I know that I said I would start another giveaway tonight, but I’m going to delay this until tomorrow. Sorry, but it’s really late and I don’t feel like putting another giveaway together today. In fact, I’m going to try to keep this post pretty short. I’ve spent the last three hours trying to fix my-site which I completely hosed after making a few small changes. I’ll just add that to today’s list of frustrations – which conveniently dovetails nicely into what I had planned to talk about anyway.

Here’s the thing – I have to go back to the office tomorrow after five days of being out so I knew that I would probably be in a less than awesome mood no matter what happened today. Therefore, it only made sense that I would wake-up this morning feeling incredibly sick – sick enough that for awhile I could hardly walk and I was about to go to the hospital because I thought I’d ruptured my appendix or something. This was a great way to spend what amounted to the entire morning. I started to feel better at around noon, and Anna reminded me that I promised her I would put some lights and a star on the tree in our front yard.

“What’s the big deal about that?” you might be thinking – the big deal is that I’m not talking about some tiny 6ft tall tree – this thing is as tall as our house, probably 25 or 30 feet from the ground to the top. If you add in the fact that it was pretty windy out, it did not amount to something that I really felt like doing. That being said – this is yet another example of  “things no-one bothered to tell you about being a parent”. Basically, your three year old doesn’t really care that you aren’t feeling well, that tall ladders and wind don’t mix, that overall you prefer to be as close to the ground as possible, or that you don’t have a damn star and you’ll have to go to Home Depot to get one. All your kid knows is that you promised them that there would be some lights and a star on the freakin tree, and you better not forget it.

So after making my way to the store and purchasing the various accoutrement required for this little project, I pulled out my 25 ft. ladder and some chains to use for attaching said ladder to the tree since I really didn’t feel like falling off and breaking a leg today. I had to get all McGuyver-esque with a little aluminum cable that I turned into a loop for hooking the lights to the top of the tree. I also had to use the handle of what I believe is an old mop for extending my reach to be able to place the star upon the tree. After futzing around with the whole thing for a couple of hours I was finally satisfied that I had everything set-up to my liking. But then I turned on the lights and decided that the lights on the top of the tree aren’t quite up to par. So I had to go back up a few times to straighten them out. I’m still not quite satisfied, but I was starting to become annoyed so I quit for now. You can get an idea of what this little fiasco looked like from the images below.

So long story short – after supper I went back to working on this site and managed to screw it up and then spent a bunch of time trying to fix it. Here I am writing about all of this right now, and it only makes sense that holiday related stress is the theme of today’s post. You see, I am trying really hard to be more “festive” this year – thus the whole promising to put up the lights in the tree thing. It’s not that I want to, but section C, sub-paragraph 3b of my agreement with Sam’s Club clearly states that: “blogger will appear at all times to enjoy all aspects of the holiday experience and will enthusiastically convey such enjoyment in both public, written communication and private verbal conversations vis-a-vis said holiday” so I’m kinda obligated here (no, I am not in any way serious). I’m actually trying to be more enthusiastic this year because Anna really “gets-it” and is incredibly excited about Christmas, Santa, the whole deal. She’s been talking for weeks about the one thing she wants this year – which happens to be “Spike the Dinosaur” (what ever happened to little girls wanting dolls and dresses? My kid wants an animatronic, psuedo-realistic, pre-historic reptile). Anyway, her excitement is pretty infectious so we are all looking forward to the holidays a little bit more this year.

That being said, I still find the purchasing of gifts to be an enormous pain in the butt. I’m lucky in that I have the Wife to take care of 99% of this responsibility for me, but there is one little problem. I still have to buy stuff for her and she doesn’t make it easy. I always have a hard time coming up with gifts for her and thus I end up putting things off to the last minute. Our friends at Sam’s Club realize that I am in no way the only one who does this, so they’ve come up with a new program called “Gifter-Stress-Lifter” to help us out.

This is my kind of thing – why depend on unreliable, overly subjective human “thoughtfulness” when coming up with gift ideas, when you can just develop a system that uses an algorithm to do it for you? That’s what they’ve done here – you enter some details about the person you want to find gifts for and they output a bunch of good options for you. Doesn’t get easier than that.

I tried it out on the Wife and it was fantastic. You enter a few details about the person, then you take a brief 6 question quiz about their personality and the application does the rest. It came up with three distinct “personality-attributes” for her and then generated 89 gift ideas. Sure beats the one or two I would come up with on my own. I can’t wait to try it out on everyone else. I’m usually not one to rave about a solution, but this one was really well executed. They even created an iPhone app so you can download your gift-idea list right to your phone. They had me at iPhone-app…

So go check it out whenever you get a chance, I am sure you’ll be able to come up with some ideas for just about everyone on your list. Don’t forget to check back here tomorrow when I roll out our next contest and also announce the winners of our last few.