9. Extreme weather. There’s weather every year, of course, but this year had some interesting stuff. It started with a bang (though fortunately not a literal one) when a tornado whizzed by our house close enough to hear. I like to think I’m prepared for most any weather emergency but that really, really spooked me. I purchased an automatic weather radio the very next day. Now when severe weather is announced the radio will alert us – a very prudent investment.

January will live in infamy from the surprise snowfall that paralyzed the city of Raleigh. While at first I made fun of the bad driving, once I joined them my tune quickly changed. My 30 minute commute stretched to over three agonizing hours. I was one of the lucky ones, too! The city of Raleigh got some really, really bad publicity, the government put a better snow plan in place, and eventually we all moved on. It remains to be seen if anything will change for our next snowfall, however. I’m not holding my breath.

One March morning the sky got ominously dark. We were just sitting down for breakfast when a terrible racket enveloped the house. Hail the size of quarters was falling, pelting the roof, cars, and everything else. I managed to measure and photograph one hailstone before leaving for work. It was the biggest hail I’d ever seen.

We got more hail in December from a freak storm. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Neither could our local forecasters, who differed on whether it was hail or sleet which had fallen. Quite unusual.

Sandwiched in the middle of all this was a long, hot drought. Droughts are becoming routine here, unfortunately. Some experts opine that the city should enact permanent water restrictions. I say that growth restrictions would be more effective. Raleigh citizens need to stop subsidizing sprawl. We should put plans into place to ensure that new development won’t put an unmanageable burden on our overdrawn water resources. Y’all newcomers want to live in a starter castle in the boonies? Fine! Don’t expect me to ration my water so you can fill up your pool.

Here’s hoping there’ll be no freak snowstorms or searing droughts to write about in 2006.

As promised, its time to look back and recall the top ten events of 2005. It was a unique year in a number of ways. There will never be a year quite like it. I toast 2005 and look forward to an even better 2006.

Let’s launch right into things and count ’em down.

10. Home Projects. Last year we moved into our current home and spent the rest of the year getting to know it. This year, we began making changes in earnest to make it our own. Projects we completed this year include shifting our home office from upstairs to our downstairs dining room. I fetched my grandmother’s antique bedroom furniture from Florida in April, though it was weird seeing her house empty. The furniture now furnishes Hallie’s room as well as our guest bedroom.

We had been planning to fence our backyard but needed to fix the grading before the posts went in. A homemade fix in January wasn’t ideal, so we called in the pros. A few bids later and the perpetual lake in the back corner was gone for good. The fence went up a few weeks later. There’s nothing like a nice fence to make you feel pride in your home!

The next projects were the most challenging: painting! The work itself isn’t as hard as determing colors. Kelly prodded me after Thanksgiving to revisit this, so we settled on a few colors and got to work. Now we have a nicely-painted den and foyer, with the kitchen and hallways next on the list. Paint can really fix a home up. We’re pleased with the results!

This Pearl Harbor Photoshop still cracks me up.

I know I’m supposed to be a fan of infill development. I’ve sat through countless land use meetings when I was on Garner’s rewrite committee. Its much better to redevelop existing commercial sites than to plow down a new set of trees. Still, I can’t help but miss the decrepit hotel that was the Plantation Inn near Capital Boulevard and Old Wake Forest Road. Even after it had been abandonded.

I’d never even been inside the old hotel, having only once met relatives who were staying there ten years ago. As it sat empty, rotting alone, though, I became more intrigued by its history.

I guess it feeds off my historical interest in how transporation choices of the area fueled its development. Looking at the corner of Capital and Old Wake Forest, with its Triangle Town Center Mall, Best Buy shopping center, K-Mart, and now BJs, I can’t help but remember how things looked when I first saw them: scub pines, a two-lane US1 highway, a bit of solitude, and the old Plantation Inn.

I kind of fell in love with those old buildings after seeing them each morning on the way to work.I feel much like photographer Tom McClancey does. “There are a lot of fine old buildings just going to hell in a handbasket,” McClancey said.

He’s right. It’s one of the things that drives me nuts about Raleigh. Folks here would rather have a glorious box store and sea of asphalt than a historical landmark. Raleigh paves over its history – over its own heritage – at the whim of whatever developer writes a check. It whores itself out to the highest bidder.

So, rather than keeping a unique landmark that was the Plantation Inn – a place that tells future generations something about how people in Raleigh lived – we get a chain store.

I believe that boring cities are for boring people. Raleigh fits it all too well.

After a month of filling my head with non-stop Christmas music, I’m an expert on the genre. As my Christmas gift to readers of MT.Net, I’m going to reveal the secrets to making your own Christmas hit. Just remember me when you cash your first phat royalty check.

What makes a great Christmas song:

• A snippet of melody from another Christmas hit.
• Sleigh bells. Can’t get enough of ’em.
• Non-stop, drooling, mind-numbing repetition.

The melody that gets stolen more often than not is “Jingle Bells.” You can throw together any random notes and call it a song as long as you have the “jingle-all-the-way” melody tacked onto the end. Bruce Springsteen’s Santa Claus Is Coming To Town has it the end, though it would be a classic regardless. No one will ever record a better Santa Claus Is Coming To Town than The Boss.

James Taylor, no slacker musician, recorded Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. It is in the classic James Taylor style: just the right amount of emotion. It’s got sleigh bells but is a little lacking in repetition. At the end, Baby James manages to tacks on a quick Jingle Bell melody, which pushes him over the top.

Some songs go even further in appropriating other songs. Brenda Lee sings an excellent Rocking Around The Christmas Tree. It’s got the sleigh bells. The song bounces along nicely and includes “deck the halls with boughs of holly” right in the chorus.

Mel Torme. I try to like him, I really do. I admire anyone who can make a decent living writing music. Naming your song The Christmas Song, though, is just too pretentious. The song itself is good enough, but it never felt completely honest to me. I can imagine Mel laboring over it for months, searching for just the right word. It seems too formulaistic to me.

The Christmas songs I like best are the ones that fit the band. Bruce’s Santa Claus Is Coming To Town becomes a Springsteen song, plain and simple. Bruce’s cover of Merry Christmas, Baby is an absolute turkey, though. It’s just him shouting “Merry Chritmas, Baby” over and over. At least it has sleigh bells and repetition going for it.

The Eagles’s original Bells Will Be Ringing is a fine example of Christmas songwriting. Its simultaneously a Christmas song and an Eagles song. Its exactly the kind of yuletide ditty you’d expect from The Eagles. No stolen melodies, sleigh bells, or repetition, though. Luckily, it doesn’t need any.

There are some artists that can’t be saved by any amount of melodies, sleigh bells, or repetition. If I hear Madonna sing Santa Baby one more time, for instance, I’ll toss my Christmas cookies. Its a song that demands subtlety. Madonna wouldn’t know subtlety if it tapped her gently on the shoulder. (I was going to say “smacked her in the head,” but that wouldn’t be subtle, would it?)

Christmas songs come in all shapes and sizes: traditional carols, standards, and cheezy pop trash. Perhaps the best thing about Christmas music is that you only hear it once a year.

There is debate about whether news organizations should publish URLs to weblogs of suspects and victims of this case. My take is that any information online and available publicly is fair game. Among their many other investigation tools, the media can use Internet search engines just as easily as their audience can.

I know I’ve written some stupid stuff on my own weblog. People may not approve of some of it, and that’s fine. I would rather post what I’m thinking and have an honest conversation with my readers rather than put up a front. I have opinions, some of which are not shared by many others. That’s fine by me. By being honest in my writing, I have brought others around to my way of thinking. Topics which can’t easily be discussed in weblogs and forums can be discussed with a great deal of freedom in weblogs and online forums. And sometimes one finds agreement from unexpected corners.

We are all more alike than we care to admit. Weblogs help to emphasize that point.

I also know enough not to post everything. Some things are still nobody’s business.

So thanks for reading, all fourteen of you. I hope to make your time spent here worthwhile.

Guys have a saying they use when discussing a woman who was attractive but who has some minor fault. The conversation will usually end with “but I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.” Now that I’m married I haven’t said that in a while. If I were still single, though, there’s a group I would kick out of bed for eating crackers: what passes for today’s supermodels.

I’d boot them to the floor because crackers aren’t enough: they need sammiches. And in a big way!

My friend Matt sent me an issue of Vanity Fair with Eastern European supermodels on the cover. I know Russia isn’t exactly prospering now, and the Babushka look has gone out of style. But, please, can’t these girls find something to eat?

Kate Moss is a good example. That’s beauty? She’s skin and bones! There’s no room for beauty there!

Call me old school, but I prefer women with a little shape to them. Women like Elle MacPherson, Christie Brinkley, and Elizabeth Hurley, for starters. Preferably women with a brain. Now that’s what I call attractive!

This new, “I’m-on-heroin” look is pretty lame. Get those girls a sammich!

Rather than buy each other expensive gifts this Christmas, Kelly and I decided to donate that money instead to the charities of our choice. We figure we have enough stuff as it is. Why not make someone else’s life better?

I hope it will begin a tradition in our family.

Now that energy prices have skyrocketed, I’ve been considering how to reduce the large bill I get for mobile phone service. It’s a larger monthly payment than our water service, our Internet service, and our phone service combined. Some months it is even higher than our electrical bill. And for what? We’ve got upteen hundred minutes per month for which we use perhaps 300 at most. Personally, I use on average around 100 voice minutes a month. (Most of my billed minutes are packet minutes, a.k.a. “PCS Vision.” I pay an extra $15 per month for the privilege of running up my overall minutes to get tortoise-like Internet speeds on a crappy phone web browser.)

There’s clearly a lot of cheaper plans out there. I can live without the PCS Vision, perhaps returning to the WiFi connectivity reseller Boingo for my Internet fix. Focusing simply on voice then, the choices are many.

Yesterday I discovered MVNOs, a concept written up in last month’s Forbes. An MVNO is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator – a company which buys minutes wholesale from the major mobile phone services and resells them to its own customers. Virgin Mobile has caught my eye before with their prominent displays in Best Buy. Their plans would save me money and I wouldn’t be giving up any coverage as they use the same Sprint PCS network that I already use. I was just about to give them a try when I thought to look on the Internets to see what else was out there.

It turns out there is a lot! There are lists of MVNOs at MobileIn, and CNet, among others. It looks like a hot market as the list is obviously growing. At the moment, I’m considering Liberty Wireless or one of the other Sprint resellers. An initial look shows I could shave fifty bucks off my monthly mobile phone bill – money which could then go to more interesting and productive uses.

The MVNO market is a market to keep an eye on. It could finally bring some innovation to a stodgy, boring U.S. wireless market.