Most of you know that I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and that I'm not against large corporations. In America, businesses aspire to become large and successful. And that's perfectly acceptable to me. But, the capitalist free-market system breaks down completely when you give one group preferential treatment over another. And, like most forms of government, it's easiest to influence officials with money. Lots of money.

So, what does this have to do with SOPA? And what is SOPA in the first place. S.O.P.A. is the acronym for the "Stop Online Piracy Act"- A bill that is currently being proposed by the US House of Representatives (Here). In effect, SOPA boils down to a few basic ideas:

• Piracy is running rampant on the Internet
• More piracy means less revenue
• Less revenue means fewer jobs
• Industry needs tools to stop piracy
• Law enforcement needs more swift authority to stop piracy
• Law enforcement needs to be able to seize sites, servers, and domains suspected of piracy

On the surface, you'd think this is something worth supporting. It's a bit of hyperbole to say that piracy supports terrorists or that piracy is taking down the entertainment industry, as their TV and radio advertisements would have you believe, but we get the point. Lots of people are stealing lots of content, and we need a way to stop that.

But as you begin to really think it over, you quickly realize law enforcement agencies already have the authority to seize property used to commit a crime, and property obtained through criminal acts. So, there's no need for new legislation granting them the same tools they already have. But wait! SOPA doesn't want to take down sites whose owners have been convicted. They want to take down sites that are suspected. And this suspicion doesn't have to come from a lengthy investigation, like it would if the police suspected you of a crime. Instead, all a copyright holder would have to do is believe content has been pirated. So, if you post a video to Youtube and it has a clip from a popular NBC show, they will flag it to be removed. Under SOPA, this literally means Youtube.com could be seized from Google! Even though your clip should be protected under fair use. Even worse, this kind of action has already been used to censor videos, text, and pictures by several different groups. All these groups would have to do is file a complaint that your site is pirating material, and down goes your site!

This might seem far fetched, but as I alluded to, most of the provisions requested in SOPA already exist in one bill or another. A perfect example of what can happen is the case of Dajaz1.com. A site that legally posted music for viewers to listen to. It was swept up by the Department of Justice with 350 other sites at a single time. The domain was taken from the owner! This is tantamount to the police taking your car without actual evidence you've done anything wrong! And in the end (a year later), the DoJ determined that Dajaz1.com was, in fact, operating legally and the domain was returned. Meanwhile, the site's owner was out of business for an entire year with literally no legal avenue for recourse. To read a long report about what happened, check out the NYTimes piece here.

I'm not the only one that believes this will become the rule and not the exception if SOPA were allowed to pass. In fact, today (Jan. 18, 2012) is SOPA Blackout day. See the list of sites, action items, protest sites, etc. at http://sopastrike.com/. The list of sites is pretty impressive, and the number of companies putting their money where their mouth is impresses me.

So, to learn the facts about SOPA, I'd urge you to check out the Wikipedia article here, the Google information here, and of course to SOPAStrike site here. You can find Google's search results for SOPA here, which is currently blowing up with information from news sources around the world. I also think you should read some pro-SOPA info including the GovTrack page here, the MPAA letter to the House of Representatives here (PDF File), and finally an article found on the eMediaLaw site here.

We, as Americans need to defend our intelectual property rights, but we need to do it in a way that doesn't come at such a severe cost the the citizens. After all, while a corporation may be recognized as a legal entity with all the rights of a person, they still can't vote. Please use the Wikipedia page here to contact your representatives and tell them what you think of SOPA- for or against.

So, The Barna Group, a group that studies the "intersection of faith and culture", published an article titled "Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church". The article comes from a five year project with the goal of creating a more durable faith in today's children. While I can give one great reason I don't go to church, I suppose I could easily come up with six or so that lead me to Atheism. Many of those reasons are actually covered in this survey, which I find humorous itself. Common sense issues that have lead the "flock" to stray from the church that have been issues for 20+ years now. Way to get out ahead of it, guys!

Anyway, here are the six categories and some breakdowns of how the group(s) surveyed answered.

Reason #1 – Churches seem overprotective.

• 23% answered “Christians demonize everything outside of the church” completely or mostly describes their experience with the church.
• 22% answered “church ignoring the problems of the real world”
• 18% said “my church is too concerned that movies, music, and video games are harmful”

I'm pretty sure nobody in the real world is shocked by these clusters of answers, and there really isn't much to say about this. Religion tells us what we should and shouldn't do in all aspects of life, and kids tend to get annoyed by that kind of overbearing protectiveness. I personally find myself in the 22% that says church completely ignores the problems in the real world, but the problems of the world I see are very different than the ones I saw as a child.

Reason #2 – Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow.

• 31% responded "church is boring"
• 24% said "faith is not relevant to my career or interests
• 23% noted "the bible is not taught clearly or often enough"
• 20% said "god seems missing from my experience of church"

Shocking revelations in this category, I know. People are bored by listening to a preacher carry on for an hour, telling them what to do instead of an hour of discussing what's going on in the world and what we think about it. Hasn't anybody ever noticed that when you TELL people how to behave, they ignore you completely. But, if you let them think they've come to the answer themselves, they tend to feel more personally connected to it? That was rhetorical...the answer is "no" when it comes to church.

Also, I think the bible should be taught clearly in church or "bible study". I think more people would find that they completely disagree with the vast majority of the things in the bible, not least of which is how to properly keep slaves, how to divide the spoils of war (how to rape your victims' women), how to blindly follow the voices in your head and kill your children, and other such timeless lessons. So, I agree with these kids, but not for the reason the survey would like.

With regard to god being missing from the church experience, that's not really shocking either. Again, it's hard to feel the presence of any higher power at 9am on a Sunday with a priest or preacher re-enacting rituals from the dark ages. Many churches try to dress up what's going on by having christian rock music, energetic sermons, and free donuts and coffee after service, but the truth of the matter is the only thing I miss are the donuts.

Reason #3 – Churches come across as antagonistic to science.

• 35% claim "Christians are too confident they know all the answers"
• 29% say "churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in"
• 25% believe "Christianity is anti-science"
• 23% have "been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate."

No real surprises here. Though, I think it would shock most catholics to find that the Pope's science advisors (the guys in the cool black and red robes) actually believe in evolution. In fact, they find it very difficult to argue against evolution given all the things we've learned about "junk" DNA (parts of DNA from other species we still have in our own), the germ theory, nuclear science, astronomy, etc. It may also shock people to know that these same scientists, employed by The Vatican, also believe in the "big bang" theory and global warming!

So, it seems the church isn't always anti-science. But its members sure are. In ever increasing numbers, ignorant people go on TV and write editorials and articles in news papers and magazines, trumpeting the evils of modern science. How science is here to steal your childrens' innocence with HPV vaccines, and teach them all kinds of immoral things about sex and sexuality with the "gay agenda" and free condoms everywhere. But I can promise you, if you sit down and read just one single article about any of these topics in any scientific publication (I like Nature, Nat. Geo., the The New England Journal of Medicine), you'll actually find that research is being done to understand and improve life by leaps and bounds. I just find it ironic that the very people science is helping today with blood pressure medication, cancer treatments, and vaccines against once deadly diseases are the same people crying for the abolishment of scientific study.

Reason #4 – Young Christians’ church experiences related to sexuality are often simplistic, judgmental.

• 17% feel they “have made mistakes and feel judged in church because of them.”
• 40% said the church's “teachings on sexuality and birth control are out of date.”

Well, now you've gone and done it. You've stepped in a hornet's nest with this question, Barna Group. The church's teachings on sexuality, and the opinion they disseminate is so backwards and out of date that almost all psychological associations warn that they can and will lead to self-destructive behavior, not the least of which is suicide. And if you think gay people are the biggest victims here, you're wrong.

While the church speaks out emphatically against gay individuals in every forum it can, it also shames young people into thinking they've done something so morally reprehensible when they've had sex out of marriage, that they need to feel guilty and ashamed. And this doesn't just mean intercourse, either! Nope, you can't masturbate either. Because that's a sin so great, it was actually called out in the bible itself.

What the church fails to recognize in these modern times of understanding, is that sexual impulses are a sign of a healthy and fully functional person of sexual maturity. We as a society tend to put limits on what we consider "normal" sexual behavior, which we are beginning to understand more and more that "normal" is completely meaningless. But the church remains steadfast in its position. You can not have sex, you can not protect yourself from STD's while having sex (unless you're in the worst effected regions of Africa), and you absolutely can not use birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

But there's good news in this answer. 40% of young adults surveyed agree that the church is full of it, and doesn't understand sexuality in a modern world. So, there's hope for the future yet.

Reason #5 – They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity.

• 29% said “churches are afraid of the beliefs of other faiths”
• 22% answered “church is like a country club, only for insiders”

Well, be thankful you live in the 21st century. Because not very long ago, President Kennedy had to go on national television to answer allegations that him being president was part of a catholic conspiracy. Yep. Distrust, misunderstanding, and out-right hatred for other religions or beliefs run rampant in nearly all religions. And for good reason! It's right there in almost every holy scripture.

In fact, being "wrong" is so heinous in the church's eyes, that they fully believe a non-believer (or wrong believer) will burn in torment for all eternity. Yeah, that's right. They believe the divine creator of the universe spend the past 14.7 BILLION years plotting to torture you for eternity. But remember, the church teaches you that even though you're going to burn for eternity, god loves us all.

Reason #6 – The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt.

• 36% Not being able “to ask my most pressing life questions in church”
• 23% having “significant intellectual doubts about my faith”
• 18% answered their faith "does not help with depression or other emotional problems”

Look, if you're having problems with depression or other emotional problems, you need friends and maybe a psychologist. You don't need a man in a magical robe with a hotline to god. I promise. You need to surround yourself with people that love and support you, even if you don't believe in the same ultimate answer you do.

And it's good to have intellectual doubts about faith. Faith, by definition, is believing in something that there's no proof for! I have intellectual doubs about whether I put on deodorant in the morning or not, so doubting a belief system invented in the dark ages to explain where we came from and give meaning to life? Yeah, go ahead and doubt that!

Finally, I once made the mistake of asking "hard" questions about church and the religion I was brought up with. Over the years, the questions got harder and the answers only got simpler. When you ask a priest or preacher why millions of kids die of hunger and disease every day, or why babies are born with defects, or why god only delivers miracles for a tiny percentage of the population that so desperately need them, they will eventually come to the conclusion that "We don't know what god's ultimate plan is". Well, I'm not satisfied with that answer, and clearly neither are at least a quarter of the people going to church every week.

So, the question becomes this. Does the church double-down, tighten the reigns, and adapt to the changing world? Or does it enforce the existing rules with an iron fist? Does church become a recreational and mostly social activity in the future, or does the church keep fighting the tide of people waking up to the real world around them? I'm not sure, but I don't think the prospects are very good for the church. Every day people realize that the bible is wrong in so many aspects of life, and they begin asking why bother if the very book their religion is based on is wrong. And that makes me happy.

Bonus: If anyone reads this and would like to read more factual evidence for evolution, and many other foolish misconceptions people still have about the real world, check out http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html

The motherboard's iKVM/BMC had to be completely reset, which the manufacturer couldn't help me with. A quick search of the chip manufacturer's site turned up a tool that would allow me to update the firmware and erase the chip in one process. This turned out to be exactly what I needed to do, and it worked perfectly. I've since notified Tyan of the utility, in the event this happens in the future to another customer.

The hard drives that I initially believed to be DOA actually seem to test out fine with the motherboard's onboard LSI SAS HBA/RAID chipset. In fact, the onboard chipset seems to behave better and more predictably in nearly every way! This is disappointing because the Areca RAID card cost over $1300, and the onboard LSI chipset is essentially a throw-away part. It's so cheap to put on the board that's not worth removing in newer hardware versions!

The HBA/RAID driver story is more of the same. The LSI chipset uses the "mptsas" kernel driver, which has had many contributors offering fixes and enhancements. The Areca card seems to suffer from the opposite in a bad way. Areca themselves have published a newer version that the one included in the 3.0.x Linux kernel, but it has some pretty big flaws that make it a bit wonky. The first and most noticable flaw is the fact that a SAS/SATA device the stops responding causes the driver to freak out. To me, this is totally unacceptable. I'd rather see the device drop from the bus and be considered "offline" than the driver just freezing. A second big blemish is the remaining reference to the "Big Kernel Lock", which has been removable since something like 2.6.28 and is now off by default in many distributions shipping a 3.x kernel.

I've been in contact with Areca support, and the things they've had me try have only further proven that there is a problem with the driver. It has also indicated that there may be a pretty big problem with the card itself as well! For $1300, I'd expect a HBA/RAID card to undergo some serious QA process before shipping. But, more hard drives are causing issues, so at this point I'm pretty sure the batch of disks I purchased is fine and the Areca card is the source of all my issues.

So, I've started the RMA process for the existing RAID card, and ordered a LSI 9211-8i card. This card has 2 SFF-8087 ports for a total of 8 SAS 6G lanes. I've also ordered an HP SAS expander card which will give me 36 total ports and dual 4-lane SAS connectivity for a total theoretical throughput of 12Gbit/sec. This should work out to somewhere around 50Mbyte/sec per drive if all of them are active simultaneously. In reality, that rarely happens in a RAID system so I'm confident this configuration will be what I need. From the reviews I've read, the card seems like it's a great solution and really well liked by benchmarking forums. And it's rated for something like 290,000 IO/s max!

While testing the hard disks themselves, I found a dead unit and some pretty bad behavior in the RAID card's behavior. When trying to write data to a dead drive, the RAID card's driver just keeps trying forever. This causes the driver to lock up completely without responding to the process that's performing the write, which causes the writing process to also lock up! I'm investigating an update to the card's driver, or a firmware setting that would modify this behavior. But, the fact that this is the default way the system works is frightening at the least!

So, next week looks like it's going to be benchmarking time. From some of the preliminary tests I've performed while breaking the hardware in, the hard drives look like they'll run pretty fast. The SSDs are, simply put, stupid fast. They write data so fast that benchmarking them against the hard drives doesn't even make sense. ZFS itself looks like it works pretty well, as well. I haven't seen many slowdowns from using it in a test environment, so that should bode very well for the new SAN.

Almost immediately I realized I ordered an Extended ATX motherboard, but the case only supports Micro ATX, ATX, CEB, and EEB. Naturally, I also ordered 4x SFF-8087 cables for the HBA to Backplane connectivity. Each of these cables can handle 4 SAS/SATA lanes, which means I can run 16 out of my 24 drives. Oops. So, a new board and two more SFF-8087's are on their way tomorrow.

Here's the case unpacked from its double boxes. It's surprisingly light for how sturdy it feels! The manufacturer says it's around 40 lbs, but I would have pegged it somewhere in the low 30lbs range. All of the edges are rolled, so you don't get the stamped steel "case cut" issue that has plagued cases in the past.

Case unpacked

The front of the case holds 24 hot-swap disk trays. These feel pretty cheap when you pull them out and push them back in, with no satisfying click to let you know you've pushed the drive in far enough. This is really nitpicking, though, as you really don't want to push against the SATA/SAS interfaces very hard. And from the feel of things, the interface is more lilkely to break than the trays.

Case front

This is the motherboard I (wrongly) ordered. It's pretty beefy to say the least, with more than enough RAM slots for my needs. The plan for now is to keep the second CPU and RAM banks empty until more performance is needed.

Wrong (but nice) board

I got the CPU in the socket, and the RAM in the proper bank immediately. Since the CPU uses tripple-channel DDR3, DIMMs have to be installed in groups of 3. You'll notice I forgot to order a CPU heatsink and FAN assembly, which turned out to be fortunate since the board has to come out.

CPU and RAM mounted

This is when it dawned on me that something might be wrong. Everything was lining up great until I looked at the void where the power supplies will be. Damn!

Not looking good

Yep. That's not going to fit at all. Well, RMA for this board I guess.

Not going to work

Most people don't get to see what OEM packaging for hard drives looks like. When you're a system builder, you get them in bulk packs like this. The only thing I hate is unwrapping a ton of them, though. But I guess I'll have 24 anti-static bags after this is all done.

Hard Drives

I'm using Western Digital 1TB drives with TLER, which better support being in RAID arrays. Though I'm not building a traditional RAID array. These were cheaper than their Seagate counterparts and more readily available, so that made the decision pretty easy. The drives slip into their trays and can be screwed in from the side or the bottom. I've chosen to use the mounting holes on the bottom to keep from interfering with the sliding mechanism in the case.

1TB HDDs mounted

The half-way mark has been reached. These 12 drives account for more space than most of the people I know have used in total in their whole life. And I'm going to double it. Hopefully I can start benchmarking this thing next week to see how the HBA card performs with this many drives!

12 done, 12 to go

That's all for now. Tomorrow I should have the power supplies and all of the drives installed. Then it's a waiting game until Thursday when the new motherboard and CPU cooler should arrive. If everything continues as planned, Friday will be a great day at work!

The first prong of our problem was storage space. To be more specific, we're running out of it. We have a SAN at our HQ location that we use to host two VMware vSphere 4.x instances, along with data for our network monitoring system (OpenNMS) and a few other odds and ends. I calculated that within six months we would be at 100% of the capacity of that SAN without adding any new projects that required storage space. The problem here is that there's a project currently in the works that requires not only the rest of the space in this SAN, but an additional 3x its original capacity! To make matters that much worse, when I projected storage needs out to 18 months, we were beyond the maximum capacity of the SAN in question. If I were to band-aid this problem, it would cost around $10,000 now, and be completely useless in just over a year. So, while $10,000 is an absolute steal when it comes to adding the capacity I wanted to a SAN, I felt like I couldn't justify a $10,000 hit for 12 months of useful service. There's so much more I'd rather do with that money!

Our second piece of the problem was parformance in another realm. We are already running up against the parformance capabilities of the SAN we were looking to upgrade! So this meant that while spending the money to upgrade its data capacity would solve one problem, it would actually make the second problem worse! And the more we rely on this SAN, the worse the performance problem gets. In fact, when I charted out the projected performace of the existing SAN over the next year, it would be so over utilized that everything we ask it to do would take more than 24 hours to complete. This is a pretty severe problem when your business hours are 7am to 7pm, needless to say.

So I went back to the drawing board. I puzzled over several possible solutions, but none of them really made me happy. I could spend $20,000 on a second SAN and use the two of them in parallel, I could steal some capacity from our backup SAN for our customer data, I could just add capacity to the existing SAN and hope the performance calculations were wrong, and of course I could do nothing. The last option was by FAR the best option on the table at the time.

Then it dawned on me. I had experimented with some different servers here, building a "home grown" SAN. Servers were cheap, and I could use any brand of hard drive I wanted. I wasn't locked into a single vendor, and the price tag was extremely appealing. For $10,000 you can build a Linux (or Windows) server with so many disks in it that you actually need specialy hardware to handle them all! I had aready been mulling over the idea of building a small Linux SAN for work, so why not build a massive one instead? I mulled this over for months until the opportunity presented itself. And by that I mean my back was against the storage wall, and a decision had to be made in just a few weeks.

Well, that day has come! While ordering software for my company, I negotiated a deal that saved around $3,500. This afforded me the opportunity to build a Linux server with room for 42 disk drives, a second CPU, more RAM than you could shake a stick at, and all the bells and whistles I wanted. This new system will give me the ability to expand throughput by adding much faster network cards and disk controllers, while allowing me to add affordable storage any time I want! What's better is that I will be modeling my system after ones used at CERN and LLNL- two massive agencies that have some serious storage needs.

Finally, after months of planning and research, the order has been placed and the parts are on their way. I'll be using 20 1TB hard drives, two or four 60GB SSD drives, 6GB of RAM (initially), a single Intel E5620 Xeon CPU, a 10Gbit ethernet card, and an Areca 24-port 6G SAS card in JBOD mode. The plan is to build a ZFS pool out of the disks, tune it to use the SSDs for data access acceleration, turn on the data de-duplication features, and benchmark the HELL out of it. Once I'm happy with the results, I'll be carving storage out of the pool and migrating things off the old SAN. Once everything is moved off the old SAN, I will add it to the ZFS pool as slower storage used for less frequently accessed data. As more storage is needed, the system will expand with the addition of $1,000 external disk chassis that can hold up to 24 disks each. The total disk limit of a single Areca card is 128 disks, and the system will be physically limited to two cards. I think 256 3+TB drives would be more than enough space to hold us over for the forseeable future.

I plan to keep good notes during this process, and I'm hoping to update this blog with the details as I make progress. I'll also be using the Phoronix benchmark suite to test access to the ZFS pool on the server itself and on iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, and AoE clients, so be prepared for lots of boring numbers.

When Microsoft created the .Net framework, they created a fantastically powerful platform that could be easily extended and shaped to fit any need. Like any good Object Oriented programming framework, there was a strong set of basic objects built in that allowed both Microsoft and third parties to build very robust solutions quickly and easily. Nearly all MS products now have .Net assemblies, which add capabilities into the framework for the product being used. This is true not only of products like Office and Visio, but of back-end products like Exchange, PowerPoint, Windows itself, and Active Directory! And PowerShell can access it all.

So, what's the best way to get started with PowerShell? I found that learning the PowerShell language was similar to learning any programming language- have an itch to scratch. What I mean is everyone can write the "Hello World" app. Even people with no programming experience at all can do it, especially in PowerShell. But to really get down to it and learn the ins and outs of a language, you need to be applying it to an actual problem you have.

So, let's see an example. What if you were in charge of a group of servers and you needed to check some statistics from them all. Well, we know that WMI already contains that data and more. And wouldn't you know it, one of the Commandlets in PowerShell gets us an Object containing WMI data! So, let's take a quick look:

$wmidata = get-wmiobject win32_computersystem

That's it! We now have an object that contains the WMI data from win32_computersystem. Sure, you can do this in VBScript so far, but it's not nearly as simple! And we're about to demolish what VBScript can do!

$wmidata | Get-Member

   TypeName: System.Management.ManagementObject#root\cimv2\Win32_ComputerSystem

Ok, so we see that this object is actually a .Net framework data type from the System.Management... assembly. We also see that there's a commandlet called Get-Member in PowerShell, which returns all of the methods, properties, and ScriptMethods an object exposes! At this point, Doc Brown will say "Great Scott"!

Alright, we want to actually do something here, so let's get to it. We want to collect system information for several computers on our network. Because we're admins, and we love being informed...right?

$wmidata = get-wmiobject -computername somecomputer win32_computersystem

"Machine name: " +$wmidata.Name

"Model: " + $wmidata.Model

"Manufacturer: " + $wmidata.Manufacturer

"Logged on user: " +$wmidata.UserName

"Total RAM: " +$wmidata.TotalPhysicalMemory

Our output:

Machine name: somecomputer

Model: OptiPlex 755

Manufacturer: Dell Inc.

Logged in user: MYDOMAIN\auser

Total RAM: 4158242816

Ok, so far this has saved me about 20 minutes of VBScript and it's got me all this data! And here's a neat trick...

"Total RAM: " + $wmidata.TotalPhysicalMemory / 1GB

Yes, you can abbreviate all that conversion math to go between KB, MB, and GB by using those letters.

So, we have a script that can connect to a remote computer (assuming you have permission) and gather WMI data. It then displays that data onto the screen for you. And it took us, what, 2 minutes of typing to get this? Using your imagination, you can probably see that you could wrap this all in a for loop and rip through a list in a matter of minutes. And the fun doesn't stop there!

If you're interested in learning PowerShell, I suggest you take a look at the Microsoft PowerShell site here . It's open to the public, and it's helpful. But you may find that Microsoft's information is a bit terse. Once you get your head around PowerShell, you'll actuall find this kind of information the most helpful. Also, check out the .Net framework documentation...this all applies to PowerShell objects! So, find an itch to scratch and get coding!

Western Digital announced a new 6TB drive recently, which is roughly 1748 HOURS of high quality HD video from Netflix, Hulu, or one of the other streaming companies. To be clear, this is their highest quality offering currently, and you could record 73 DAYS of it.

So. How quick can we fill our disk under perfect conditions? What if I just wanted to fill every single nook and cranny of this behemoth? Below, I've listed some popular computer peripheral connections and how long it would take them. In short, Thunderbolt is the clear winner!

Dad hands me the saw..or the rusty jalopy that stands in for a saw. And there I am…face down, ass up under a 14 foot tall douglas fir that I already hate. Covered in sap and needles, freezing what used to be my balls off. Of course, the tree is so thick nobody can hold it while I cut the son of a bitch down…and you just CAN'T get out of three feet of snow that quickly. So, not only do I get the honor of cutting down a tree, but I get the PRIVILEGE of dragging it a mile down a craggy hill side, in the snow, covered in what is the most hateful mix of water, shame, sap, and sharp pointy sabers masquerading as evergreen needles.

We purchase the tree, discover we forgot rope for the 10th year in a row, but $17 of rope (roughly 10 feet), strap the tree down to the roof of the car, and make our way home in the same manner we started…miserable and tired.

Let it be known that nobody's family is better than mine.