Nothing at all. Just sitting at home and watching Dick Clark’s balls drop.
(smile)
Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.
So I’m slowly getting back to normal after X-mas. Jamie still doesn’t have to be back to work until the 3rd and we’re already climbing the walls wondering what to do with ourselves.
In hindsight, it was big, but forgettable holiday. We swore we’d keep it simple, but spent WAY too much and WAY more than we intended. This year seemed more about quantity than quality in terms of everything. (and yes, this is mostly materialistic gift talk – we all know we should appreciate each other and what we have and all that schmaltz)
On Christmas Eve we opened gifts sent from various family members (a yeary tradition) to make room for Santa to leave his stash for us. I think everyone had the same quantity over quality approach this year. It might have a lot to do with that fact that none of us had anything we really wanted or needed. (yeah, that’s a horrible place to be, huh?)
Tons of stuff, a lot of nice things.
Got the kids to bed and finished wrapping and putting stuff under the tree late on Monday night. o further illustrate my point – we didn’t keep an exact count but there ended up being over 100 gifts under the tree for X-mas morning. It was stupid how high I had to stack stuff. I have pictures, but haven’t taken them off of the camera yet.
This year it took a full 3 hours and 36 minutes from the time gift opening started until one of kids whined about being bored. (gotta love kids!)
So what did Daddy get? The biggie this year was a iPod. I scored a black 160GB classic.
Before someone comments about the Touch and all of that – I don’t care. I wrestled with the decision for a while, but in the end decided that I was mostly wanting it for in the car and that it made more sense to be able to hold all of my music and stuff rather than swapping out songs all the time. I’m the type of person that loves having thousands and thousands of songs and just hitting shuffle and taking them as they come (just look at my last.fm lists).
I currently have almost 70GB of music. The 16GB touch just wasn’t going to cut it. Hell, at the rate I’m going the 80GB classic didn’t seem like enough. The 160GB classic was the smart choice. I needed storage more than anything. In a couple of years when the touch actually adds some substantial storage, I’ll upgrade. I like the ‘flash’ of the Touch, but this time I took substance over style.
My daughter’s biggie was a 26″ LCD TV. She’s had an old 20″ Magnavox forevrer. The thing is 16 years old and showing its age – the time to upgrade was now.
Little Man scored a ton of litle things he’s into – Wii games, Star Wars lego sets, Star Wars Transformers, Transformers in general – all the good little boy stuff that amuses Dad too. (although the 575pc Lego Jedi Starfighter was not a fun build)
Jamie got the copout Jewelry (she does like shiny things though) and a certifcate for a local salon/spa she’s been wanting to go to but never found the time. Maybe this will kick her ass into gear?
Lots of good stuff. Typical american consumerism holiday. I’m part of the problem and I’m ok with that.
I’ll probably do a post about the Wii games after I’ve had more time to play with them…which I’m about to do right now.
Hope everyone had either a good material holiday or a good spiritual one…or both! :)
A few posts back I promised pics of our tree. As has become customary, we ended up with a tree that has ‘character’ – which is just a nice way of saying we waited until way too late into the season to get one and ended up choosing from leftovers.
Come to think of it, if you step outside of things and look back in, the concept of uprooting your life and keeping a fucking dead tree in your house for a month and a half is entirely unappealing. That’s why we get one two weekends before X-mas and it’s gone the first garbage day after New Year’s. We don’t piss around.
But we took our homely leftover tree and showed it love all “A Charlie Brown Christmas” style and it rocks in its own special way. Here’s a few pics including the obligatory ‘arty farty’ stuff where you just use a shallow DOF and impress anyone who doesn’t understand photography. Enjoy.
Now gimme my presents!
Time for another ‘what’s been going down’ entry.
I’ve had a weird pain in my jaw/neck/ear area for four days now. I think it’s a swollen gland or something. I can’t quite pinpoint the exact spot. Somewhere behind my jaw, below my ear and not quite on my neck. It’s a dull pain, but focused. It hurts worse if I lean forward or bend over. Everyone I mentioned it to and everything I read seemed to make it seem like no big deal and offered up ‘wait and see’ advice – so I’m gonna wait and see what happens. (I’m not one for medical intervention anyway.)
The mother-in-law arrived last night. Sigh. (the same in-laws mentioned here) The same rules still apply.
Today Jamie kept her out of the house for much of the day and they took the kids to Clifton Mill in the evening. I took the opportunity to slip out and finish up some X-mas shopping of my own. I busted serious ass and got shit done. Stopped at 4 different places, got a haircut and whipped through the drive-thru in about and hour and a half. I’d elaborate on purchases, but the wrong eyes might see this. I’ll do a gift update after Christmas.
Tomorrow Jamie is stuck at work, so I get to spend the day with mom-in-law by myself. Yipee-fucking-doodle.
Even better, her (by ‘her’ I mean my mother in law) brother and his wife and driving down from Michigan to surprise her. He’s a cool guy (although physically disabled in ways that make doing anything other than sitting at our place practically impossible) but his wife has the smelliest feet in the world. When we lived in PA, they lived kind of near us and I swear on my life, I could come home from work and tell she’d been by because the foot stink just lingered. They plan on staying until Saturday and my mother-in-law is leaving Sunday morning. So I got that going for me.
I started watching Seven Ages Of Rock on VH1 classic. It’s a seven part series (duh!) chronicling the history of Rock music by breaking it down into seven distinct periods/styles. A little bit of a British slant if you ask me, but being co-produced by the BBC explains why. Good stuff if you’re into that sort of thing.
I think I’m going to sit down, pop in the Simpsons Movie and wrap some presents while everyone is sleeping.
Copyright © 2012 Lord Gonchar