A Piece in My Mind

Christmas

Well another Christmas has come and gone already. I have to admit I'm a little sad to see it go. I am feeling a little guilty today after reading a couple friends' blogs about how their Christmas wasn't so great. It makes me even more thankful for having such a great family even if they pick on me a lot.

Marty & I left pretty early Saturday morning, about 10. We ran into nasty fog at about Sparta, which is only 30 min. into the 2+ hour drive. SO things were a little slow going and definately neveracking. I'm not the best driver in bad weather, too tense I'd say. Once we got to the city limits of Stevens Point things were decent. We got home and had some lunch. My brother needed to get his dog some food so we took off to Fleet Farm. I needed a neck pillow for my trip to Hawaii, so I went along. No neck pillow and at first no dog food. The guy went in the back and found 5 bags, Ian got 2. Yipee food for Keenan!!! We stopped at Target to look for a pillow and found one. I parused the Christmas decor and gift wrap section to see if anything was on clearance yet, but it wasn't. We finally used the last of our Christmas wrapping paper that we got on clearance 4 years ago. Then back to the house. The family hung out the rest of the afternoon and I honestly don't remember how we passed that time.

At about 6 it was time for Christmas Eve dinner of creamy potato soup. Yummy! Then we did our traditional drive around town to look at Christmas lights. Ian drove since he has the biggest car by far. Dad was in the front and Mom, Marty and I crammed in the back seat. The seats are leather so Marty thought it would be funny to push me over a bunch of times when I was trying to get buckled up. We saw lots of great lights this year and us three backseat people were feeling silly so we clapped and wooped at all the good ones. We even made a trip down to the Bamberg household to see what they had up and we were quite impressed. Then we headed back home to open presents. I have some how become the offical gift passer outer despite knocking the tree over back in like 1998 and breaking my Dad's Packer ornament. My parents did spot the tree when I went behind it to get the one last gift back there. So once everything was passed out we each took turns opening a gift as we went around the livingroom. Now normally this isn't a super long process, but then again we normally will go in together to get one big gift for my parents, but not this year. So they each had a couple gifts from me, Ian, and Marty. It ended up taking 3 hours to open them all, we even had to have an intermission for potty breaks. My mom always wraps sveral gifts and puts them in a larger box and then wraps that to make it a little more difficult to figure out what we got. This is especially important since we are big on Christmas lists. Ian decided to do a twist on this and wraped my gifts in a box with my Dad's gifts to see if I would think that he hadn't gotten me anything and cry. Well I wasn't fooled for a second, actually I hadn't even noticed yet that there wasn't anything for me from him. PLus like I really would have thought he didn't get me anything. After he told me of his plan I told him that I still have the recites for gifts so I could just return his. He also wrapped packing tape all around boxes for Dad and me. It was annoying, but not as bad as when Erika and Liz did the same thing but with duct tape, now that hurt.

Best gifts I gave were the Sims 2 to my mom (I haven't gotten any questions on how to play it yet surprisingly) and a new short leather jacket to Marty. I told him once he took the tags off he couldn't exchange it and he took those off right away so he must like it. He looks really good in it too, I'm going to have to watch out for all the other ladies now. :) I got a lot of great gifts this year. The most exciting one's were a very nice Packer zip hoodie from my parents, a Grey Eye Glances CD that's been on my list for oh 2 years now from them as well. Ian got me the tenth season of FRIENDS on DVD. I'm excited about that one because I was really upset that they have come out with a special wood boxed set and when I opened the DVD they have an offer to get the box for it for $10 plus $10 shipping, so now I can have that. *Warning Geeky Moment Coming* Marty got me Photoshop CS1 and an upgrade to CS2 plus a 20.5" widescreen LCD monitor that can rotate to portrait mode for my computer. It's super cool and has really great resolution. Once we got all the settings right it gave me a whole bunch more desktop space for working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. Plus it makes my Sims world bigger and look way better! Can you tell I'm excited about it? Man, what a geek!!!

Christmas day we got up and had Christmas dinner at about 11. My mom makes the best Christmas dinner ever, such great stuff. Sweet salad and the special mashed potatoes, how can you go wrong? After lunch it was time to pack up and head back to La Crosse. We made a quick stop at the Bamberg's so Patty could take a look at a jacket we're printing Dad's Computers on for her to make sure she liked it. The thing that sucks the most about being all grown up is several of my friends were back in Point for the Holidays but I was there for such a short time that I didn't have time to see them. It would have been nice especially since one of them I haven't seen since April of 2001. I do read their blogs, so at least I can sort of keep up that way, but it's not the same. Gwyn keeps bugging me to have a 4th of July party, so maybe then. So we got home and got my new monitor hooked up and I watched the Packer game. Then we watched Batman Begins which Marty got from my parents for Christmas. It was Really good.

Monday we got up and headed to Dexter, MN to Marty's parents'. We got there early and Marty started working on trying to get them set up with Direct TV. He thought he could use their Dish Network dish and ended up spend about 2 hours trying to get it to work. Finally he had his dad put up our old Direct TV dish and it worked right away. I held my tongue and didn't say a thing about it. We ate another Christmas dinner in the meantime. Then it was time for presents. THey gave me a pair of fleece Packer mittens which are really cute and they gave us each some money to use on our Honeymoon. PLus they always give us lottery tickets to scratch off. I was the big winner this year with $15, Marty got $2. They wanted to switch the TV in the kitchewn and the one in the living room, so Marty and I grabbed the one in the LR and his dad grabbed the one in the K. I ened up pulling a muscle in my my right wrist so I'm dealing with pain in my mouse hand which is not good considering what I do. Marty got all the stuff for Direct TV switched over to his parents. To make a very long story short we ended up without service or recievers we could use to set-up a new account for us. When we got back to La Crosse we went out to Best Buy and were going to get an HD reciever until we found out that in order to get the rebate for it we have to sign up for the HD service which is $10.99 a month. THat would be fine, but we don't have an HD TV yet. He was just going to get that one so we wouldn't have to buy it later. Anyway, so we got a regular cheap one and one that has a built in DVR since we can record two things at the same time with that one and it was free after rebate. We went home and got everything set-up and working excpet the local channels. Luckily Marty had them on the phone and it turns out that you need a second dish for those so we have an appointment for them to come set that up next week. Well then Marty couldn't get the Replay to control the reciever in the livingroom and he called Replay and they said that Direct TV made it so they couldn't in the new models. So he had to call Direct TV again and they got the old reciever to work again so we could use it. It was SO much fun, but I think everything is finally in order. We just have to figure out what we are going to do about internet now because we have that through our cable provider so we have to have local channels through them and the other service we want isn't ready yet. SO do we switch to DSL and get tyed into a year contract or stick with the cable, pay extra and hope that the service we want is available soon?

posted by Ziese52 @ 9:29 AM