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My Christmas curse continues! You see, for a long time now — almost thirty years — Christmas has become synonymous with home problems for me.

This all started in the first home that Kris and I owned back when we were newly married. We woke one Christmas morning to find that the water heater had overflowed, flooding the laundry room and much of the converted garage. Unfazed, we cleaned up the mess and spent our holiday without hot water. It was fun!

Since then, I've experienced a long line of home problems on Christmas day: frozen pipes, broken gutters, fallen fences, and more. And this year? Well, this year's issue was minor…but may lead to a major repair.

The house that Kim and I bought last August is in good shape. We made sure of that during the inspection period. Still, no home is perfect — and a house built fifty years ago has a few warts.

I'm a long-time vocal proponent of higher education. For me, it's personal. I was raised in a poor family with parents who had briefly attended college, but never with any real gusto. (I'm not sure my father had a plan. My mother studied home economics. Not kidding.)

My uncle got a math degree from a now-defunct community college, and his son (my cousin Duane) went to school back East. I'm not sure if he got a degree, though. (I'll ask him tomorrow when we get together to bake Christmas cookies!)

But from a young age, I knew that I wanted to go to college. I knew I was a smart kid, and I viewed college as a Way Out. It was an escape from the trailer house I grew up in, an escape from menial labor.

Too bad then that I squandered my college education. I entered Willamette University intending to be a religion major, but eventually ended up with a psychology degree — chased with an equally useless English minor.

The older I get, the more interested I am in history.

When I was young, history and myth seemed to be interchangeable to me. To ten-year-old me, there was little difference between, say, Abraham Lincoln and the Greek gods sitting atop Mount Olympus. All of it was abstract stuff that happened to imaginary people long ago.

Somewhere along the way — in my late teens, I think — history began to seem relevant. During my junior year of college, I took a course on Pacific Northwest history and my eyes were opened. I could see in my own life how events decades ago (or hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago) created the actual world in which I lived my day-to-day existence.

Now that I'm firmly entrenched in middle age, history has never seemed more relevant.

As part of my new commitment to just being me, I hope to share a lot more random stuff around here — just like I used to. Instead of waiting for weeks (or months) in order for inspiration to strike for a longer essay, I want to share the best of the interesting money stories (and semi-money stories) that I find around the interwebs.

Think of it as Apex Money, I guess, but instead of sharing three to five discoveries each day, I may share one or two a week. And instead of editing and polishing these pieces, they'll just be quick braindumps with minimal attention to detail.

Today, for instance, here's a 103-minute YouTube video about the lines at Disney theme parks.

If you're a nerd like me (and I know that many of you are!), this is fascinating stuff.