(With apologies to Clement Moore and to Simon and Garfunkel)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter’s nap,

When out of our phones there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

It was the National Weather Service with a cheery greeting:

We hadn’t been planning to travel until much later in the day, so the warning was superfluous.

Eventually, we drifted back to sleep.

When we got up intentionally this morning, I looked for a way to disable such warnings in the future, and found it (at least for iPhones). Go to Settings/Notifications, scroll almost all the way down to “Enhanced Safety Alerts” (below all the apps and just above “Government Alerts”), click, and turn off “Imminent Threat Alerts”. You can read the full details from Apple.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

This morning, I noticed I was nearly out of Cheerios. It would be crazy to go to the supermarket on Christmas Eve; instead, Diane and I went to Costco, arriving there about an hour before closing time.

It was a lot easier than most of our Costco visits; parking was easy, the store wasn’t insanely crowded, and there was only one person in line ahead of me at the checkout.

I only made one impulse purchase – a 2TB portable SSD. I don’t really need another external drive right now, but SSD prices are going up (thanks, AI!), so it seemed like a good idea. Costco only had the one SSD available (a SanDisk with a 10Gb/s transfer rate); their price was $50 less than Amazon.

Everything else I bought was on our usual Costco list – wine, paper products, drugs, cashews, canned salmon…nothing exciting, but it should keep us supplied for a few months.

Happy holidays to all!