Post Christmas Wrap-Up

After three days of great time with friends and family, I can’t say that I wanted to go back to work this morning (but who ever really wants to go to work?). I got to spend time with all sorts of family and friends and ate far too much food. A great time was indeed had by all. It was great seeing friends and family who I hadn’t seen for quite a while (some for years). And as usual, we were all spoiled rotten. The haul (not 100% inclusive, but interesting things that were giving to anybody in our family that readers here my find interesting — I’m at work, so I can’t remember the list 100%):

• First, my haul from my Reddit Secret Santa
  • Homocidal Jungle Cat, a Calvin and Hobbes book.
  • 99% Perspiration, a Frazz Collection.
  • Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I haven’t read a novel for years, and this one is 1100+ pages, so it might be time to start.
  • Starter Pack for Arduino. I’ve heard about Arduino stuff, but never looked into them much. This will force me to play.
• The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus Mega Set.
• A 2TB External Hard Drive
• Onkyo TX-SR508 Receiver. This was a gift to myself, primarily, using some money from ads on this site I’ve been saving up. I wouldn’t have even pulled the trigger on a receiver, but I found it refurbished at more than 50% off, and I was sick of all the zillions of RCA cables I had behind my make-shift entertainment center. I couldn’t pass it up.
• An H20 Mop. My wife must not have thought I was doing a good enough job mopping the floor, as she loves this thing.
• Seidio Innocase for my phone.
• My kids got a Wii from the grandparents, along with a couple extra controllers. They also gave us Wii Sports Resort, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wii Party, and Zumba Wii (that’s for my wife as she’s into Zumba — my body doesn’t move like that).
• Board(ish) games were big this year, with Creationary, Balderdash, Scrabble Flash, Mad Gab, Perplexus and Apples to Apples making their way under our tree (we like playing games in our household).
• No Christmas should be complete without an Alton Brown book (especially when you don’t have cable): Good Eats 2: The Middle Years.
• Several DVDs and Gift Cards (including extensions on both our Netflix and High Desert Museum memberships), and some clothes (which you don’t appreciate as a kid, but really appreciate as you get older).
• And some other stuff I can’t remember as I’m work posting this on my lunch break…

Seriously, though, it’s a large haul, and I’m not including all the stuff my wife and kids received (there was a FoodSaver, a bunch of American Girl-sized stuff — some brand-name, some generic — as well as some other toys and things that I have forgotten at the moment). We always clean out the kids toys and closets after Christmas and donate their gently-used stuff to charity, and we’ll be doing that again this year. I’m always extremely blessed and grateful to have such caring wonderful people in my life, and I hope that I’ve been able to do what I can for them, even if I can’t always do so financially and spoil them like I’d really like to (if I had the money, I’d be buying a ton of gifts for people).

I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas!

(Note: Yes, I do have Amazon affiliate tags in some of these links so if you purchase any of the stuff listed above or anything from Amazon via these links, I’ll get a few pennies. If you object to the affiliate tags, I’m sorry, and you’re welcome to just search the Web for these items or block the cookies.)