I know I haven’t posted in a while, but to bring you up to
speed, I’ve had the last four days off. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the
schedule. It’s like I got my own mini-Christmas break. It’s been really great.
I spent most of it just lounging around and relaxing, even though I did end up
going into work three of the four days. (Twice for movies and once for my pay
check.)
Today, however, I ventured out to “play Santa” to my
friends. That was a lot of fun. Jon was visiting his family in the afternoon,
so I stopped at his place first. I had a model of the Delorian from Back To The
Future II for Jon, a poster of “the Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” for Amy,
a car that makes siren noises for Cameron (with an E, lol.), and a
doll/back-pack set for Gabby. Everyone seemed pretty happy with their gifts,
but I think I found the kid’s reaction the most entertaining. I’m used to
giving gifts to calm, savvy young adults, so it was a lot of fun to see the
little one’s excitement. I think I did pretty good.
They, however, REALLY outdid themselves. After passing
everything out, I got to open what they got for me. I tore off the paper to
find the complete works of Edgar Alan Poe. It was one of those nice
leather-bound editions you see them selling at Barns & Nobel, so I was
quite impressed. So, we sit there and talk for a little while and, without even
really thinking about it, I started to flip through the pages. Or, at least,
that’s what I tried to do. I found that the majority of the pages were stuck
together. Only the cover and table of contented opened to reveal that the
center had been removed. This was no ordinary book! It was a home made book
safe! (The store-made ones are nowhere near as nice as this one, I must say.)
And, inside, I found a bookmark featuring a certain heroin addicted hobbit, a
One Ring like in Lord of the Rings/Clerks 2, and a 128MB jump drive. We all had
a good laugh and discussed how they expected me to take longer to notice. But,
yeah, I was blown away. The jump drive alone is just … awesome. Jon even loaded
some drawings and a cool paint program onto it to get me started. And I know
it’ll come in handy as I’m buying a used laptop off of one of my managers at
work. So, once again, thanks guys.
After that, I planned on driving over to Katie’s house. I
was about a block away before I remembered that I had promised to call her
first. So, I pulled over and gave her a ring. I’m glad I did, too, because she
informed me that she was, in fact, not at home but the hospital. The ICU, if I
recall correctly. She mentioned to me the other day that she had developed food
poisoning shortly after returning home from school, but it wasn’t getting
better as quickly as they expected, so her parents took her in just to have her
checked out. So, we agreed that’s she would give me a call later when she
returned home.
With Katie’s stop temporarily delayed, I went on to Comic
Town to pick up my weekly fix. Hung out there a little bit talking to DJ about
Wizard magazine and how it doesn’t cover comics quite as much as we’d like. I
learned that the folks at Comic Town were actually considering putting out a
magazine of their own. It would essentially be a list of everything they
received each week and an honest review of what they thought of what they read.
If a book was good, they’d tell you why you should check it out. If a book was
bad, they’d tell you exactly what was wrong with it. Best part is that the
magazine would most likely be free and automatically included for pull
customers. I told them that I thought it was a great idea. I can’t wait to see
if it works out.
I finally returned home and hung out with Mom and Jared for
a while. Later, as we were beginning to discuss dinner, Katie called and I ran
over to her house. That was really nice. We haven’t been keeping up as much as
we used to, so it was cool to just hang out and talk. I got her the “College
Humor Guide”, a book put out by College Humor.com , which I guess she’s a fan
of. (I didn’t know that, so it was a happy accident.) She got me “The Kill Bill
Diary” by David Carradine, AKA: Bill. It’s the actually diary David Carradine
kept during the shooting of one of my favorite movies. Very cool, can’t wait to
read it.
Then I went home, had dinner, and we made Christmas cookies.
Making and decorating cookies is a tradition we’ve had for as long as I
remember. We usually do it on the Eve, but I have to work tomorrow, so we went
ahead and did them this evening. It was a lot of fun and we made some very odd
ones. Most of them are your usual Christmas cookie cut-outs, but we always seem
to get board with them and start making unusual shapes by hand. For instance, I
made a replica of my “geek jacket”, with sprinkles for my patches, and the
symbol of the Dharma Initiative. Of course, they never come out looking as good
as we intend. The geek jacket cookie looks like what it would have been like
had I started sewing patches onto a parka instead of a black hoody and the Dharma Initiative cookie is basically
unrecognizable unless you know what your looking for. Still, it’s the making
that’s fun.
And that’s just about it. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I have
to work, but we’re only running the first two sets, so I’ll be home early. They
may even let me go after starting the second set (instead of keeping me until
the end), so I may be home super early. That evening, we will go out and look
at lights. It should be very good this year. Just driving home from work, I’ve
seen a lot of good houses. Then we’ll come home and Dad will read “Twas the
Night Before Christmas” and then it’ll be off to bed so that “Santa will come”.
Jared and I will be up half of the night, of course. Another tradition that
goes back more-or-less our whole lives is that we sleep in the same room. I
can’t really remember how this started, but now that my room is on the opposite
end of the house, it ensures that no one sees anything before anyone else. Back
in the day, we would sleep in the same bed, but there comes an age were that’s
more creepy the cute. So, these days, I end up on the floor. Not the most
comfortable arrangement. It was perfect timing, too. When you’re young, you’re
too excited to sleep. As you grow older and become more mature, you’re better
able control you’re excitement and sleep better. It was at that point that I
started sleeping on the floor. So, I’m still not sleeping before Christmas just
like when I was little, simply for different reasons. But it shouldn’t be so
bad this year. To make room for the tree, we had to move one of the living room
chairs into Jared’s room and I’ll be sleeping in that.
It will most likely be Christmas before I post again. So,
until next time, I wish you all happy holidays and a very merry Christmas!
