Right now, while I am sitting on the couch by the fireplace writing this blog post, our house is full of women and kids for my wife’s annual cookie exchange. Even though our tree went up a few weeks ago, along with the Christmas lights on the house when the weather was decent (though a bit of snow still on the roof almost caused me to make an express trip to the ground), it just didn’t feel like Christmas.

Sure we’ve had our first snowfall, the music has been playing, and we been working on completing our gift shopping (of which was completed this weekend), I still couldn’t quite get that feeling. Well, today it finally hit. It must be the gathering of friends and family, the 200 conversations trying to co-mingle with each other, and the utter chaos caused by five young girls running around the house. It just feels like the holidays.

Tonight we have a bunch of friends over for dinner, then head down to the annual big truck parade, the final of the Christmas parades we’ll see this year. I even see that snow is in the forecast for the coming week, possibly even Christmas day. That would just complete the holidays, though it’ll still be just as nice with sun or liquid sunshine.

There is still two weeks until the big day, but I know it will fly by, just like the first half of December (let alone all of 2010). After that, it’s saying goodbye to 2010 and welcoming 2011, which I know will be an interesting year for us as we will be welcoming another addition to our family mid-year.

Happy holidays from our family to yours.

Yes, I have had a major lack of posts about the tent trailer project over the last year, but rest assure, the project is still around. I have made small steps in moving forward with the roof rebuild over the past few months and now have a structure to mount back on the trailer. Unfortunately, when I was working on getting the canvas frame ready to re-attach to the new roof structure, I discovered a broken lift cable. Here’s a diagram of the lift cable system found on older Lionel/Bonair tent trailers.

Instead of reinstalling the roof structure and moving on, I decided it’d be easier to replace the cable, perhaps even both front cables, before the new roof was on. It was at this time that friends of ours were installing new vinyl flooring int heir house and had enough left over that I scored some new flooring for the trailer for free. I plan to install this before the new roof goes on as well. When these two tasks are done, I’ll get the new structure on and mounted, then it’s just a matter of applying the new roofing material (vinyl decking) and going for a camp-out. The plan is to not have the trailer in the garage this summer, even with another baby on the way, we’ll figure out how to get out camping at least twice hopefully.

Here’s another great article by the folks over at Lifehacker. It’s all about focusing on clarity when composing an email message versus using your great wordsmith skills.

Read more after the jump…