I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, Boxing Day, Christmas Eve, Festivus, and all that! I'm afraid things were a bit muted here, as Mary came down with a cold or something a few days before the holiday, and she is still on the mend. She tried really hard to not spread her germs over my way, but apparently that effort was for naught. I started getting the sore throat last night, and this morning it is very much worse and right now I am very nauseous. So hopefully I can write a few words here and get done before I lose my breakfast! (Okay, possibly over-sharing there...)

I have some exciting news, and I feel the best way to announce it is in the broadcast--so be sure to tune in next Sunday the 3rd of January. We can ring in the new year together, and I can introduce you to my "new" family members. You see, VacaSis gave me a great present on Christmas Eve. She has found a connection with a whole other branch of our family tree, and this one has some exciting folks in it! I've been having a lot of fun these last few days exploring this new branch of the family. I've been sitting on this ever since the 24th, so I'll just sit on it a few more days.

Speaking of presents, I really want to thank you all for the gift of knowledge again--in the way of the magazine subscriptions! That is so very kind of y'all!! It really is my best conduit to the natural world, at least from inside my most unnatural environment (which is this office).

As for presents here at home, I got some science books, including a fascinating memoir from the physicist Richard Feynman, that I just started reading last night. Mary also got me a DNA kit from Ancestry.com, so last night I took my DNA sample and packaged it up, and tomorrow I'll put it in the mail. I'll be curious to see what my DNA has to say about our family origin. I'm hoping that it might confirm some of the genealogical research I've already done, and perhaps point me in some new directions.

Mary also got me a Raspberry Pi development kit. This is something that has been creating quite a stir in the technology world lately. The RPi is kind of like an Arduino microcontroller, but actually the next step up. This is a whole computer on a single board. It is not much bigger than a credit card, and has the power of a PC from around the late 1990s time frame. So it's not as fast as current technology, but there is its diminutive size and price (about $25 to $35). This represents my attempt to ease myself back into the technology arena--there is a lot of demand for developers who can create apps for this sector.

So I guess that is about it--I have managed to get through this and keep my food down (I took some Pepto-Bismol, which helped). I wish everyone a great week, and I look forward to chatting with you all next weekend!

p.s. Oh, and I wanted to explain a bit about the holiday card design I put on Zazzle. I had tried to access my old account with CafePress, but I am finding that many things have changed there. In short, I could not even figure out how to design something and make it available for sale! The process used to be so good there. What it seems like is that they took a lot of the controls out of the design process, perhaps to make it simpler for the non-designers. What it means is that for those of us who HAVE designed there in the past, the new stripped-down design controls means that you cannot totally get the products to show up the way you designed them to.

So basically, I gave up and tried setting something up on Zazzle (a site I had heard good things about). However, I never really seem to have gotten that to work 100% either, so I'm just not sure how successful this is going to go. But in the event you are interested in seeing the greeting card design I came up with, the link is here: VacaDude