We went to New Orleans yesterday to be part of the atmosphere around the ultimate game of the best college football season in the history of mankind. The day was perfect: warm weather, good food, good game, LSU win, big celebration.

I'm sure that it has a lot to do with having a kid, but we did a lot of very "traditional" things this holiday season. The most absurd one was the festival of lights in downtown Baton Rouge, where the whole downtown was decked out in full Norman Rockwell Holiday tradition. Most of my fellow citizens even changed out of shorts and put on long pants so that we could pretend that early December was winter here.

I'm watching the Fiesta Bowl right now, and a West Virginia player named Tito Gonzales just caught a monster pass for a touchdown. I don't know who the announcers are tonight. Fox doesn't cover college football the rest of the year, and these aren't the scrubs who get sent to broadcast Saints games, so I don't recognize the voices.

Some stories about the end of football season, and about a dumb dog.

Instead of blogging, I've spent a lot of time installing trim around windows, crown molding, light fixtures, and putting up paint. It's unfortunate for my site, because I really had a lot to say in the past month that didn't get posted. Here's a partial list of posts that I thought about doing but never got to in the past few weeks:

A long time ago, I had a thing on the home page for "link of the week." I did a poor job of keeping it updated, so I finally pulled it altogether. However, I have a ton of things saved off to the side, and I can't even think of what else I would do with it. So, I'm going to bring this feature back some time before the end of the year.

Last week was LSU's homecoming week. The College of Engineering had an alumni reunion on Friday night, which I wouldn't have known about except that my friend Jeremy emailed me looking for a date. He's obviously afraid to face nerds alone.

It's a little known fact that I count every time that I hear any song. Any song ever. For example, do you know that theme from The Nutcracker, whose name I don't know, but which is used in one out of three commercials between now and January 1? Well, I've heard that 5917 times in my life.

As you might have guessed, we did our first kid-Halloween this past Wednesday. Since our house gets about six groups a year -- and all of those are teenagers without costume -- we drove over to our friends' neighborhood.

Just a quick note to let you know that I'm still around.

We're into week two in Athens, and I'm about a half hour from being out of both bananas and Triscuits, at which point a miniature Russian revolution begins right here in our condo.

It's hard to believe how much difference an hour makes. I speak of the one hour difference between the Eastern and Central time zone. For example, last night, I picked up Mrs. theskinnyonbenny from her work stuff at 5:00. We went back to the condo, let her change clothes, walked into the tiny downtown, picked a restuarant, ate, had a couple of drinks, and walked back home.