🎨Remember that each and every day is a canvas🖼 📷 https://t.co/5X6yEyol07 pic.twitter.com/Rvncgw6iyz — Visit Ventura (@VisitVentura) January 5, 2017

My preference for renting a home, instead of owning one, is well known, largely thanks to the fallacy that home ownership is an investment. The burden of maintenance is another strong dissuasion. Case in point, our water heater died today. Instead of having to buy a new unit, and pay extra for “emergency” installation, it’s my property manager’s responsibility to replace the unit by the end of the day.

Lots of popular people died this year, and an election outcome was not as many expected. As a result, people are blaming the year. And strangely, others are defending 2016, as if it’s capable of feeling or couldn’t survive without their support. Where’s the harm in blaming 2016? Who is hurt by this? If it helps people process a difficult period, what’s wrong with blaming a construct we’ll soon be free of?

Keri Russel had one humanizing storyline and The Americans did what it always does. I love it.

When I moved to Ventura in 2014, I recall two or three breweries in the city. The last two years changed that, and 2017 promises more. Just another reason I love living here. http://www.vcstar.com/story/life/columnists/lisa-mckinnon/2016/12/23/cafe-society-ventura-county-all-pok-2016/95614862/

2016 can go to hell; I can’t think of a single positive thing that’s happened to me this year. In the fifteen months since we married, my husband has spent a few days per month–a week at most–at home. He’s been around so little in 2016 that he never spent two consecutive weekends in Ventura. As a fitting end to this wretched year, Chris will miss Christmas due to work obligations, just as he did last year.

A Canadian drunk driver confronted an excavator operator, and the operator won: In conversing with the driver, the operator observed signs of intoxication and as a result ‘prevented’ the driver from fleeing with the ‘bucket’ on the excavator… The photo that accompanies the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s press release is spectacular. 😂 http://www.rcmp.gc.ca/en/news/2016/22/q

About a year ago, we hired cleaners. I felt rather silly at the time, paying someone else to clean my apartment. At the same time, my husband spent the last 13 months working from Texas, and I didn’t want to squander the brief times we had together. Honestly, if you had only a few days a month with your significant other, wouldn’t you find ways to make the best use of that time?

VICE featured a story yesterday about two guys who bought a few of those reflective vests that construction and maintenance workers wear, and used them to get into random places they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed. I’m genuinely impressed with how effective the vests were. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/turns-out-wearing-a-hi-vis-vest-gets-you-into-everything-for-free

It’s both entertaining and sad how few companies are prepared for a service provider’s outage, like those suffering through Slack’s downtime today. Automattic, fortunately, wasn’t so shortsighted, so we continue to function without significant disruption.