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December 27, 2005
A Very Curmudgeon Christmas
After a few days' hiatus to visit friends and family for Christmas, I'm back for the dead week between Christmas and New Year's. I should enjoy it for what it is -- the first four months of 2006 are going to be intense, and I'm sure that by the time April's here I'll be longing for a week where nothing's going on. Anyway, about my Christmas... (Putting on my very best "Jay" from "Jay and Silent Bob" impression...) "I made out like a FAT cat for Christmas this year... snoogans."
First of all, I finally got an iPod, only 9 million days after the rest of the world. (I'm nothing if not cutting edge, kids.) I'd been planning on buying my own anyway, once the Xmas shopping season had faded and I didn't have to feel guilty about buying something for myself -- but knowing this, my parents went and basically got me a gift card that'll take care of the bulk of the iPod, and thus by week's end I will finally have one. (Since I have a couple thousand MP3s sitting on my hard drive, it's about damn tme I got an actual MP3 player so that I can listen to them away from the computer!) I got a few other things from them -- the Trans-Siberian Orchestra DVD, a good pair of leather gloves, the latest book from The Onion, and a bunch of paraphenalia from my favorite local microbrewery -- but the iPod was the biggie. Not that what you get is the main thing that matters, but it's usually the first conversation-making question we all ask each other, isn't it? All in all, a bunch of cool stuff and more than I should have gotten (again!).
Before seeing my family, I stopped over in suburban Philadelphia for a Christmas visit with the Doc and Mrs. Doc and the kids. And I have to say, they bookended the electronic Christmas perfectly; if the iPod represents the latest and coolest new electronic gadget that has caught on and gained mass appeal, the Docs' gift to me, in together with Tim & Mrs. Tim, represents one of the earliest. Yes kids, I am now the proud owner of a vintage, still-with-the-original-box, Intellivision! (eBay is an amazing thing, isn't it?!) It even has about 25 of the original games with it. I figure that both my retro-cool score and my total geekitude score just went up at least 100 points each in one single setting. This is the coolest thing -- I haven't seen one of these in more than 20 years. Screw PS3 and Xbox, man... give me dot-matrixed biplanes and odd looking blurbs of players tossing a square white football any day! Oh, and we watched movies that night, so now I have finally seen Sideways (loved it! now you know which DVD you can get me for my birthday).
The weekend was quiet, uneventful. I met up with my parents in downtown Philadelphia on Saturday -- my uncle, who is doing the post-retirement career switch thing and has become a flight attendant now (don't laugh, the dude is in his 60s and travels all across the US all the time now, and is having a ball!) had a flight that landed in Philadelphia for an overnight, and we all had the chance to get together. After meeting up mid-afternoon, we hung out at the Reading Terminal Market for a little while, then settled in for a lousy dinner (shoulda known better than to pick a hotel restaurant, but we were afraid very little else would be open on Christmas Eve). Oh well, at least the company was good.
Saturday night after returning to Delaware, we exchanged gifts (we're Christmas Eve gift people, always have been, dunno why) and pretty much fell asleep. My brother was with his wife's family this year, and the usual troop of DC area orphans we often host seemed to have all found "homes" this year... which made this the smallest (3 people) family Christmas gathering ever for the Curmudgeon family. We usually have four or six, with a couple of friends along for the ride... felt weird and oddly un-Christmas-y to have it be just us three. So Christmas Day was pretty much like a normal Sunday, with a dinner and football games on. Monday was nice to have off, I did a little wandering around Rehoboth, did some writing, and then at night we saw Syriana (really good, if a bit hard to follow... not so much a traditional story with a beginning an end so much as being just a window on a world we try not to think about too often).
Today, on the drive home, I got to see a dump truck overturned on the New Jersey Turnpike, spilling several inches of sand and dirt across two lanes of highway. Now there's something you don't see every day... Problem was, to see it I had to be stuck in the miles-long backup that it created. So my return home to NY was delayed quite a bit.
To sum up: iPod. Intellivision. Sideways. Philadelphia. Syriana. Dump truck. Merry Christmas.
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Comments
Welcome to the 21st century! I seriously love my iPod. I "got" a nice pair of gloves for Christmas, too. If by "got" you mean they seem to be backordered and haven't gotten here yet.
Posted by: Jill at December 28, 2005 11:26 AM
Well me good Mudge I still dont have an Ipod, some of my muso friends are less than impressed with sound quality on them aswell. So I am in no rush..Happy Hogmanay btw!
Posted by: mcrob at December 29, 2005 06:48 AM
Mudge,
Charlotte got a Nintendo DS for Christmas so we have a pair with the one Tim got for his birthday. WiFi enabled gaming between DSs rocks!!! And the P2P WiFi chat/IM/drawing is cool too.
Finally something that meets the Pervasive promise. Remember when we talked ecosystems?
: )
Posted by: usefulguy at December 30, 2005 02:43 PM
