01/02/2006

Another interesting 2005 statistic for me is the amount of time I spent working. Since I have a timekeeping system I use to track every hour I’m at work (so I can bill clients appropriately), it’s easy to run the full year and see how things went. This year?

2,520 hours

That averages to about 48 hours per week– definitely more than I’d like to be working, but probably not unreasonable in today’s workplace. Considering the fact that I’m running four businesses, I suppose this isn’t bad at all. But hopefully 2006 will see a drop…

01/02/2006

Well, the New Year is here and today happened to be my day of organizing stuff around the office. As such, I filed away the last of the 2005 e-mail messages and saw the total.

13,681 messages

Holy cow, I’m averaging 37 messages per day. That number continues to rise year after year, too. I suppose in a few years that’s pretty much all I’ll be doing: writing e-mail all day.

12/23/2005

Kyra lost another tooth… no, literally she lost it. Distraught that she might not get some cash from the Tooth Fairy, she wrote the following note and put it under her pillow:

12/23/2005

Only two more days until… The Holiday That Cannot Be Named.

Yes, that’s right– if you attend school these days, you’re well aware that no one is allowed to have a Christmas celebration, exchange gifts, or even trade cards. That would clearly be offensive to children of other faiths, not to mention the possibility of incorporating the word “Christ” into a public forum.

A splendid example of school administrators with the IQ of kumquat is in a school district near Miami. As part of a school program, some kids were going to sing snippets of the “Jesus Christ Superstar” musical. The administration put a hasty lid on that, saying that non-Christian children would be offended by the mere mention of Jesus’ name.

But that wasn’t enough, ho ho! The school then told all of the children that they couldn’t refer to those green pines throughout the school as “Christmas trees”. Instead, they were to be called “magical trees”.

Looking for even more things that would deeply offend non-Christians, the administration realized that singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” during a holiday concert was way out of line. The song, sung by a group of third-graders, became “We Wish You a Swinging Holiday”.

But perhaps most incredible of all, the administration decided that the color red– when combined with green– had strong connotations of Christmas and must therefore be outlawed. Yes, you read that right: the color red was banned, and had to be replaced with white-and-green decorations instead.

Hey, administration, I’ve got your “Swinging Holiday” right here…