It was Christmas week and we weren't celebrating, so we recorded what we did including the long wait in the traffic jam and the continuing progress of the penny project. We also recorded the New Year's Eve gathering and the results of Suzanne's knitting binge.

The pennies were one of the central themes of this holiday season. We had lots of them and were sorting them first by decade and then by year. Images such as these represent our progress and are meant to show the different distributions of pennies from different sources. In capsule summary, Sovereign Bank on Nassau Street (image to follow) gave the worst pennies. They had lots of Canadian pennies and their rolls often had only 49 pennies. Fleet Bank on Nassau Street did an honorable job -- many fewer Canadian pennies, no rolls were short and the pennies had a respectable, if boring, distribution. The PNC Bank I went to with DrLen was the most interesting of all. Some of the rolls were just shiny new pennies. But, others came with character. You could read the person's account number on the side of the roll and feel like they were sharing a part of their life with you.

In the days before Xmas, I made the mistake of journeying out to Sam's Club and getting caught in an horrendous traffic jam. Fortunately, Jane was with me at the time and reminded me that I had the camera and so could record what it was that I was seeing inside the car and out and around the lot. If you had been here with us, these were the scenes you would have seen from my vantage point

until this sign told us to follow this truck home so that we could see the pennies once more and feel like our life was OK.

Xmas eve, The Gespass'es from Pittsburgh came to visit and we lit a fire