I decided that I better go ahead and throw something up here today, lest you all think that I died a horrible death and was not able to slap together a post in the last week.
The Christmas Holiday is always a pretty hectic time in these parts, especially this year. I had ordered a gift for the wife through amazon.com (which is not linked to or capitalized because I am a bit pissed at them right now). A couple of days later, I got an email saying that the item was ‘delayed in shipping’, but not to worry it would still be here in time. Of course the next email that I received from them said that it was out of stock, and wouldn’t be getting here at all. That sort of thing really sucks. Especially if you are like me, and don’t want to set foot in a department store anywhere between Thanksgiving and New Years, but I really had to in this case.
The item in question was not even any sort of a ‘white elephant’, it was just the ‘Titans’ expansion to Age of Mythology. While I was not able to find the expansion at the local Wal-Mart, I was able to find the gold edition of the original game, which included the expansion, and that was what I bought (it did cost a lot more than the expansion, but I needed it at that point). This is where doing your planning at least a couple of weeks before Christmas could really have helped me.
Angry Amazon stories aside, Christmas went pretty well. I did buy the latest Harry Potter DVD for my wife, while she instructed her Parents to buy the same for me, so we now have two copies of it (I kept my receipt just in case something like that were to happen, so it is not that big a deal). We all seemed to enjoy the day, it was a pretty good Christmas.
My wife gifted me the second ‘Roller Coaster Tycoon’ (well, the ultra, mega, version, with all of the expansions) game, which has been draining away most of my waking hours. The second RCT game has gotten rid of a lot of the issues that I was having with the first, but it has left a lot of them as well. I just enjoy the second version more since they give you scenarios where you don’t have to make any money at all, don’t have to have a good park rating, just have to have exciting coasters, and you don’t have to pay anything to build them. That was the whole reason I wanted to play the game in the first place, I wanted to build gnarly roller coasters and see if anyone would go on them. I did have a lot of deaths on my first couple of attempts, but who knew that you actually needed to put brakes at the end of the run?
The Christmas haul also had some socks and underwear. While, ten years ago, I would have hated to see such items as Christmas gifts, this year I was totally stoked. The wife managed to find some of the underwear that I failed to find in both an internet search, and a local store search. Add to that that the wife has been searching for said underwear for several weeks with the holiday approaching, and never found them. Imagine my excitement when I opened a package to find 8 pair of underwear! I may never have to buy underwear again! Well, that is certainly not true, but I am starting to think that, since the underwear are so hard to find, I may only wear them on special occasions from this day forward. Of course that is the type of bold statement that you could make if you weren’t married. For some reason, women seem to think that you should be wearing underwear every waking moment. Unless, of course, they are horrible sluts, in which case they might get confused if you offer them underwear.
One more thought for today, I have recently started to read the book “The DaVinci Code”, and I find the first few chapters to be a tad boring. I know that it has glowing critical acclaim and all, but it is (so far) seeming to be some sort of a history lesson. I am sure that there will be action in it at some point, but for now I am reading it solely because it has so much buzz about it. Perhaps every mundane factual mention in the first few chapters will come into play in the end, I don’t know. I will say that it has me intrigued enough that I want to to turn the page to see what happens next, and that is the hallmark of a good novel. I sure hope it starts to happen soon though, else I might just start to think that whatever is going to happen will happen whether or not I am reading about it..