I have this nifty little iBook at home, and I always forget that, in spite of Web-safe colors and the supposed universality of HTML, Web pages designed on my perfect Mac never look the same as they do on any PC.

I was shocked at how bad my site looked when I arrived at work this morning. Managed to doctor it up so it looks like it should, but yikes.

A. and I had a lovely evening. Decorated the poor, neglected Christmas tree, and ate our Hannukah dinner: potato pancakes with applesauce and sour cream, challah, and a pear, pecan and blue cheese spinach salad (to put the California spin on it). Even when the sink clogged up with all the potato peelings, we handled it gracefully and calmly. I'm proud of us.

The worst of our natures came slinking out on Sunday to put a damper on our otherwise cheery weekend. It was time to cut down the Christmas tree.

Last year, we endured the same exact thing when we went to get the tree. Since it was our first year in our new place, we explored the tree lots in our town and found that they were charging nearly $100 for a dry, ratty tree. We live about 15 minutes from a little town on the coast that's peppered with huge Christmas tree farms, so we decided to make an adventure out of it and drove out to chop down our own. It was a great deal — $20 for any tree. But we were unprepared. The flimsy hacksaw the farm provides is the equivalent of using a dull spoon. It had rained a lot, so the wood was wet and hard to cut. We weren't quite dressed for it, so Andrew got muddy. And we were cranky by the time we got it home.

So because I'm feeling all Martha-y this year, and because I'm not traveling and suddenly am getting overexcited by the amount of free time I have, I thought it would be adorable to make our Christmas cards with a funny picture of A. and me looking harried as we posed by our healthy, fat, green tree.

It was a disaster.

The first problem is that A. is not, shall we say, the handy type. Neither am I for that matter, but I grew up with a carpenter father who will fidget with something until he makes it work, even if it takes an hour. A. just gets mad. Really mad, right away, as soon as something doesn't work the way it should. Looking back, he admitted that his biggest problem with the day was that we didn't plan properly — we should have taken a sharper saw (which I was advocating), should have taken twine to tie the tree to the top of the car to get it back to the front of the lot, should have put the blanket (that I brought for this purpose) down on the ground so we didn't get grass stain on our jeans. It also didn't help that I dropped the digital camera on the ground, which pissed A. off even more. By the time we took our Christmas card picture, we were not comically harried — we were simply not amused at all.

The day culminated in a fierce confrontation on our front lawn, A. struggling to saw off extra branches on the trunk after the tree fell out of the stand, our neighbor standing behind his minivan watching us fight. Not a pinnacle day for Colddigits and A.