Christmas went well.  I woke at 1 AM, took a walk, read, shot people, and prepared for a new day.  About 7:30 AM I prepared breakfast, then spend 2 hours waiting for someone to wake up. I opted not to roust the house with slamdancing and assumed the scent of delectable breakfast meats would do.  Apparently sausage doesn’t waft as well as one would anticipate.  At 10 AM gifts were exchanged and by 10:02 my father and I were done and watched the love-match between my brother and his girlfriend take turns out-gifting one another.  Somewhere in the middle my brother got a really nice miter saw.  He doesn’t really use or need one, but should he, he’ll have a really nice one at the ready.  In other news I think my brother won Christmas, but I suspect him of cheating as Amanda pitched in on the tiebreaking decorative bench.

My single gift request for 2008 was a new speaker set for my computer and received the Logitech Z-5500 set.  I thought they’d be much smaller and found of the 55 lb package that 54 lbs was the sub woofer.  This fucker’s HUGE with a warning label cautioning not to use it within 2 feet of magnetically sensitive devices like pacemakers or credit cards (or simply ‘electronics’ as they put it).  It has an air intake for it’s turbocharger (I assume that’s what it is) big as my fist and fat heat-sink.  I’m confident I could sit on it while playing whale songs or something equally bassy and ride the thing like a hovercraft.  Alternatively, sneak it into Bestbuy and play Foreplay by Boston and permanently magnetize every CRT and erase every hard drive there.   I can now hear entire instruments that I could make out before like the “bones” in Great Big Seas Rant and Roar album or the wicked Bonnie Rait-inspired slide guitar opening to Appalachian Spring; true story.

My brother asked why I had the speakers on when I wore headphones while playing Team Fortress 2.  The answer: With the headphones, I can hear my enemies.  With the speakers, I can feel them.

We’re dog sitting for a friend of my brothers and said dog Judas has a few quirks.  Our dog Max needs a bit of a lead to catch things thrown at him whereas Judas could pluck a side-armed pistachio from the air.  Judas also has egregiously long claws that make walking for him something akin to secretaries that have to type with their palms because of having 4″ acrylic nails/talons.   He also has a tough time navigating stairs to the point where if he’s at the top and wants to go down he simply barks endlessly.  Today we got a lick of possibly why he does this: he built up such momentum going down that when he tried to brake at the bottom, his paws couldn’t catch (his claws were lifting his paw pads) that he smashed into the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

Engineering!

We’ve installed a doggy crash pad consisting of a bath mat and a pillow and he now ascends and descends stairs with abandon.

I encountered car trouble on the way home eventually resulting in my car dying in my drive, blocking 1/2 of it as an onslaught of costumed 20-somethings were to raid my house.  The rain thwarted our initial attempt at diagnosis so we simply opted to push the car out of the way.  During break in the rain, my brother dressed as dracula in a too small cape, his friend dresseda post-suicide Lehman Brothers Executive, my dad dressed as the world’s gayest looking pirate at me in my staff uniform dressed as…. an Ockanickon Staff member began pushing.  There were two impediments, the fact that the micro-meteorite impact zones of the moon look smooth compared to my driveway and that my dad was convinced that allowing the car to roll downhill would somehow help us push it more.  With a mighty heave my car was parked and we were cheered on by Marilyn Monroe (surprisingly helpful) as dreams of driving home inebriated slutty witches died in my chest.

I went food shopping the other day and came home to a bag of chocolate morsels on the counter top.

Ryan: We found the chocolate you were hiding.
Me: I wasn’t hiding anything.  I used those the last time I made cookies.
Ryan: You mean the ones for my birthday?
Me: Yeah (his birthday’s in May), they’ve probably been in there open ever since.
Ryan: Hm… That would explain the texture.  And why I have to go so bad.
Me: 6 months of a heavily sugared food left open in a dank cabinet frequented by fearless mice, I bet you do.

caveat eater

One of the benefits of perpetual sobriety is having crystal clear memories of what your friends do while inebriated.

This incident is the delightful intersection of alcohol and technology. My brother has used Yahoo! Mail for years but has hit up against its storage limit and wanted to switch to something, after two 40s I convinced him and he tried registering but was stopped by the CAPTCHA which he fudged a key and had to try again.  Each got progressively harder until he had something like “o0Ol|1q9p” or another of its ilk that so frustrated me when I played Nintendo.

Good to know that Google has systems in place not only to stop spam-bots but also moderates the BAC of those using its services.