t really run it. I all but completely stopped. I don’t think I ever come to a complete stop when nobody is around. In the winter more so. The roads are glare ice. When I come to a complete stop it takes me a good 30 seconds to get enough traction to get moving again. Sure, that’s not a good excuse. I have no excuse. I didn’t come to a complete stop, but who does? On my way to lunch I saw five or six cars do exactly the same thing I did. Not to mention all the people that didn’t use their blinkers. They could seriously hire a hundred more cops and not cost the city any more money. My ticket was $100. It would be so easy for a cop to get five or six people in an hour. I saw that many people break the law in the fifteen minutes it took me to go out to lunch. Yeah, I am bitter right now. It just seem pretty petty for fining me $100 because I slowed down to 0.00000001 MPH and not o.ooooo.

Happy New Year! I thought I would start the new year off with a new look on my blog. Here is a cartoon I ran across last week that I thought was rather funny, and appropriate for today.

We are taking off in a half hour to have our Christmas tomorrow. It’s kinda weird having Christmas this late. I doesn’t feel too much like Christmas anymore. I am sure that will change once we get to my Mom’s place. I am sure she will have the place all decked out with Christmas stuff. I won’t be online until Sunday, but who knows, maybe I will be twittering from my phone.

So yesterday at work one of our mechanics asked me what I did for Christmas, or am I one of those crazy Atheist that doesn’t believe in Christmas. I said I wasn’t. Sure I am an Atheist, but I believe Christmas is a Christian holiday that occurs on December 25th. So I do believe in Christmas. I am sure my beliefs in Christmas are different than his, but he never asked about them. To me Christmas is just a day when we spend time with our family, eat a lot of food, and just enjoy ourselves. I wish Atheists weren’t so looked down upon in this country. Not many people know that I am an Atheist. It’s just not something that comes up very often. I hate when people force their believes on other people, so I keep mine to myself. I just wish people understood and respected Atheists more. I don’t look down upon religious people, and as soon as there is some proof of a God I will be right there with you.

We had a little different Christmas this year. Because of our work schedules, it wasn’t really worth it for use to travel, so we just planned on staying home. The In-laws surprised us and showed up. So we had dinner with them, then they took off. The best thing is they took Loser Brother In-law with them. We are heading to their place this weekend and celebrating Christmas then. Then we will bring Lose Brother In-law back when we come back. I am so hoping he changes his mind and wants to move back home. He has nothing here. He doesn’t have a job and he isn’t going to school, and we are charging him rent on the 1st. I can only dream I guess.

So I guess loser Brother-in-law isn’t leaving anymore. I still don’t think he is going to be here much longer though. He doesn’t have a job, and he is too lazy to get out of bed and look for one. We will see what happens when his rent is due.

Hey look, I added a new picture to my Flickr account. I thought I would test out my new phone. I am not a bird guy, so I don’t know what kind of birds these are, but they have been sitting in our bush all winter long so far (yeah, I know it’s not technically winter yet, but it sure feels like it). They really should learn to fly south.

Since buying our house our savings account has really taken a beating. It’s down to about half of what it was before we bought the house. I was expecting that to happen because we wanted a bunch of stuff for our new house.

Now we are pretty much settled in. There shouldn’t any more major purchases for a while. The other day we sat down and looked at all our expenses and tried to find things that we no longer use and could do away with. It’s amazing how much little things add up. From Netflix, Audible, my web host, DirecTV, phone, cell phones, and internet sure add up. We unsubscribed from HBO since neither of use could remember the last time we watched it, but we didn’t really want to get rid of any thing else. We were tempted to get rid of our land line. When we moved we had to change phone plans and out phone bill went up $15. We rarely use our land line. It is mostly used for incoming calls that we don’t want on our cell phone and it is also nice to have when we have family visiting. So last week I signed up for Vonage. I got it all set up today. I am a little nervous about the quality, I haven’t used it enough to tell how good it is, but for only $15 a month for 500 minutes of out going calls local or long distant and unlimited incoming calls is a pretty good deal. For $10 more I could have got unlimited minutes, but I don’t see us ever using more than 500 anyways.

So I guess we have saved $50 a month so far. Not much, but every little bit helps. I don’t mind paying for things we use, but I think we have a lot of waste. Next year our goal is to get our saving back up again to what it was before we bought the house. We feel much more comfortable knowing that if something major happens, we have enough in savings to cover most things.

Like everybody else that has the DirecTV HD DVR I hate it. My DirecTivo is so much nicer. The DirecTV HD DVR menu system makes no sense, and it’s hard to find things you are looking for. The worst thing though it that is just misses things all the time, and you have to reboot it at least once a week or it will lock up and wont record anything either. As soon as DirecTV comes out with something better I am getting it. They made up with Tivo and they just recently bought Replay TV, so I am hoping they use one of them to improve their crappy DVR.

Over the weekend I downloaded an episode of Numb3rs that the crappy DVR missed. We watched it streaming to the XBox. The new upgrade to the XBox 360 is super cool. It played the the file no problem and looked really good. So then I installed Ted. Ted stands for torrent episode downloader. You can subscribe to shows and it will go out and look for new episodes and automatically downloads them. With Ted and the XBox 360, I might have a good work around for my crappy DVR. We will see how it works.

One thing I learned from having my brother-in-law living with us is that I have a lot of pet peeves and am pretty anal about some things. It bugs me when people don’t put things away. We have drawers in out entertainment center for our XBox games and DVDs. He is always leaving games and DVDs all over the place. How hard is it to put them away when you are done? He also leaves dishes in the family room. You have to walk past our kitchen to go to bed. Can’t you bring your dishes to the kitchen? He also leaves his shoes right in front of the front door. I am always tripping over them. We have a closet right there for shoes and coats. Use it. He also always cranks up the baseboard heat in the bathroom. How much time do you spend in the bathroom? Does it really need to be 90º in there? Isn’t it hot enough when you get out of your 30 minute shower? Yeah, he takes 30 Minutes showers too. It will be interesting to see what our water bill is like after he moves out. I think our last one was $65. One more week and all these annoyances will be gone. I can’t wait.