Ahhhh, the first post of ’07.  Oh the excitement.  I better keep it brief, I know everyone is still reeling from the length of last weeks post, which judging from all the negative feedback still wasn’t granular enough.  Sheesh.  Plus, I added three new sections in the “photo album” section, which should count for something.

Saturday we got up bright and early and headed up to Mom’s for our second Christmas celebration.  All the little ‘uns had a great time opening all their presents up.  They all seemed quite overjoyed by the whole situation, most likely because they didn’t have to drive.  Ahhhh, youth.  After the present-opening, we enjoyed an awesome meal; honey-baked ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, and assorted other goodies.  This all went on well into the afternoon, and left me quite exhausted.  We went home and rested up a bit, then I met Todd down at the Brooksider for dinner and that boring NFL game.  For whatever reason, this was the last time Todd would be seen or heard from for the remainder of the weekend.  We are semi-concerned for his well-being;  He won’t even respond to text messages.  If you have any information on the whereabouts of Todd, please call our hotline at 1-800-findttr.  There is a $25 reward offered for information leading to his safe return, or callers can remain anonymous.

Sunday was declared “Farewell to Ed and Kim” day.  We met up with them up at the Brooksider to watch the football games, marking the last time they would ever, ever set foot there.  OK perhaps not, but for a while anyway.  As I’m sure everyone is aware, it was quite an exciting day of football.  Ed’s Bengals lost, throwing him into a 30 second funk, but it was all part of the grand scheme that would eventually culminate in the Chiefs going to the playoffs, so nobody felt bad for him.  After the 49ers/Broncos game, Ed and Kim joined us across the street at Carmens for our New Years Eve dinner.  We had a great meal, and then headed back to our house and played cards for the rest of the evening.  Not an overly wacky New Year celebration, but thankfully they saved us from just sitting at home and doing nothing.  It was our wedding anniversary too, so we’re rather obligated to do SOMETHING on the holiday.  Yep, it marked 16 years, in case you didn’t know.

Yesterday doesn’t even warrant a mention.  I don’t know if it was the relatively late night we had Sunday, or the cold I’m battling or what, but I never even managed to get dressed.  Just laid on the couch all day and watched the bowl games with the dogs.  I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do on New Years Day.  It suited me just fine, so whatever.  I rode my super-duper scooter in to work today; that went relatively well.  My buddy Wally up at the coffee shop, who is a rather avid motorcyclist, recommended only riding if it’s over 35 degrees.  After today’s 26-degree jaunt, I might just tend to agree with that.  I’m sure the feeling will return to my fingers some time today.

We’re inching ever closer to the end of the holiday season.  My sanity remains intact thus far, or at least as much as it was before the holidays.  One pseudo-Christmas and the New Year remaining, and then I can get back to the predictable drudgery of my normal schedule.

Friday was a generally unremarkable beginning to the long weekend.  We were let out of work early, and I spent the rest of the afternoon running errands;  Out to Microcenter to do a little last-minute shopping, swung by the Scooter shop to see if my helmet was in, (which it wasn’t… One of my co-workers had the rather innovative idea to paint my head with shoe polish in the meantime,) and dropped my car at the shop to get inspected.  After all that was done, I spent the rest of the evening putting together my new PC, which was my Christmas present from me.  It came together very nicely, if not exactly as planned.  For those who care, which I would imagine are very very few, I shall detail the specs of this super-duper new machine.  After much shopping, research, and gnashing of teeth, I decided on an Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard.  I’m sure most of you have already moved to the next paragraph so I won’t waste keystrokes on how and why I finally came to that arduous decision.  The rest of the components were a bit easier to select;  most were picked by the all-important “on sale” criterion.  For storage, it has two 320 gig SATA-II Seagate drives, plus an extra 80 gig SATA-I generously donated by Martin for some backup space.  For the rest, I went with an AMD 2 GHz dual-core processor, 2 gig of DDR2 RAM, a 512 MB Geforce 7600GS video card, and two 18x DVD burners.  All of this almost comical overkill is housed in a very nice Antec P180B case with a 500 watt Ultra power suppy.  I added a few other niceties also, like a built-in memory card reader and a CPU fan that rivals our home central air unit in both size and cooling capacity.  If I wake up tomorrow and decide I want to be a serious gamer or maybe a graphic designer, I’ll be ready to go in the PC department.  Until then, I will be the proud owner of a machine capable of the fastest game of solitaire in the neighborhood.  The only “glitches” encountered in the project were the hard-drive setup and the Linux install.  I had intended to set up the two 320’s in a raid 0 array, mostly because I like saying “raid array.”  It was acting a bit odd in that setup though, so I scrapped that part.  I had also originally planned to put a Linux install on the 80 gig drive, and dual-boot it with Windows, which would let me get rid of my Linux box that sits in the basement.  This turned into a several-hour debacle and a non-booting PC though, so I ended up giving up on that too.

If you managed to power through that stretch of tedium, that brings us to Saturday.  Most of the day was spent restoring stuff to the new PC, and tweaking it for optimal performance.  Which is to say, jacking it all up and then trying to get it back to working order.  Sigh.  After a generally wasted day, we crossed the river and hit the Martin’s Christmas party.  It was… Loud.  I have known quieter evenings at the Brooksider.  Oh well, all in the name of festivity.  I did enjoy lots of good food, including some almost-award-winning pork and a passable effort at a brisket.  I slunk off a bit early in the evening, leaving Donette to fend for herself in the gift exchange.

Sunday I woke up nice and early and threw a brisket on the smoker, in preparation for the Christmas dinner.  That was a pretty effective day-killer;  Cold-weather smoking takes a bit more attention I guess.  It ended up taking 12 hours, so not much else was accomplished during the day.  We had the grand idea to watch a few Christmas classics for evening entertainment, but were quickly reminded that they suck, so we went to bed.

Monday we got up bright and early and dug into all our gifts.  I got a new PC, some new kitchen knives, and a new shirt!!!  The surprise was somewhat tempered by the fact that I’d purchased all this for myself in the previous weeks, but it was exciting all the same.  (Santa did leave me some goodies in my stocking, but I can’t go into that for fear of having to share.)  The puppies got stockings full of toys, which they promptly destroyed, and Kane got a snoot full of catnip.  Donette got everything she wished for too, which was yet another year of marital bliss and a steam cleaner.  Score!!  Later in the afternoon we headed north (again…) for Christmas with Donette’s family.  After quite a large gift exchange we enjoyed an awesome BBQ dinner; Ribs, beef, and pork with all the sides.  Perhaps not exactly the traditional holiday fare, but I’ll take some ‘que any day.  My second overloaded plate was my undoing… I was thoroughly uncomfortable for the rest of the day, if in a contented kind of way.  I wound down the holiday down at the Brooksider, watching the football game.  Unfortunately, the sole Miami touchdown proved to be the undoing of my Fantasy Football season.  Although my team was on an 8-game winning streak, and favored by a whopping 28 points to win it all, every one of my players managed to pick this week to go on an uncharacteristic touchdown drought.  Arrrgghhhh!!!  Oh well, second place still pays better than last, I guess.

Christmas is almost here.  Rather, Christmas is almost over, if you view it as more of a nuisance than anything.  Actually this Holiday season isn’t shaping up too bad;  It’s still early though.

While that was a busy weekend, I am not particularly inclined to detail all the events.  I’m just plain ol’ tired and I don’t feel like typing.  In the interests of consistency though, I’ll try to at least make a passable effort at a weekend overview.  Things started off solid on Friday with Donette’s company Christmas party, which was at Morton’s.  You just can’t go wrong there.  I had an enormous bone-in ribeye, and Donette had the slightly-less-gluttonous cut of the same.  In a well-executed plan of attack, we skipped the salads and took it easy on the appetizers, which left enough room to focus on the truly important part of the meal.  I almost polished mine off.

Saturday we spent most of the afternoon shopping.  We started at Office Max, where we picked up a new computer desk.  Donette has been into some heavy remodeling upstairs, and our current desk doesn’t fit into her grand scheme.  After that mundane purchase, we headed out to Scooterworld  in Overland Park, because I wanted to show Donette some of the nerd-mobiles I’ve been eying for a while.  She was so enamored with them we ended up going ahead and picking one up!  Unfortunately they didn’t have a helmet to fit my melon, so I have to wait on riding it.  Donette is set up and ready though, complete with a neon pink jacket.  Oh yeah, we’re styling.  After that thoroughly exhausting  ordeal, we took a little nap and then headed over to our friend Susan’s house for her annual Christmas Extravaganza.  That was a festive time as always, and even better with the 60-degree weather.  We spent most of the evening out on the back deck; can’t beat that for mid-December.

Sunday turned into a rather unfortunate work-a-thon for me, while Donette worked on her painting project upstairs.  That ate up most of the day, although I did get around to assembling the new computer desk.  For evening entertainment we met Ed and Kim down at the Brooksider and watched the unfortunate debacle of the Chiefs game.  Because I strive to always find the positive in every situation though, I will point out that I needed mucho points out of Ladainian Tomlinson for my Fantasy Football team, and he delivered in kind.  Before his offensive barrage I stood to get knocked out of the playoffs; as it stands now I at least have a chance of surviving, depending on the outcome of this evening’s game.

Well, that was a “work weekend” so I ain’t got much to go on.  I could go all the way back to last Wednesday when we went out to dinner with the Martins to celebrate Donette’s birthday.  We met them at O’Dowd’s and hung out there for a bit, then ate dinner at Kona Grill.  Uhhhh… and that was it.

Friday we stayed in and watched movies.  The featured selection of the evening was the critically acclaimed docu-drama “Nacho Libre.”   I thought it was pretty good, in a “could this possibly be any dumber, why am I watching this” kind of way.  It got a few chuckles and at least one outright guffaw.  I found it a rather quotable flick if nothing else.
Saturday was a wash… I stayed home and rested up all day for the pending all-nighter at work.  Played with the dogs, surfed the ‘Net, and that’s about it.  Man those Saturday nighters at work a young man’s game, I have to rest up for them.

Sunday morning I got up semi-rested at 9:00 or so.  In my old age I find I can’t really sleep in, no matter what time I get home.  I was feeling a little jet-lagged, but I downed a pot of coffee and headed over to work on some guy’s PC for a while.  It seems his trusty Windows 98 computer was making constant calls to Madagascar.  Nice.  Hopefully that little problem got fixed.  After that I went back home and tried to nap for a bit, then I went on a shop-a-thon with Donette.  Woo-hoo.  For dinner, the Martins and Todd came over and Donette made stacked enchiladas.  Good stuff.  That kind of wrapped up a boring weekend for the kid.  I tried to watch the football game but couldn’t keep my poor lil’ eyes open.  Got some parties next weekend, maybe that will make for some update material.

That was a miserable weekend, on many fronts.  Things started off well on Friday, with a day off from work.  I kind of slacked off all day, not accomplishing much.  That evening we hooked up with the Munkirs at the Blue Moose for some dinner.  Quite a tasty meal;  I’m rather fond of that place.  The atmosphere was a bit sullied by the mob of children that somebody had unleashed in the dining room, but otherwise an enjoyable dinner.

Saturday morning started off as usual, which is to say I was up enjoying my coffee and reading the newspaper.  Somewhere around 8:30 Donette was rudely startled out of bed by the Nebraska Furniture Mart truck out front.  I have often heard people complain about the delivery service of NFM, apparently with good reason;  They had called me on Friday to confirm that they would be there between noon and 2:00.  Knuckleheads.  So, Donette shot up out of bed and got dressed, while I tried to corral the dogs and get them out of the way.  Anyway, to make a long story short, none of our new furniture fit up the stairs.  Actually, they didn’t even really try.  They tried the armoire, and I will certainly agree that piece wasn’t going to happen.  The mover-dudes were then convinced that none of was going to fit, so they didn’t even try the remaining pieces.  I was pretty bummed.  It was nice furniture, all solid oak with solid cedar drawers.  Not to mention, we haven’t had a freaking dresser EVER and I was looking forward to not having my socks spread across three bedrooms.  Well, I guess we still don’t have one.  So, they stuck it all in the garage and said somebody would be by to pick it up in twenty minutes or so, and went on their merry way.  As soon as they left, it struck me that I really didn’t feel well at all.  Omitting the gory details, this feeling was confirmed very shortly thereafter.  I spent the entire rest of the day in bed watching movies and popping nyquil.  Bummer.  Oh yeah, my day of misery was punctuated when the NFM jokers called at 8:00 that night to let me know that they were finally on their way to pick up the furniture.  Apparently 20 minutes had morphed into 11 hours.

Sunday was about the equivalent of Saturday, except Donette ended up with the same bug I had and joined me in the sick bay.  In short, I got cheated out of my entire weekend by an untimely illness.  Gosh, good thing it didn’t hit during the work-week, I would have had to dip into my 11 years of built up sick time.