Christmas

Yesterday, 25 December 2011, was Christmas. (This is my obvious statement for the day.) Got up around 8:00 AM to be sure that I'd be ready to leave for church by 9:15 AM. When we arrived, there was a delicious pancake-and-sausage breakfast prepared for everyone, followed by a somewhat brief-ish worship service with a strong sermon (on the importance of 'treasuring up in one's heart' our encounters with God's activity in our lives) and the eucharist. Came home, and after a bit of reading in D. Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (up to page 116), it was time to open presents. I got my mother a movie (Taking Charge) and a CD by Matt Maher. Wish I could've afforded more, or that the store had actually had some other things she would've wanted. She, in turn, got me:

• a six-month World Deluxe gift membership to Ancestry.com, active starting today
• a copy of the Xbox 360 game Assassin's Creed: Revelations
• a new pair of slippers
• a pair of sweatpants
• Metaphysics: An Anthology, edited by Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa
• Evangelicals and Nicene Faith: Reclaiming the Apostolic Witness, edited by Timothy George
• Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want by Christian Smith
• In the Name of Jesus: Exorcism Among Early Christians by Graham Twelftree
• Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig
• The Untamed God: A Philosophical Exploration of Divine Perfection, Simplicity, and Immutability by Jay Wesley Richards
• Passionate Conviction: Contemporary Discourses on Christian Apologetics, edited by Paul Copan
• Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology by Jason E. Vickers
• Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God by Marilyn McCord Adams
• Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook for the Study of New Testament Miracle Stories, edited by Wendy Cotter
• Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against Scientism by Frederick Olafson
• The Death of Truth: What's Wrong with Multiculturalism, the Rejection of Reason and the New Postmodern Diversity by Dennis McCallum
• The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate by John Walton
• The Meaning of Jesus: Two Views by Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright
• The Historical Jesus Quest: Landmarks in the Search for the Jesus of History by Gregory W. Dawes
• The Interpretation of the New Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism by John Granger Cook
• Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, edited by Thomas V. Morris

After relaxing in our family room by the fireplace for a while, I went to my room for a five-hour 'nap' from about 2:30 to 7:30, which included an odd dream that, best as I can recall it, involve myself and my friend Kristyn inserting three of our hands (two of mine and one of hers, I think) into a brown paper bag... to fill in for the Teletubbies... who had been removed from their position in a project... to retranslate the biblical book of Micah? Sometimes it boggles my mind that I can have the dreams I do, and not be a crack addict or something. I'm sure the dream was even stranger than the few points that stick out in my mind.

After I got up, we had a supper of turkey, stuffing, fried potatoes, and mixed vegetables. After that, I went to my room to both start playing Assassin's Creed: Revelations and to turn on my computer in hopes of writing this post. Well, one of those things went much worse than the other. And it wasn't the video game. A couple viruses had snuck past my antivirus the other day, and apparently cleaning them out wasn't enough. My computer had lost the capacity to start Windows, necessitating a full system recovery. All data: lost. All programs: lost. All settings: lost. Now, I'd be a lot more distressed if I didn't have virtually everything backed up on my external hard drive in Kentucky. But still, I was and am quite upset, because this is a massive inconvenience. At least I didn't lost too much in the way of notes....

Anyway, I stayed up until around 5:00 AM in an effort to begin restoring my computer to functional status. That involved re-downloading a slew of programs (Firefox, Open Office, Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader, iTunes, Google Earth, etc.), starting to download a massive collection of podcasts (which still has well over a thousand episodes to go), attempting to re-create my blog subscription lists from memory.... It took a while, and I'm still not wholly done.

Today I'm experiencing further obstacles, in that apparently Firefox 9.0.1 uses the Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut for something other than italics, and although I successfully disabled that with through the use of Firefox extension Customizable Shortcuts 0.5.9, I still can't get it to play nice with Blogger. On the other hand, Firefox will use the italics shortcut when writing up a complaint about it in the Blogger forums, and Blogger will use the italics shortcut when I'm typing it via the otherwise-awful browser Google Chrome, which I downloaded today in an attempt to circumvent this particular problem but which I can now see is both aesthetically and functionally inferior to Firefox. So I just need to hope and pray that someone can provide me with a solution, or else all my blogging will be in Google Chrome... yecch.