It's the gift that keeps on givin'

My family is more than a little obsessed with National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We watch it every Christmas, and some quote from the movie comes up in our conversation often. Part of it is that we have family members who are eerily similar to Clark's relatives. So it seemed a natural fit to come up with my own "jams and jellies of the month club".

Of course it's not jams and jellies, it's chocolate! That's right, you too can have a Nearly Never-ending Supply of Chocolate!

I'd toyed with the idea before, but after a failed attempt to pick up the new Harry Potter book - we'd pre-ordered, but they were making everyone go through the same checkout line and only using two registers. Bad planning people, bad bad planning. The line literally snaked through the entire perimeter of the big bookstore and out into the mall. I'm not saying I was terribly surprised (although this is a small town, and half of it thinks that fictional books about wizards will still lead you straight to hell). But still, I didn't stay to wait it out in the line.

Back home, bookless and awake, I started thinking about chocolate. What sort of flavors would I include? After about five minutes of brainstorming, I said - wake up, silly - why not just get going on this right now? That's how I found myself writing code at 2 am, adding a new page to the website and coming up with an excellent list of flavors.

The lesson I learned from the whole night was - don't wait. If you have a good idea, write it down at the very least, and do more than that if you can. If not, some of the best ideas you have will slip away and be lost among all the little mundane things your brain must think about.