Happy Holidays / Ads

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Belated Happy Birthday to Genevieve, Martin, and the Northern 
Hemisphere Sun. Bad catlady was asleep and missed them despite Amy and 
Neil and everyone's wonderful announcements.

Tabouli, I live in coastal Los Angeles where the cold of winter never 
gets down to freezing. Some days this winter so far it has gotten 
cold enough that I took a jacket along with me to work, but none yet 
cold enough that I wore it. But I REALLY notice the darkness since 
Daylight Saving Time ended. It's dark by the time I catch my bus 
home from work. My friend said she loves the long nights and was 
surprised that I don't; I'm ashamed to be so normal but I find all 
this darkness depressing. I understand the necessity of making a Big 
Deal of winter holidays (Xmas shopping season) to fight against (or 
distract away from ) despair. We don't immediately notice the sunsets 
getting later after Solstice; we see the sun setting just as early 
and remind ourselves of the promise that Solstice HAS happened and 
these days ARE lengthening and daylight to see the way home WILL come.

My friend gave me a Harry Potter box of Danish butter cookies for 
Xmas. I had no idea there was any such thing. There is a NICE picture 
of Hogwarts on the lid and I eventually figured out that the 
squiggles pressed into the light color cookies are Nimbus 2000, 
Sorting Hat, and Flying Keys (Tim asked me if these are the cookies 
sold at Honeydukes and I said no, Honeydukes doesn't know about the 
Flying Keys. If it had been the Golden Snitch.....) One of the cocoa 
color cookies had a round dot pressed into it, which I assume is a 
Bludger, and the other is actually molded into a shape that I 
suppose is a monster centipede. Except I don't remember any monster 
centipede in Book 1 or Movie 1?

I'm still on webview and being interrupted by full-page ads that I 
have to click "continue" to get on to the next post. Most of them 
seem to be ads for Yahoo itself. I don't believe that they are 
deliberately trying to annoy us (altho' they so often succeed so well 
in so many ways!). I think that since the recession has caused a huge 
decline in advertising spending that has been reported all over the 
news, Yahoo has to sell a lot more advertising to get the same amount 
of income to keep their business running.