Today is a very fitting day for the first day of winter. We started out the morning by trying to go to church and being stuck in our parking space because the snow plow blocked us in with icy snow. We eventually just decided to go get in the truck. When we got back from church, with the help of my neighbor we freed both our cars from the ice with a pick. That Ashlee calls an ice pick. Check out the pictures and video. There are wind chill advisories out and even the salt is not keeping ice from forming on the roads. It is -6 right now with wind chills in the -30 range. Pretty cold, but at the same time, I am always happy for the winter solstice. Even though I know the worst of winter weather is yet to come, the thought of the days getting longer really helps me feel like I made it through. Unfortunately at the summer solstice, the best part of summer is still to come, but I start to get depressed. Anyway happy winter and I hope it is warmer where you are.

I am mainly writing this to entertain my fellow dermatology residents, but also to share some cultural knowledge that I think is a great idea.  The picture is of Jessica on the left feeding Tricia (the birthday girl) on the right a piece of birthday cake.  Jessica’s family has an interesting tradition. Her husband is Indian, and it is an Indian tradition for every birthday party, that everyone present gets to feed the birthday person a bite of cake and the last person to go gets to smear the cake on their face.  Now that sounds like a great birthday tradition to me, as if we need any excuse to eat a little more cake on our birthdays. Fortunately for Tricia, only Jessica felt obligated to feed her and did not smear her with cake.  Here is another interesting tidbit from Wikipedia about birthday candles.  Enjoy.

Though the exact origin and significance of the candle blowing ritual is unknown, the history of placing candles on top of the cake is well documented. This tradition can be traced to Kinderfest (Kinder is the German word for ‘children’), an 18^th century German birthday celebration for children. A letter written in 1799 by Goethe recounts: “…when it was time for dessert, the prince’s entire livery…carried a generous-size torte with colorful flaming candles – amounting to some fifty candles – that began to melt and threatened to burn down, instead of there being enough room for candles indicating upcoming years, as is the case with children’s festivities of this kind…”. As the excerpt indicates, the tradition at the time was to place candles for each of the individual’s life with some added candles ‘indicating upcoming years’. Candles, being slow-burning, are believed to be symbolic of the passage of time. In fact, they were often used as timekeepers. The origin of birthday cake candles can be further traced back to the 16^th century German tradition of placing tapers on Christmas trees.  This tradition was then brought to North America by German immigrants. By 1927, the Sears Roebuck catalogue offered birthday candles and holders for sale.

Check out the videos of a very neurotic cat. These videos are all off YouTube but in the Japanese version. There are even more videos there.

Nice shots through the box.

Hold your breath for this one!

I saw this photos and had to put it on my site too. How would you like to catch one of these monsters on a fly rod. The original post postulates that this may be what big foot subsists on and I am inclined to agree. They also point out this photo is indeed real and it is unfortunate that when we see photos like this we think it is photoshopped because this salmon is 5-6 years old and lived a normal life. In other words without over fishing we would see fish like this frequently.

Bigfoot food!