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.

Well, we made it back from Mexico safe and sound.  We ducked out last Wednesday morning, under cover of darkness, and boarded a plane for Playa Del Carmen.  We had some first class tickets in our hands, thanks to our Albuquerque traveling buddies Jill and David.  I’ll say one thing, it’s a darn site closer than Hawaii: we were sitting on the beach soaking rays by 2:30 that afternoon.  SWEET!!

To sum up the trip, let me just say “All Inclusive.”  That pretty much wraps it up.  We stayed at the Gran Porto Real, and I’ll give the place an A+ under the “relaxation” category.  My goal for the trip was to move no more than 300 yards a day under my own power, and I met or exceeded that goal each and every day.  It was a rather stunning display of sloth even for myself.  I did start to feel a bit bad about the situation after the first two days.  Nobody should eat and drink that much without countering it by doing some type of physical activity.  It just ain’t natural.  I managed to fight through the emotional rollercoaster and stick it out ’till the end though.  Our daily agenda went something (exactly, actually) like this:

• 6:00 AM – Stumble outside and stake our claim to four premium lounge chairs, by using the international symbol of the beach towel draped over the back.  Go back to bed.  This was by far the closest we came to work the entire trip, taking sometimes as long as 10 minutes to accomplish, and definitely carried the most responsibility.  We split these duties with David and Jill, every other day.


• 7:30 AM – Get back out of bed, pick up clothes off floor, put them on, and go to breakfast.  Typical breakfast consisted of a large omelet, several sausage links, assorted fruit, chunks of cheese, scrambled eggs with ham, potatoes, french toast, and a few pieces of the “meat du jour,” all covered liberally with pico de gallo and washed down with 4 cups of coffee.  You may think I’m exaggerating… I’m not.


• 9:00 AM – Switch out shorts for swim suits, shuffle out to the aforementioned lounge chairs and read the newspaper.


• 10:00 AM – Everisto, our personal bartender, shows up for work and brings us a round.  We grossly overtip him, ensuring prompt returns, and lay back in our chairs.


• 1:00 PM – Lunch time gluttony, consisting of nachos, guacamole burgers, french fries swimming in copious amount of chili and cheese sauce, ceviche, and assorted other artery-cloggers, all buried under a few cups of the same awesome pico de gallo.


• 4:00 PM – Nap time.


• 6:00 PM – Dinner.  Although the content varied a little more than the other meals, the portions were quite similar.


• 8:00 PM – Here we mixed it up a LITTLE bit, but not a whole lot… Just kind of went with the flow.  Check out the nightly show, sit out by the pool and chit-chat, watch a red-neck wedding, that kind of stuff.

Think you could hold that pace?  Not as easy as it sounds, bub.  Not for lounge-rookies, I’ll tell you that.  Any oddities on the trip, you ask?  Well… All the topless chicks kind of took me by surprise.  Not an all-together unpleasant surprise, mind you, but it kind of threw me off my game.  There was always that underlying feeling that something just… Wasn’t right.  A bit unnerving.  Plus, I think it distracted Everisto, and that’s just not good for anybody.  We also went and saw a Michael Jackson impersonater one night.  THAT was something to see.  There is a very good possibility that I may live out the rest of my life regretting not getting a picture with ol’ Michael.  Would’ve been a fine keep-sake.  Oh, oh, and I can’t forget the Red-Neck wedding, alluded to above.  The wedding party wasn’t all that remarkable actually; relatively normal people with horrible drawls.  But then there was Will, and he was quite a case.  Will (pronounced “Whee-Ull”) sat out on the beach every day in a cowboy shirt, properly-formed ballcap, Wranglers, and well-worn boots.  Honestly, watching and listening to Will provided me with more diversion than the topless chicks.  (That sounds like something out a “you know you’re getting old when…” skit, but it’s true.)  He had many memorable lines, few of which can be repeated.  One of my favorites was when he wandered by, soaked from head to toe, (and still in the clothes described above) and stated “%$&%#*-*$%#@, that was a bad decision.”  Other than that, the synopsis above pretty well covers things, with the exception of a few items filed under “what goes on south of the border, stays south of the border.”  Well, there are several little “catch phrases” we picked up on, (besides Will’s,) but they just wouldn’t work on here.  You have to actually hear them, and for that matter you have to hear them the FIRST time to get the full effect.  So never mind on those.