There are several simple signs that the crud has successfully knocked me on my ass, but the biggest sign of all is that I have been home since Friday night (and as of this writing it is now Tuesday afternoon) and though I have been on the couch most of that time, have I posted here?  No.  I'm just now feeling capable of stringing sentences together with some hope of achieving subject-verb agreement, and if I get wordy, even that's gonna get a bit dicey.

I've been giving some thought to a piece of writing that works well this time of year, but I'm not sure I should / could do it.  It's December, which means cards and year-end letters from friends are arriving in our mailbox, and also means it's my turn to wonder if I should do one for my friends as well.

As close as you'll get to a Christmas card from us this year:

['Blessing enough' on flickr. ]
[Original photo shot in St. Patrick's, included in my 10/2007 New York City set.]

I've been asked a few times what modules I'm running on the drupal installs I'm tending.

Site #2 is a firewalled company intranet focused heavily around the concept of using organic groups to allow users to post content only to relevant groups. It's running under 6.x, currently 6.8, with comments enabled. (Site #1, my single-user blog domesticat.net, was written up here.)

Modules that are installed but unused because I haven't configured them yet are bolded. Modules that I will turn back on the moment I've got a bugfix are italicized.

I'm undoubtedly missing some fantastic ones, but these are the ones I know about and rely on.  Mind you, sites of this size are going to be far more tailored than, say, a single-user blog, but this list gives you an idea of what it took to create ours.

Every year on Christmas Eve I look for a way to express love.  For years I felt, as the non-religious sort, the true import of this holiday was a bit lost on me, but continued celebrating in my own way.

domesticat.net now chronicles fully a quarter of my existence on this earth, and combining that with a search function often serves to bring the arc of my life into clearer, simpler focus.

Other people focus solely on Christmas, but the entries of the past eight years tell me that this period of the year, this time of shortened days and year-end celebrations, matters as much to me as that one single day matters to most of you reading this entry.  I am not celebrating a religious event, but I am using the excuse of darkened, chilly days to re-evaluate my place in this life and the people I share it with.

I light words against the darkness, and leave them for you to find.  Here are two images from Christmas Eves come and gone:

Date night is a bit overblown for what we do. If what you're doing is more accurately described by "grabbing chow" instead of "going out for dinner," consider throwing the moniker 'date night' out the window.

On our way to Jason's Deli for sandwiches and salad bars, Jeff mentioned Stephenie's tweet. We weren't the only people we knew heading to see Benjamin Button that night.

[Fountain & Monaco Pictures by my coworker Tamara]

The Monaco has tapped into something that was missing here in Huntsville: stylish, art deco, with the kind of plushy amenities you never really realized you were missing in your theater. Go up the staircase to the 21-and-up section, get the boozahol of your choice, and settle into the leather rocker recliners with armrests big enough for both you and your neighbor's arms.

For those of you who weren't aware, my friend Noah is closing up his online photography print shop on January 1. If you want a print of his work, hop over to noahgrey.com/photography to nab one.

Some of you might even remember that I was in his 2003 gallery. Look closely and you'll see two photos of me available on that page.

My entries from my trip out to visit him are here. My favorite is one he shot that he's never made available for sale:

[Contemplation on flickr.]