Christmas!
Right off the top, I want to thank secret_santa, whomever they may be for the gift of 2 months paid LJ time and the 100 userpic add-on. It is greatly appreciated.
I had a pleasantly uneventful Christmas. We made a nice dinner (ham, sweet potatoes, and a very nice green salad), but didn't do much else. My gift to the family was $100 grocery money which didn't give people anything to open, but it was needed. My parents bought me a jacket, a scarf, and some fingerless gloves with the mitten piece that comes over the top. It was nice, but I suspect it will all be going back to Target next week. Two issues. The jacket is much too light to ever be useful for me, and the mitten part on the gloves is way too short for my freakishly long fingers (which are why I don't already own gloves). I think I'm just going to have to learn to knit and make my own, because even the stretchy "magic" gloves don't fit me in anything approaching a proper manner. The scarf is nice, and I might keep it. Other than that, my brother and sister-in-law gave me some bath stuff before they left for Arizona. It's your typical bath set, cherry blossom scent, nice if a little generic. And a friend from church gave me a Barnes & Noble gift card which will probably be used to buy the next couple of Dresden Files books. I know my sis is still sending me something, and I still have a gift to ship off to her as well.
The babies (and I suppose my brother, sister-in-law, and niece too, but who cares about them it's just the kids that are important) will be back on my birthday (January 3) and I think Mom, Dad, and I are taking their gifts too them then. Victoria's mom is coming to stay for a couple of months which means that I won't have to worry about babysitting which is nice and should dramatically increase the number of hours that I can spend doing people's taxes and actually making money myself.
I still haven't gotten around to watching most of my Christmas Presents to Myself. I did watch A Dog's Breakfast. It's hillariously twisted and I absolutely adore it. David Hewlett is one of my favorite humans. I still need to watch Poolhall Junkies and De-Lovely, but I burned the first season of Supernatural to disks for Dad and he's kind of co-opted the television to watch those. It is worth noting that the quality is pretty decent, even on our pretty good sized television. I wasn't expecting that, given that they're kind of grainy even on my laptop screen. I used DVD Flick to convert the .AVIs to MPEG-2 files and make menu files so that the disks can be played on a standard DVD player. I fit 6 episodes on a single-layer 4.3 GB disk and while there was absolutely some quality loss (Things were a little fuzzy), I've watched things that looked much worse on television. The menus are a little clunky and difficult to navigate, but it's a free, open-source program so I'm not complaining.
I had a pleasantly uneventful Christmas. We made a nice dinner (ham, sweet potatoes, and a very nice green salad), but didn't do much else. My gift to the family was $100 grocery money which didn't give people anything to open, but it was needed. My parents bought me a jacket, a scarf, and some fingerless gloves with the mitten piece that comes over the top. It was nice, but I suspect it will all be going back to Target next week. Two issues. The jacket is much too light to ever be useful for me, and the mitten part on the gloves is way too short for my freakishly long fingers (which are why I don't already own gloves). I think I'm just going to have to learn to knit and make my own, because even the stretchy "magic" gloves don't fit me in anything approaching a proper manner. The scarf is nice, and I might keep it. Other than that, my brother and sister-in-law gave me some bath stuff before they left for Arizona. It's your typical bath set, cherry blossom scent, nice if a little generic. And a friend from church gave me a Barnes & Noble gift card which will probably be used to buy the next couple of Dresden Files books. I know my sis is still sending me something, and I still have a gift to ship off to her as well.
The babies (and I suppose my brother, sister-in-law, and niece too, but who cares about them it's just the kids that are important) will be back on my birthday (January 3) and I think Mom, Dad, and I are taking their gifts too them then. Victoria's mom is coming to stay for a couple of months which means that I won't have to worry about babysitting which is nice and should dramatically increase the number of hours that I can spend doing people's taxes and actually making money myself.
I still haven't gotten around to watching most of my Christmas Presents to Myself. I did watch A Dog's Breakfast. It's hillariously twisted and I absolutely adore it. David Hewlett is one of my favorite humans. I still need to watch Poolhall Junkies and De-Lovely, but I burned the first season of Supernatural to disks for Dad and he's kind of co-opted the television to watch those. It is worth noting that the quality is pretty decent, even on our pretty good sized television. I wasn't expecting that, given that they're kind of grainy even on my laptop screen. I used DVD Flick to convert the .AVIs to MPEG-2 files and make menu files so that the disks can be played on a standard DVD player. I fit 6 episodes on a single-layer 4.3 GB disk and while there was absolutely some quality loss (Things were a little fuzzy), I've watched things that looked much worse on television. The menus are a little clunky and difficult to navigate, but it's a free, open-source program so I'm not complaining.