Articles with Holiday

Power Outage

A freakish storm came through here last night, knocking out power in our area.  It also dropped the temperature down to about 14 degrees F.  The wind was harsh, and the windows in our apartment are ill-fitted to stop the cold from seeping in.  The power went off temporarily at about 10 p.m. and then came back on for about an hour before going off again for another 10 hours.  Before the power went off I found a battery-powered clock my sister had given me for my birthday, and I set it up so that it would wake me up just in case the power failed again (which it did).  I didn’t know whether the power would fail again, but sure enough this morning we had no power.  The apartment hall lights and elevators were working, backed up by a backup power generator.  However, the rest of the building was dark and cold.

I still went to work today.  I decided to leave our car with my wife in case she needed to evacuate the family to a warmer place–like a nearby mall.  Thus I had to use mass transportation to get to work.  I caught the apartment shuttle to the Metro station, then took the Metro to another shuttle that then took me to work.  Easy enough, but unfortunately a train had stalled on the Blue/Yellow line, causing significant delays.  I was absolutely freezing waiting on the platform for the train to arrive.  14 degrees isn’t extremely cold, but after Saturday’s balmy weather it was a shock to my system.  Everyone waited in huddled masses for the train, and once it arrived we crammed into it Tokyo-style.  I’ve never been on such a crowded Metro train before.  I held my breath and finally made it to my destination, catching the shuttle to work.  After that I was fine until the power went off at work.  I thought, “Oh no, here we go again!”  Fortunately, the power came back on about an hour later.

My wife picked me up after work, and we ran Christmas errands.  I missed that car!  We shopped for presents, delivered a Christmas gift to someone, and waited an hour at the post office to mail our Christmas presents to loved ones.  Christmas is the one time of the year when everyone waits at the post office in pressure-cooker fashion and yet manages to be polite and cordial to one another.  Waiting at the post office to mail packages made me wonder whether e-tailing would really do away with in-store shopping.  I talked to a store clerk last weekend who mentioned that Christmas sales were down because more people were shopping online.  I still saw a lot of people shopping for Christmas the old fashioned way.  As for me, I bought one gift online this Christmas, but for the most part I went the traditional route and went to the mall and factory outlet stores.  I limited my gift card purchases to two.  It just hasn’t been a good year this year for me to exercise creativity (too busy).

D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and Council Chair Linda Cropp met today to discuss stadium financing options for the Washington National baseball club.  It sounds promising; hopefully they can broker a deal before Christmas that will bring the club to Washington, D.C.  The next time I return to D.C. I hope to watch baseball in their new ballpark.

Christmas Cards

Isn’t Christmas card writing fun?  Not!  I don’t know a soul who enjoys sitting down and writing a stack of cards and letters for the holidays.  Of course you enjoy getting in touch with people you know and love.  You also enjoy receiving Christmas cards and letters from them.  You might contact people you’ve been meaning to get a hold of all year long.  It’s a great excuse to reach out and get in touch with an old friend or acquaintance.

I have to admit though that the actual job of writing cards isn’t much fun.  It can be a lot of work.  I like writing our annual Christmas letter.  I usually write the first draft, and then my wife contributes and edits it.  It’s a joint effort.  We work well together.  I don’t really enjoy the Christmas card assembly process, though.  It’s operations management at its finest trying to maximize Christmas card throughput (corny sounding I know, but it’s true).  Buy cards, make a list of recipients, write something pithy in the card to show you care, print the Christmas letter, fold, add an occasional family photo, stick in the envelope, seal, recipient address, and stick on the stamp and return address label.  Batch processes so you don’t have to do each painstakingly one by one.  Drum-rope-buffer.  (Read “The Goal” sometime, an excellent story about operations management.)  Fun fun fun!  If it were only few perhaps, but the list seems to grow longer each year.  We had to trim it down a bit this year.  The elimination process is a tough one sometimes because you just can’t figure out who not to send a card to…you want to send one to everyone but you just don’t have the time or resolve to send a card to everyone.  It seems like every year we send out a lot more cards than we receive.  Maybe it’s a dying art.  Maybe everyone is resorting to e-cards.  Maybe they’re too busy.  Maybe we’ve been crossed off their Christmas list.  Who knows.  This year I have to admit that it isn’t too enjoyable for me with everything I have to do before we leave.  There’s a lot of people I want to get in touch with though so the show must go on.  We’ll get them out before the fast approaching deadline.  If you’re wondering, “If it’s such a chore, why do it?” it’s because we enjoy keeping in touch and letting people know how we’re doing.