Holiday Wrap Up

...Get it? Wrap up? Ok., I'll stop.

So, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and all that stuff. Can you believe that it's 2009 already?

I actaully celebrated Christmas on December 25th this year. My family tends to celebrate what I've dubbed Rafuse Orthodox Christmas. It falls on the day closest to Christmas that everyone can get together.

I did minimal decorating in the apartment, but did manage to put up a rather nice tree. Space is very limited in the apartment, and because of that I decided to go without a tree last year. Then I discovered that not having a tree made me sad, so I bought a small pre-lit tree and called it done. This year I bought some small sized decorations to put on it. I tried putting on my normal sized decorations, but it looked silly. In any case, the tiny star that I found in a random aisle at Wal-Mart worked perfectly. The fun part is that I searched the Christmas decoration section for a while, found no trace of tree toppers large or small, and then gave up the search. I wandered through the pet supply aisle for something and found the little star lying discarded on a random shelf. A Christmas miracle? You decide.

I managed to get all of my sewing projects done before gift giving time. I ended up finishing a few after Chrsitmas, but that was ok, since I wasn't giving these out until Yomper's post-New Year LAN party. Let's hear it for procrastination!

My roommate and I had decided to not give each other presents. He has gift giving anxiety and neither one of us has room for extra crap. I woke up on Christmas Eve morning and found a gift under the tree for me. The roommate had gotten me an Ipod, engraved with my name on it. Surprise! I felt a little guilty, since I didn't get him anything, but I really do appreciate the gift. I've been wanting an Ipod for a while now.

The weather on didn't cooperate. Depending on what part of the road you were on, it was raining, snowing, sleeting, or a combination of all three. I had to pick up a couple of last minute things and discovered that 9am on Christmas Eve is a great time to shop. The 2 stores that I went to were nearly deserted.

I trekked down to the Kingdom to spend Christmas at my sister-in-law's parents' place. My brother and sister-in-law were there, of course, and my siter and her husband made it down from PA, even after the icey roads added another couple of hours on to their driving time. At my brother's suggestion, we all wnet out and played in the snow. It was a blast. The rest of Christmas was the nice kind of chaos that comes from having to many people in too small of a space. Alyssa slept through most of her first Christmas.

I spent New Year's eating yummy food and playing poker with BlueMule and friends. They were more than happy to take my money. As a consolation prize, I scored a recipe for some tastey chicken divan. All's well that ends well, right? Actually, I had a blast, and it was still cheaper then going out. I must be getting old, because for the last few years I have had absolutely no desire to go out to the bars on New Year's Eve.

Yomper had his annual LAN party that Friday. I ended up using his wife's computer because mine just isn't up to running any new games. This worked out for me because that meant I didn't have to schlepp my system to his place. We played Left 4 Dead all day long. Let me say that this game is the bomb diggity, and I'm not usually a huge fan of first person shooters. I've been playing the Xbox version with the roommate since late November. The basic concept is that it's the zombie apocolypse and a team of 4 survivors is trying to, well, survive. With 5 players, we decided to try the versus mode.

Playing the infected is even more fun than playing the survivors. It was with glee that I did all of the asshole-y tricks that the zombies have done to me in various run throughs of the main game. Smoker dragging a survivor into a witch, resulting in eviceration? Check. Boomer standing on top of a car with a sensitive alarm, so that shooting the Boomer results in alerting the zombie horde? Check. Multiple infected completely screwing over the survivors? Check and check. Playing this game with 8 players (4 survivor, 4 infected) would be insanely fun.

So, how have you been?