Today made it official. Today, we booked our trip to England.

My mother is the biggest anglophile I know. She quotes Byron, Shakespeare, and Conan Doyle. She wishes me a Happy Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November (”Please to remember the fifth of November”) and English breakfast tea is the only tea worth drinking. And drinking all day long. Her major in college? English.

In sixth grade social studies, everyone chose a country to do a report on and I chose England. The English teacher, in her cleverness, had us write travel brochures for the country we had picked in social studies.

It seemed that everyone else’s parents were good at helping their children with science projects. Not mine. I don’t think I ever entered a science fair, but I sure did reap the benefits of having mom as my editor.

I remember writing that brochure. Mom sat with me and had me write down the things I thought of when I thought of England: castles, Shakespeare, the Queen. She got a hold of some travel brochures for me to look at so I could get a feel for the language and format used in a brochure. I learned new things about England, such as what the heck a moor looked like.

We fleshed it out over the afternoon, an exercise in the writing process. Writing and re-writing. New paragraph, comma, semicolon. “Come to England,” it invited, “the land of moors, Shakespeare, and Stonehenge.” I drew a recognizable enough picture of Big Ben on the cover and was proud to turn it in.

When our assignments were finally handed back, I wasn’t nervous. I was sure we had done well. I got my brochure and turned it over to look at the grade. I was crushed. D-. I scanned the list of comments with their corresponding deductions. Small stuff, “sloppiness, -10″ (my hand got tired from all the writing, this was true), “spelling, -10″ (Only one or two mistakes, but my hand was already tired, no way I was going to re-do it). Down at the bottom, “plagiarism, -20″. Along with a note that told me to “bring in my sources” and she would work with me to re-write. Re-write! No way lady, I went through that process already. With someone who would teach me more about writing in that little session than you would all year.

Really, it turned out to not be a big deal. I went up to her and told her I hadn’t plagiarized and that my mom had helped me. I had to bring in a note from my mother explaining the situation and her role in helping me, and I got my 20 points back. It was still only a B-, but that was the fault of small spelling mistakes and sloppy handwriting.

But, the point isn’t that we were so awesome we tricked my English teacher. The real point is that working on that brochure, sitting in our dilapidated little house, surrounded by various types of shamble-ness, but also surrounded by books, books, books, my mother painted a picture of England so vivid, you’d think she had lived there. Of course, she had never stepped foot on European soil, or any soil outside of the States, save for a childhood trip or two to Tijuana while growing up in California. Mom try to get to England? She may as well have tried to get to the moon.

For all my wanderlust through high school and college, dreaming of the day that I would finally have the means to travel, I always knew where my first trip would be and who it would be with. This year, for Christmas, my brother Todd and I were able to send my parents to England. And I’m going with them.

I’m excited as all hell to knit this.

I’m thinking brown.

Playing top 5 Christmas movies over at Carrie’s.

So I can’t decide if I’m 6 or 60. Cartoons and old movies.

#1 The Muppet Christmas Carol. Clever, cute, true to the book for talking fruit and singing mice, and the music, while all new for the movie, is easy to work into an established and traditional repertoire of Christmas tunes.

#2 Scrooge (w/ Alastair Sim 1951). He is creepy enough to be scary in the beginning (and screaming Marley gets me too) and totally awesomely batty at the end. Also, first heard the phrase “Bob’s your uncle” here. That’s funny. Oh, the English.

The fact that Muppets outranks Scrooge on my list has always made my mother question my judgment. Every year she asks me if I am serious. Yes.

(No particular order after this)
#3 Charlie Brown. Linus’ nasally little voice telling us the meaning of Christmas is quite moving for a cartoon.

#4 A Christmas Memory. It’s just a made for TV movie (mom taped it a long time ago when it aired), but Truman Capote narrates his own work, and that’s kind of cool. The kid playing Buddy is kind of a dork, but that’s okay.

#5 A Christmas Story. But there are some ties here (Grinch (cartoon, of course), Miracle on 34th (1947), It’s a Wonderful Life, The Bishop’s Wife…).

Merry Christmas!

khatt posted a photo:

Of all the string in the world, Oscar loves the bakery string most.

We had a going away cake for someone at work today and I made sure to snag this for him.

khatt: Brother is getting hitched on the 27th. Holy crap.

My brother’s (Todd) friend from high school posted some videos they made back in the day. Unfortunately, it’s a bunch of shorts but as all one video. So it looks a little intimidating at almost an hour long.

Some of them make me chuckle. And it’s funny to remember that his hair was so freaking long.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=38781416

khatt posted a photo:

At the Natural History Museum. Corporate membership through work is awesome. Free!

khatt: Going to see the dinosaurs!

Kate and Dave’s wedding went really well except for the part where “something happens to Dave” and I have to step in and marry Kate instead. Damn.

Of course maid-of-honoring it made me unable to take many pictures, but there were plenty of other people with cameras, not to mention the actual wedding photographers, so hopefully those will start surfacing. And also hopefully Kate will scan in the Polaroids. Otherwise I’m gonna hijack them and do it myself.

It was really beautiful and everything turned out awesome. The weather was great and the leaves were perfect. I can’t believe it’s over. I can’t believe we can’t make bad-wedding-idea jokes any more.

Bumming around the area for the week worked out well. Made it to Cooperstown and the Ommegang brewery and to some of the more nature-y parts of Troy/Cohoes I hadn’t seen before. Having already fallen out of the picture taking habit, I didn’t get too many. Other people take better pictures anyway, so I’ll just look at theirs.

It’s been a long week or so at work. For example, Monday lasted until 10:30pm (at the office, then working on some stuff at home until I don’t remember. Late. Or early. Depends on whether you’re coming or going.) and Tuesday started at 8:00am. Luckily, I had already purchased tickets for Passing Strange for Thursday otherwise it would have been a few late nights.

All of this because of Internet Explorer 6! Usually, things aren’t so bad and I can tick off in my head what will be problematic in IE6. It’s never been a cakewalk, but this time took the, well, cake. I’ve stayed far, far away from PNGs precisely because of lack of support by IE6, but the designers in charge this time around had other ideas.

First, there are two types of workaround for the PNG issue: PNGs on the page, i.e. the <img> tag, and PNG CSS background images. And don’t forget that random javascripts might want to fight each other. And since I’m running Multiple IE’s there are some conflicts between IE6 and IE7 as well. Basically, I could tell if the PNG fixes were working in IE6 because I wouldn’t be able to see any images on the page. Which doesn’t mean that things were a-ok in IE6. Since I was unable to see the page in its entirety, I had to keep looking at my co-workers machine to see if things look alright (sorry!).

I could go on and on about the details of how much this sucked. This pie chart sums it up so nicely that it makes me want to cry more than laugh.

I won’t go on and on, however. It did get me thinking though - over the years so many projects were complicated and extended just because IE6 wouldn’t play nice. Seriously days, weeks, spent just on IE6 troubleshooting. And that’s just me. Add in all those people who included that pie chart in Flickr, and the all those people with blog posts titles “I hate IE6″, “Dear IE6 please die” … it made me think “class action lawsuit”. Bitches.