xmas update

[bjarvis]

Despite the xmas eve vandalism to my car, the holiday seems to have passed with no further disasters. I intentionally resisted all contact with family in Canada to preserve my good mood, such as it is. Kent's parents called from their wintering spot in Punta Gorda, FL, and we chatted for a while; I can claim that satisfies my holiday family contact obligations for this year.



There were some surprises under the tree this year. I didn't get a DVD of "Firefly: Serenity," but that's fine: I can buy that for myself at any time. I did find an Olympus SP-500UZ digital camera though! I had expressed a desire for one frequently over the past couple of years, not as a hint to him per se but just from frustration of dealing with the delayed gratification of chemical film cameras. I was waiting for a digital model which had better than 4x optical zoom, had at least 5 megapixels of resolutions and could handle at least 512MB if not 1GB of memory so that I wouldn't have to carry a computer with me to drain the camera every few minutes. All of that, and cost less than $400. Models which met my desires started coming out early this year and now I have one! Whee!

The other big surprise was a 2GB SDRAM card --more a wafer than a card-- for my Palm Tungsten E. I use my Palm as an MP3 player but I could fill my older 512MB card rather quickly with square dance music alone (I practice patter & singing calls while driving to work when the mood strikes). I wasn't even sure the 2GB card would work in the Tungsten since cards half that size weren't available when this model of Palm was designed, but indeed all works well! Yay! Kent had a widget he bought for himself which allows the SDRAM wafer to be plugged into the USB port of a computer so I was able to quickly duplicate the contents of my older cards to the new one, then add more material. I still have 1.3GB to fill.

One of my little playtime activities recently has been resurrecting an old Toshiba T1200XE laptop I bought years ago at a pawn shop in Toronto. It's a 12 MHZ 286 with 1 MB of memory and a 20 MB hard drive. My Palm now has 100 times more memory expansion than the laptop. Scary. I get giggly when I compare it against my old Commodore 64, or PDP-5S. :-)

One of the more bizarre gifts: in my stocking was a small plastic cow, about 1 inch high by 2 inches long. Press down on the cow's back and it poops a jelly bean. Kent said he saw it in a store and couldn't resist... why am I not surprised?

Many thanks to rlegters and tdjohnsn for the handmade soap (as well as the surprise umbrellas)!

95% of the remaining gifts may be summed up in one word: chocolate. There must be 15lbs of chocolate --mostly dark-- around the living room right now. It may last a week if I stretch it. :-)

Kent appears to be in love with his new table saw. If we didn't have the garage entirely occupied by my damaged car, he's have it set up & slicing wood already.





As planned, we joined friends at the Uptown Theater for the 2:45 PM of "King Kong." It may be a three hour movie, but it goes quickly: there's plenty of action and the places where the plot slows are well suited and nicely interspersed. Naomi Watts did a superb job. I normally can't stand Jack Black but he was... tolerable. Not great, but the best work he's ever done (which isn't exactly a big hurdle to jump). Sets, venues & scenes were impeccable, from New York 1933 to the ship to Skull Island. And I could drool over watch Thomas Kreschmann all night. And King Kong himself was beautifully rendered: good expression and believable smooth movement.

There was a family with young children in the row behind us. I was a little worried that a three hour sit might be impossible for the younger two kids, but they seemed as enthralled as the rest of us. They may be having nightmares about Skull Island for a week, but that's not my problem. :-)





We were originally planning to have a vietnamese dinner after the movie, but the restaurant we were assured would be open that night was most definitely closed. Bummer. We instead walked up the street to a chinese restaurant which, well, didn't enjoy the greatest of culinary reputation among several in our party but at least had the virtue of being open with available tables.

To our complete surprise, the food was delicious! The cooking staff must have been upgraded since the last visit. Or maybe they cleaned something. Whatever. The food was good! Nine of us polished off $170 worth of various flavours of chicken, beef & pork with rice & noodles; a few of us helped clear away some excess inventory from the bar too. I don't drink at all but a couple of my sweeter friends were more than happy to help make up my contribution.





We returned home by 8 PM and, for the most part, spent the evening winding down, reading and generally being lazy. I made telephone calls to initiate the claims process on my car, transferred files to my Palm's new 2GB card and generally started learning how to use the new camera (so many settings!). I'll worry about vacuuming the remaining glass out of my car this afternoon.

Comments

[paigemom.livejournal.com]

ah yes, the honorary grandparents.

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

You did recognize the umbrellas didn't you? :-)