My wife is great at Christmas gifts.  She does it the right way by putting time and thought into each gift.  Over the years she has perfected the annual gift for our parents and grandparents: a personalized calendar.

This gift works perfectly for our talents and hobbies.  My wife’s talent is scrapbooking.  Thanks to her years as a high school yearbook editor, she has a great eye for page layout.  My hobby (I can’t quite call it a talent) is taking photos.

Here’s how the process works:

1. Throughout the year she reminds me to take good photos during family gatherings.
2. My wife selects the best photos of my kids and our nieces/nephews.
3. My wife arranges the photos in calendar project in iPhoto.
4. I order the calendars and have them shipped directly to our parents and grandparents.

This year I decided to kick up the calendar a notch by adding birthdays and anniversaries.  Of course I could have easily typed those into the calendar right in iPhoto…but then I’d have to do it every year.  Like any thoughtful (and slightly lazy) man, I found a way to automate this for years to come.  This is how:

1. I created a birthday calendar (one for each side of the family) in Google Calendar.
2. Each birthday and anniversary is an all-day event that repeats annually.
3. I subscribed to those Google calendars in my Mac’s iCal application.
4. I updated the gift calendar setting in iPhoto to import the desired calendars.

It worked perfectly.  Of course I could have skipped Google Calendar all together and just done the birthday calendars right in iCal, but I use Google Calendar for everything else so I wanted those calendars in the same spot.

Image source: Google

101.  Simply amazing. My wife’s family called her Grandma Great.   She lived up to that moniker.  She had 6 children, 20+ grandchildren, 80+ great-grandchildren, and 20+ great-great-grandchildren.  My wife is one of the great-grandchildren.  My two boys are part of the great-greats.

My wife and I married a little over 9 years ago.  In those 9 years I had the pleasure to meet and talk to Grandma Great on several occasions.  The most recent was at her 100th birthday party.  Even then she still remembered my wife and asked about our family.  I remember that my son was fascinated with her jewelry and she was kind enough to let him fiddle with it.  What an amazing woman.

Our road trip this weekend is for her funeral.  The last minute planning, packing, and scheduling is worth it to honor her memory.

I’m taking all of next week off of work, and the family and I are headed to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving.  It’s a long drive…too long for two small kids in our small car.  So, we rented a bigger car for the week.  Tonight we picked up that rental car: a Dodge Grand Caravan.

Yep.  A minivan.

The minivan has one feature that totally blows the mind of my four year old: automatic sliding doors.  I told him the door are magic and they will open when you say “abracadabra.”  He tried it out, and the magic worked perfectly.

We start out on our long journey tomorrow.