Christmas Recap

Well Christmas has come and gone but the day lives on in the form of machine gun fire and grenade reverberations emanating from the basement. Carlos got his hallowed Xbox 360 for Christmas and all is right in the world. The basement is complete, there's a big TV down there and when Carlos comes up for food and water he resembles Gollum and mumbles about his precious. For those of you that have lived through or heard about my obsession with the Terror Drome it was kind of like that. One Christmas when I was younger I had my eye set on King Cobra's hive of villainy; the Terror Drome. I began my propaganda campaign around Thanksgiving by mentioning at least daily that I really wanted the Terror Drome. As time progressed I began to cut out pictures of the Terror Drome from the Sunday circulars. I would lovingly stare at a caress my cut outs each morning as I ate my crazy toast (Mom's specialty) before school. I would take any opportunity to tell anyone listening, and increasingly those who weren't, about the Terror Drome's many features and its place in any healthy well adjusted boy's life. Terror Drome, Terror Drome, Terror Drome.

Well all I can say is karma came back in the form of the Xbox 360 and Halo 3 tenfold because this my friends is the digital age. Carlos bested me in every category. Sunday circular cutouts - bleh - how about getting emails from your son with links to videos that some kid in Texas took of a Halo 3 online death match where he single handedly disarmed a Covenant elite and used the Warhammer to take out the whole other team - yeah! How about checking out Halo 3 wallpapers on his laptop that change everyday while getting the play by play of everything that is happening in the shot including background stories on each of the characters and the landscape. I don't know my wife's cellphone number but I know all about "The Flood". I can't locate a word in the dictionary without reciting the entire alphabet, but I know which guns you can dual-wield.

But I found, as I'm sure my parents and older sisters did, that it's all worth it in the end. He was totally stoked and today we got Xbox Live hooked up so he could battle it out online. This was a biggy for me, not because of the hazards found online (Microsoft does a lot of work keep Live kid-friendly) but because I knew this would usher in one more dimension of crap I'd have to fix when it breaks. We had our first experience with this as we were getting things ready and found out how poorly Microsoft put together the Xbox Live setup. I had to lower our router's security settings after finding out that they flat out lied on their packaging and said they supported a mode they do not, and we also had to jump through hoops to create an account. The whole thing was very frustrating and it is the perfect example of how Microsoft has stretched themselves too thin in my opinion. Drop the iPod wannabe Zune, drop the videogame stuff you started to compete with Sony, drop the performance crippling graphical glitz in Vista so you can compete with OS X, and write some decent software! Wow, sorry .... if I keep up the techie rants I'm going to lose my half a dozen readers ....

Anyways, Carlos was quite pleased and Jack is too young to do anything but he did do quite well on the trip to Carrie's parent's house. I got the Rosetta Stone Spanish version which I'm excited about. I had been talking about it for literally 3 years but was always turned off by the steep price tag. Carrie splurged and got it for me though (along with some other goodies, one of which I using right now to type this :)).

Well now that I've covered all the material possessions, I can talk about all the time we spent talking about Aunt Sarah and how she isn't spending the holidays with her family because of the commitment she made. I'm sure we weren't the only ones whose mind she was on. We love you Sarah and hope you had a Merry Christmas. Do you need any more Garbanzo beans? How about some Chili stuff?? Have you fed the entire Army yet??? :)