I went to North Carolina for Christmas last week, and decided to take pictures of some of the art in my mom’s house. Click on the flying pig to see the rest of the Flickr set:

A vastly more interesting book would be The Five People You Meet in Hell.

The Apple IIc, circa 1984:

Photo courtesy digiTofu

Setting: December 2006, John F. Kennedy International Airport. Janna takes out her trusty PowerBook to see whether she can get a free wireless signal (ha!). An upper middle class man and his teenage son walk by.

Son: Hey, look, she’s got the Apple. Do you like the Apple?
Janna: Sure, it’s great. I love this computer.
Dad: What’s Apple? I’ve never heard of it.
Son: It’s this awesome new company …

Awesome Christmas present from Cynthia:

No sea anemones were harmed in the making of this photograph, I swear.

Merry Christmas! I’d like to encourage all of you to channel your holiday goodwill toward a worthy cause this season. Just ten days before Christmas, 21 workers at the Woodfin Hotel in Emeryville, CA were given two weeks’ notice of termination. The firings follow a protracted struggle for the workers’ rights under a recently passed law ensuring them a living wage, and are a direct act of retaliation.

To find out how you can take action, go to this page on the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy’s website, or check out the Woodfin Watch. If you’d simply like to make a much-needed donation to the Living Wage Hardship Fund, which directly supports the fired workers, go here.

Please take a minute to click the links. Supporting these workers, who are now faced with finding new jobs and explaining to their children why they won’t be receiving Christmas presents this year, will go far in restoring the balance of human decency in the world. Remember - if all the Whos down in Whoville could get to the Grinch, we can surely take down the Woodfin.

I paid $2.75 for 20 ounces of water at SFO today:

What’s special about this water?

• It’s purified!
• It’s non-carbonated: yippee!
• It has a weird Franclish name. Dejà Blue (why not Déjà Bleu?) ≈ Déjà vu = “already seen.” Yes! I believe I have seen bottled water before, although it’s usually in the $1 - $1.50 range.
• It is sold after the security checkpoint at which you must surrender all of your liquid items.
• If need be, it can be used as a defensive weapon should any of your fellow passengers become violent upon learning that your flight has been overbooked by 21 people and there is no way you are all getting on the plane.
• It may prevent you from fainting when you are told that your best alternate itinerary begins 40 hours later and involves flying to North Carolina via JFK, thus proving that the quickest route from A to B is not always a straight line. Not by a long shot. Oh, well. At least you get to spend time in New York!
• You can pour it over your head in an attempt to stay awake on the BART ride home (sans checked bag, which will theoretically be waiting for you in Raleigh-Durham in two days). Why is this necessary? Well, after getting just 3 hours of sleep and then standing in line for four hours, you could feel the irresistible urge to nod off. Caveat: the water trick may not work, and you might wake up just in time to squeeze through the closing doors at your stop.

Yay, holiday traveling.

On the bright side, I now have a $500 voucher and an extra day and a half to address the fact that I left my apartment looking like it was hit by a cyclone. I am also very happy that I am not the unfortunate woman at the airport who was close to tears as her two toddlers played the “who can scream louder game” in purgatory the how-screwed-are-we? line.

Relatively speaking, life is good.

We live in an area bordered by two very volatile faults:

Map courtesy the US Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program

I felt the red earthquake, even though I’m across the Bay now - it was a 3.7. Thank God I have the All-Purpose Survival Tool my Mom bought me in preparation for the inevitable Big One.