A new life; same as the old life?

All of the really cool winter things are just starting to kick in, Christmas lights, winter wonderlands, train sets and holiday festivals. Today was the Highland Park holiday festival, where they switched on the holiday lights, without an actual Christmas tree of course. There was ice sculpting first thing, some cider, chestnuts, and then Father Christmas arrived on a fire truck to switch on the lights. I took a bunch of really cool pictures of the ice carving, check em out .

As regular readers will know, we bought our house, the one we have been living in for almost 3 years, in December of last year. Of course, besides the normal maintenance and cosmetic items that I have been doing for a while now, since we own it, there are bigger more fundamental issues to deal with like the windows we installed in December, the completely unbalanced heating/cooling installation and the tiny crappy kitchen. I started planning the new space, with some walls to be knocked through, bathroom shrinking to a powder room (toilet for my British readers), smaller laundry room, etc. Reasonably complex but nothing horrendous, no supporting walls, etc. However, as these things always do, (especially if there is a wife involved :-) the project potentially had become significantly more complex, possibly tearing out most of an original supporting brick exterior wall, the one that now forms the wall between the dining/kitchen area and the family room. Whilst I saw the logic of the cho...

Update - As we approach the upcoming holiday season, and I excitedly wait for the "Holiday Lite" to come on, I actually got a comment from his other daughter, who's name unfortunately I do not know. She corrected a couple of my errors in writing this post, which I have done below. She also told me sadly that her father had died of cancer, three months after recording this, and as a result was unable to see it's success or receive the award he so richly deserved. Here's what she said: "Thank you for posting this :) ! Actually, my dad, Father Ted Berndt, lost his battle with cancer three months after recording this reading. My sister, Ellen Stout, was a radio personality at WLTQ at the time of the recording. She produced this and accepted the ARI award in Dad's behalf. To be correct, Ellen and Dad recorded this for ALL service people and their families around the world. As always, "Merry Christmas to all, and may God bless you this night" :) ...