Update: 15:31 - relaxing after Christmas dinner. As Holiday Cheermeister, it was my honor to carve the roast beast. All I can say to you vegan and vegetarians out there is, you poor bastards . . .

Clickable image.

For all you South Park fans, here’s Mr. Hankey, your favorite Christmas Poo . . .

HOWDY HO, KIDS!

Well, sorta like a couch potato football weekend. Watched NFL on Thanksgiving Day, college rivalry days Friday and Saturday. Looking forward to NFL Sunday tomorrow.

We actually didn’t just vegetate. The Better Half and I put up our Christmas Lights yesterday; that’s a lot of trips up and down the extension ladder. That, plus religiously taking walks after big meals gets a few miles on the old bones, at least.

The setup in the clickable image is the big 42-inch HD on the left and the 19-inch digital on the right. Both are fed from DirecTV tuners. Try out the clickable image feature. I upgraded the site with a home-grown image viewer feature.

The Better half and I took a ride down to Point Vicente today. It was a nice clear and warm Thanksgiving Day and a lot of other people had the same idea. The air was clear, the ocean was calm and you could easily see Catalina Island across the channel to the south. To the west south west, if you really tried, you could make out Santa Barbara Island, about 45 miles offshore.

It was also a nice day to jump in your Boeing Stearman open cockpit biplane and take a flight along the shoreline. I took this photo of the plane as it rounded the point near the Lighthouse. It’s painted in the original pre-WW2 Army Air Corps primary trainer color and markings.

This is Wikipedia’s summary of the Boeing Stearman Model 75:

The Stearman (Boeing) Model 75 is a biplane, of which at least 9,783 were built in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s as a military trainer aircraft. Stearman became a subsidiary of Boeing in 1934. Widely known as the Stearman, Boeing Stearman or Kaydet, it served as a Primary trainer for the USAAF, as a basic trainer for the USN (as the NS & N2S), and with the RCAF as the Kaydet throughout World War II. After the conflict was over, thousands of surplus aircraft were sold on the civil market. In the immediate post-war years they became popular as crop dusters and as sports planes.

If you have a pair of red-blue or red-cyan 3D glasses, you might be interested in a 3D picture of this very same airplane that I posted last month on the family blog. It’s a beauty. If you don’t have the glasses, the 2D version is here.

The Better Half pointed this picture out to me while she was reading the blogs last week. I don’t know about you, but I may never be able to look at pumpkin pie again, without having this image pop into my head.

All the silliness aside, we are planning to feast on turkey parts, stuffing, cranberry jelly, mashed ‘taters and pumpkin pie for dessert. Prior to the feast, we will be enjoying the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and all-day NFL games, all on the HDTV. The morning game is the Packers at the Lions, the afternoon game is the Raiders at the Cowboys and - new this year - the evening game is the Giants at the Broncos.

I wonder if the new Thanksgiving Day game will be permanently played in Denver, as it is in the other two “D” cities, Detroit and Dallas? Does anyone know the answer to that?

We wish everyone a great Thanksgiving Holiday!

I wasn’t satisfied to just have a three-day weekend for the July 4th holiday, so I took a vacation day today. It was worth spending one of my few remaining days to get everything done today.

We got in a little grocery shopping, browsed over the gun counter at Turner’s Outdoorsman and barbecued some really good baby back ribs this afternoon. Served ‘em up with baked beans and the Better Half’s “World Championship” ‘tater salad.

Damn good.

The daily commute occasionally allows us to spot weird things. Today, it was this.

And Happy Hunting.