This cold:

This is a shot of my neighbor’s front doorstep. (Our building contains four townhomes and she’s right next door.) Because she comes in and out of her garage, the icicles on her porch are growing and spawning new ones.

On Inauguration Day, most likely you saw the Oath of Office uh, fumble, for lack of better words. At work, a few of us jokingly talked about the minor mistake, and I couldn’t help but jokingly ask if this was anything like a baseball player running to home plate, but not quite stepping onto the plate itself. Technically, is he safe? Does he score?

The Christian Science Monitor published Obama’s agenda for the first day on the job, and I giggled at the 7:35pm entry:

7:35 p.m. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts administers the oath of office (again) in the Map Room. Explained White House Counsel Greg Craig in a statement, “…out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time.” President Obama joked to the Justice, “We’re going to do it [the oath] very slowly.”

Everyone can now rest assured that President Obama has technically touched home plate.

Something else that I found interesting is the 8:35am entry:

8:35 a.m. President Obama spends ten minutes in the Oval Office alone. Reads a note from former President Bush in an envelope marked, “To: #44, From: #43″.

Crayon lettering aside, I’m curious to know what was said in the letter. It was probably professional wishes of good luck, though my imagination would like to think it was filled with a list of secret activities, secret secrets (whoa), and the name of the gunman on the grassy knoll. A last letter from one president to another divulging of deep secrets could make a good thriller novel.

Though, after the last 8 years of the Bush presidency, I could very well believe the letter said “The green marker tastes better than the red.”

My family has always been late on the technological upswing. Case in point, my mother told me that she and my dad had just ordered cable television. As a kid, our first television was barely color. My brother had broken off the rabbit ears in the back when he was a curious toddler, so we used some screw-on rabbit ears from Radio Shack that barely worked. The television had no remote. Actually, that’s not true – it did have a remote. The remote was called “the kids”. How it would work was my dad would start screaming from the other end of the house for one of us like he had fallen and couldn’t get up. Whichever one of us had been randomly summoned come ripping down the hall, expecting we’d need to call 911. Upon arrival, Dad would sit back into the couch, point at the television and calmly say, “Change the channel.” Sometimes we’d have to adjust the rabbit ears for him, too. One day I mutinied and refused to change the channel ever again. I screamed and yelled and told my dad that from now on he’d have to get it himself. He laughed. I think he was testing to see how long Neall and I would actually do it. I’m surprised we put up for it as long as we did, and it taught me a valuable lesson: Don’t put up with anyone’s crap.

After the mutiny, Dad bought a new television (some cheapo kind that also went on the fritz shortly after — my parents weren’t too technologically savvy), and the barely-color with broken rabbit ears and no remote television was given to Neall and I in the den down the hall by our rooms.

After Atari had been out for a while, my parents finally broke down and got us one when they found it on sale. At that time, the Atari 2600 only came with two video games: Pac Man and Combat. I think we owned those for about a year because my parents couldn’t really justify spending the money to buy us a third game, so we just stayed up all hours of the night playing Pac Man over and over and over and over again.

I was a certified addict. Neall and I would make forts in the small, square den and haul our sleeping bags in there, and we’d play Pac Man until our eyes were in danger of bleeding out of our heads. Neall also liked to play Combat, but I didn’t really care for it other than the tank games.

I haven’t played Pac Man in a long time so my addiction to the game was cured… or so I thought.

The other day I was flipping around my Google front page — you know, the nifty personalized one. On my personalized page I have email, news, weather and a few other things, and I noticed I was able to search around and find other popular things to place on it. Google calls them “Gadgets”. So I was flipping through the list and, lo and behold, I noticed Pac Man. Yes, you can put a miniature sized Pac Man on your Google front page if you want to play, just like the arcade game.

So I did.

I played a game, then another, then another. I’m readdicted. How is it that this stupid little game can still grab me after all these years? I can’t stop myself! The obvious solution would be to remove it from my front page, but I think I might need a support group before that happens.