Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.  I managed to, despite my best efforts.  Had a nice little mix of “traditional” and “non-traditional” celebrations.  I won’t elaborate there, I’ll just leave that line up for interpretation.  The inlaws got me some nice practical things for the house; new blinds and the roller-things you put under your 200 lb. house plants.  (That’s the best I know how to describe the roller-things… All I know is the plants are getting too heavy to move by picking them up, so you put these under them and roll them around.)  Every “toy” I wanted for Christmas, I bought for myself.  Playin’ it safe, you know.  Hopefully I can just send my Newegg and Microcenter bills to Santa Claus when they come in.  Since Zim asked for details on said toys on the message board, I shall now bore everyone with the details of my acquisitions.

My Christmas Toys

• Samsung 16x DVD burner.  This might be my favorite purchase.  I bought the burner OEM/white-box from Microcenter, then bought an aluminum external case for it off newegg.com.  So, I can just plug the burner into any of my PC’s USB ports, and voila, instant portable DVD factory.  Sweet.


• Seagate 80 gig hard drive.  This was one of my “Black Friday” sale scores; I picked it up at CompUSA, then bought another aluminum case like the one for my DVD burner to put it in.  So, I use it as a portable drive to carry around and back up all my PC’s to.


• Panasonic 50″ LCD rear-projection TV.  That was our present to each other, I guess.


• A new Palm Pilot.  I can’t go into details there, because I haven’t actually bought it yet.  I have one picked out on EBay though.  As sure as I list any details of it out here, one of you knuckleheads will rush out and outbid me on it, purely for the joy of ticking me off.

What did we do over the weekend?  Well, you know, Christmas stuff.  We went and exchanged gifts with the Munkirs over lunch at the Blue Moose on… Friday was it?  Holy smokes, my days are all messed up.  Couldn’t have been Saturday because I was doing Christmas stuff all that day, and it couldn’t have been Sunday because I watched football all day… Yeah, musta been Friday.  Saturday I got up at the crack of 11:00 and drove up to Mom’s house.  We aren’t having “Kenagy Christmas” until this Thursday, but I figured I better get up there anyway.  This worked out very nicely because all her neighbors had brought over all kinds of food, which I gorged myself on.  After a few hours of visiting, I had to run back home and fry a turkey for the “Morelock Christmas.”  Since they also had ham and brisket, I’m not sure we really needed a turkey too, but I like frying them anyway so I wasn’t asking questions.  After dinner we played some game called “bunko.”  On the surface it seemed like a pretty simple game, but I never really caught onto it.  You roll some dice and then everybody takes your money.  Sometimes the person to your left takes your money, sometimes the person to your right takes your money; but somebody is always taking your money.  Much like every other game I’ve ever played, I guess… That’s why I never play them.

Outside of that, I pretty much hung out with “The Group” at the Brooksider and watched football.  Those days are over now though; it’s back to the gym this week baby.&nbsp Ohhhhh yeah.  That’s the plan anyway.  Speaking of football… Barring some total catastrophe in this evenings game, my Fantasy Football team will be in the league Super Bowl next weekend.  Given my somewhat embarrassing lack of knowledge about sports, and my well-documented propensity for bad luck, this is really quite a remarkable event.  We shall see what happens…

I shoulda put some kind of “Holiday Hours” on here.  Something to relieve me of any responsibility until all the Christmas stuff blows over.  There’s just too much going on.

Anyway… As I alluded to last week, we went and saw “A Christmas Carol” again last Thursday.  Honestly, it wasn’t quite as bad as I anticipated.  I had fully prepared myself for the possibility that I might have to hurtle myself off the top of the building during intermission if it got too unbearable.  We had really good seats though, so that made it a bit more tolerable.  Plus, I had forgotten that the building was only two stories high, so I likely would have only suffered some mild abrasions.  Probably woulda still had to sit through the second half.

Friday was the big Christmas Party down at the Brooksider.  Nothing too extraordinary to relate there, although it was a very good time.  They provide all kinds of good food and stuff.  We actually even stayed a few minutes past nine I think, which is quite late for us.

Saturday, as everyone knows, was the 75th annual Martin Christmas Extravaganza.  Now, I don’t really feel the need to detail that event.  We ate, drank, and made merry with all kinds of good folk.  Had a gift exchange, played some ping-pong… C’mon now, there is about a 99% chance that if you are reading this, you were there.  Therefore, you already KNOW what happened, right?  For me to type it all in here would just be redundant, right?  Right.  And, I forgot my camera so I don’t have any picture.  Now if YOU have any pictures and would like to send them to me, I would of course be more than happy to post them.

Sunday was football day.  I won my first ever playoff game.  Whoop-dee-doo.  Delay the inevitable.  Then Sunday night we went over to Ed and Kim’s to watch the Sopranos and eat Mexican food.  The Sopranos didn’t work out; we’d already seen all the episodes that we rented.  Something got mixed up there… So, we watched “Elf” which was a relatively good flick.

Whoa, that’s a rather tame update.  It was quite a fun weekend, although you wouldn’t know it from that mundane summary.  I better look into doing this on Sunday full time.  Mondays are too depressing anymore to try and portray any kind of merriment.

OH AND I SAW MARK FRANCISCO

Well the weekend isn’t quite over yet, but I don’t want to wait until Monday again and risk not having time to post anything.  The tragedy would just be too great.  Probably won’t do anything too special today anyway; so far it’s shaping up into an afternoon on the couch tracking my fantasy football teams.  @$#*%, my @~*$% quarterback just threw an interception.

We kicked off the weekend Friday by going down to the Brooksider to say “hi” to everybody, and to unwind a bit from an uncharacteristically busy week.  We only stayed about an hour, then headed home to hang out.  We rented “Kill Bill” and hung out in front of our super-duper new television.  We’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of the TV so far, I think it’s going to be a good purchase.  The debate over whether or not to get cable service is still ongoing, though.  We might just stick with renting movies; the fact is there just really isn’t anything worth watching on TV.  (Excluding Professional Wrestling, of course.)  Anyway, the movie wasn’t bad.  The violence was a bit over the top, but it beat a chick-flick any day.  Oh yeah, I wanted to mention our dinner too.  We decided not to eat dinner at the Brooksider while we were down there, in keeping with our current health kick.  “Let’s just eat at home, it’ll be healthier and cheaper.”  So, we walked over to the grocery store and picked up a few big baking potatoes.  It really made for a good dinner, but the “healthy” part fell apart in grand fashion.  “Let’s see, what do we have in the ‘fridge to top these things… Here’s some leftover nacho cheese, a bottle of ranch, a can of chili, 1/4 stick of butter, some jalapeno peppers…”  Calorie-wise, we’d have probably been better off with a double-cheese burger and fries at the Brooksider.  The thought was there though, if that counts for anything.

Saturday, we took the rather unusual liberty of sleeping late.  I’d slept rather poorly throughout the night, due in no small part to the above-mentioned potato toppings.  Without going into unnecessary details, I wasn’t very comfortable.  I think I got my best sleep from 7 – 10 in the morning.  After we finally got up, we had lunch at Baja Fresh, and then did a little shopping.  After that, we had a little double-date thing going on with the Martins.  We were supposed to go to dinner, but for one thing we were running a little late, and for another nobody was really hungry.  So, we ended up just getting an appetizer at the Kona Grill.  After that, we had tickets to “A Christmas Carol” at the Repertory Theatre.  The play was absolutely fantastic, without a doubt the best production of this story I have ever seen.  I sat riveted to my chair the entire 5 hours (or was it only 2) spellbound by the captivating rendition of this timeless classic.  Afterwards, I fairly skipped to the car, giddy with an abundance of Christmas Spirit.  In fact, I was so taken with the show, we are going back to see it again Thursday with Doni’s work group!!  Ahhhh, yes, I am truly a blessed man.  To think, I get to see this play not once, but twice in one week.  Ahhhhh, yes.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yes.  Words fail me.

I’m on break, gearing up for the Holidays.  Cut me some slack.

Buenos Dias, I hope everyone had a nice holiday.  We certainly did.  Thanksgiving may have surpassed July 4 on “favorite holiday” list.  I never get to shoot fireworks myself anymore, which greatly detracts from July entertainment, but I DO still enjoy Thanksgiving in every sense.  Maybe I’ll buy a gross of bottle rockets next year and see if that makes a difference.  Maybe I’ll shoot them off on Thanksgiving day… Now THAT would be a holiday.

We didn’t do much worth relating over the weekend, so I’ll back up all the way to the holiday.  We had Thanksgiving dinner over at my Aunt Kathi’s, and a fine feed-fest it was.  Pretty much the traditional feast; greenbean casserole, mashed potatoes n’ gravy, noodles, cranberries, corn, rolls, stuffing, dressing, and both smoked and roasted turkeys.  At least I guess that’s our “traditional” foods.  I’ve heard that not everyone puts noodles on their mashed potatoes.  What can I say besides “they should.”  After that we put together a big Charlie Brown jigsaw puzzle, and I went out and helped the nephews build a snowman.    I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I haven’t built a snowman in 15 years.  Probably a good reason for that too, I think I slipped a disc.

Friday I hit the “Black Friday” sales like a madman.  That’s something of a yearly event at work, and embarrassingly I kind of look forward to it.  We develop our game plan on Wednesday, and give everyone an assigned store.  (Not like Jones and Kohl’s… Electronics stores like CompUSA and Microcenter and such.)  Then Friday morning we descend on them like a swarm of nerd locusts, buying up everything in site.  I got a little more carried away than usual this year… I did some serious damage.  I was at CompUSA in Independence at 5:00, standing in line, and it paid off handsomely.  I hit the jackpot on every good deal I could find.  No small victory there… Several of the things I got were limited to like 10 per store.  From there I hit some of the other stores and picked up a few of the “less critical” items, which is stuff that I have no earthly use for but bought anyway just because it was cheap.  Yes I am aware that indicates a serious problem.  When the smoke cleared, I came away with a 19″ LCD monitor, an 80 gig hard drive, a stack of DVD’s (movies), 2 DVD burners (??), Norton Antivirus, 50 blank DVD’s, an optical mouse, some cool little Atari games, a wireless network card, rechargable batteries, some flash memory, and several other items that shall go nameless because they’re “secret.”  Whew.  Ohhhhh yeah, we tore it up.

We really didn’t do anything over the weekend of note.  Kind of rested up from the holiday.  Saturday, apparently still caught up in the shopping frenzy, we did go out to Nebraska Furniture Mart and purchase a new TV.  Hopefully this will be the impetus to finally complete “the room.”  I’m a little nervous about the whole purchase… There is a very real chance that the TV won’t fit in the room.  I guess we’ll worry about that when they deliver it.  Sunday, we kind of just hung out and messed around in the house.  Cooked some gumbo, cleaned the house a little bit, pre-made some meals for this week, that kind of stuff.  We watched the Chief’s game too, whoo-hoo.