Things were cool here. We had a rather full house. As was mentioned before, Sheri's parents, brother and grandparents were here as well as Ginger & William. We had a nice, relaxing day. Opened some presents and had a tasty ham dinner. Some high points on the loot include a couple new wii games (Sheri & I each got each other one: she got me Mario Galaxy and I got her Okami - plus wii points for the Secret of Mana and some other games yet to be decided upon), some *awesome* autographed stuff (the Brobdingnagian Bards' newest record and the Gamers II which was purchased for me at gencon this year - neither of which i've had time to view/listen to yet) and some spiffy lens filters for my camera lens. Sheri's dad is thrilled about his new wii (that we and her mom & brother got for him) too, which is cool.
Since then we've been hanging out with our company - generally playing a lot of Wii and a lot of cards. Sheri's grandparents left on friday morning. Yesterday was an awesome 73 degrees. I took Sheri's dad & brother out to watauga lake since they wanted to go fishing. I walked around with my camera for the afternoon. I didn't get anything awesome, but a few decent pics i think. We took her parents to Misaki last night - which they said they really liked.
Today we had church and went to Toby's for lunch. Just relaxing since then. Sheri & her mom just left to go see Edie about some beading stuff.
Tomorrow is back to work as usual - through wednesday anyway. I think my parents & sister are supposed to come in tuesday or wednesday - so we'll have an overfull house yet again. I'm really looking forward to seeing them again.
Anyway, we've had a lot going on lately - not too much of which makes for good reading though.
Last thursday I finally finished the wardrobe we bought over the summer - it looks pretty good and functions wonderfully. It's nice to have something other than the cheap wal-mart dressers we had before.
Had a good game session / birthday party on saturday. That was fun. I got presents! Heh. Also, some of my friends got together to make some game-inspired snacks. We had Gnome Knuckles and Pixie Puree and a giant Cheese Ooze and treeant branches and all kinds of geeky goodness. The game was lots of fun too. It was a bit combat-heavy, but it makes up for the last session where there was none.
Sheri's choir had their Christmas Cantata on sunday - it went pretty well, i thought. We spent most of the rest of the day cleaning up in preparation for our lot-o-christmas-company.
Speaking of, sheri's parents and brother arrived early monday morning and it wasn't long before they'd fired up the wii to feed their bowling addiction. Hehe. Her grandparents arrived later that evening. We are having a full house, but it's fun. I'm excited to have people here for the holidays instead of traveling. It's a nice change of pace.
My camera flash came in the mail yesterday too! Much fun is had! I've been discovering all kinds of things with bouncing light off ceilings and walls. I've taken some really nice, natural-looking shots with it already. I have *also* taken a few accidentally lit pictures with some rather bizarre lighting when i didn't realize the flash head was pointed some odd way. Anyway, i'm loving this thing. It's such an amazing improvement over the little built-in pop-up.
Also, i got to hang out with Sam a bit yesterday. Good times.
Also, also - i need to finish my christmas shopping today. Yes, i know i'm way late. It's hard to find a good time to go when sheri's not with me.
So yesterday was my birthday. It was pretty much a normal day in most respects. Since Sheri had choir that evening, we really didn't plan much. I did finally put a clear-coat on the wardrobe that's out in our garage (it's almost done!).
It was a pretty good day though - I got phone calls from both of my parents and my brother and tons of birthday messages from friends. :-)
We're gonna have a gaming session saturday though (mayhem!) and i've heard a rumor that some aspects of the evening's festivities may pertain to my birthday.
This is part of a screenshot I took of our company's new site design while it was still in the testing phase.
Matt told me that if I didn't get him a staff picture to put up soon, he was going to do something drastic. Unfortunately, this wasn't exactly the motivator he might have hoped for. In fact, I would have preferred this image to be left in place.
The laptop my boss gave me to use has been sadly outdated and a bit flaky for quite some time (occasionally, the keyboard will stop reporting certain keys - namely, the enter key. inconvenient, that). I don't use a lappy for work terribly often, but there are occasions that I really do need one. There are other occasions when i'd just really *like* one.
Knowing this, for something that resembled a cross between a business-expense equipment upgrade and a christmas bonus, they let me pick out a replacement for the aging dell lappy.
So now I have a new Macbook (Awesomeness!!), and Sheri got to inherit Moro, the old laptop - which, despite its faults, is still kicking and will be cool for her. Like she said 'old lappy is better than *no* lappy'.
I've added some code to the site to play with the isight camera on this thing too - you may occasionally see a 'penguin-cam' beneath the sushi-cam. Not that you *want* to, but just because I can.
In keeping with my tradition of naming gadgets after anime characters, Kotoko is named after a minor character from Chobits
I got this new spiffy gadget on saturday when we went out to dinner with Kedrick & Addie. They're a lot of fun - it's too bad we only get to see them once a year. We do have a standing invitation to come stay with them for a weekend or something if we get a chance. They talked about having us come up sometime to hang out. Maybe go to the cincinnati zoo or something. :-)
I gave them a framed 8x10 print of one of my pictures as a christmas present, and they really seemed to think it was really neat - which was great. *I* was really proud of it, but wasn't sure what other people might think. In related news, i'm going to be compiling a 2008 Portfolio gallery of what i'd consider my 'best work' around the end of the year.
Shortly after Ginger's birthday extravaganza, I started trying to think of something fun I could do for Sheri. Since her favorite board game is Ticket To Ride, I decided that would be a good thing to get together & play. I invited a bunch of friends over and we played a large, team-game adaptation of the game - using two different versions at the same time. It actually worked really well, and I think we want to try playing it that way again sometime (when we have enough time to actually finish). Going for something like a themed party, I also got a gingerbread train kit that I made for a sort of birthday cake... ...this was in addition to a turtle pie and a bunch of other snacks we had.
It was lots of fun, and Sheri had a great time. :-)
~PS
EDIT: Picture added to this post: all of the Ticket to Ride games we have, two of which were added last night.
New Xtreme thursday! Now with 53% more work, 78% more stress and 110% more suck!!!
Actually, it wasn't that bad... ...just the kind of day that seems to leave me a little dazed. This week's been pretty blah overall, really. Oh well. I get to go christmas/birthday shopping for Sheri and to pick up some pictures i had printed tonight though...so that should make for more fun. I also need to do a little more planning for Sheri's party on monday too.
On "Midsummer Lull"
On "Midsummer Lull"
On "OotSCon 2010"
On "Return from AR 2010"
On "A Weekend in Athens Grease"