Greetings one and all from the land of vacation. Everything is muy bueno here, what can I say. If vacations all went this well, well then I would take one permanently. Nonetheless, here is the update on how things are.
I got to do the family get together on Christmas Eve, which is usually a good time anyway. In the annual gift exchange my grandfather had my name and he got me junk food. I know, your thinking what kind of gift is that, but you didn't read my list very carefully then. Groceries are always on the list, so those goodies come in handy as well. He also got me some lottery tickets, but my luck with them is never very good. I think I won $4, with just one winner out of 5 tickets.
The really cool thing was that my uncle called from over in Iraq during the festivities (even though it was 4am Iraq time). I got to talk to him for a few minutes to see how things were. He seemed to be about as upbeat as you could be there, especially since he has already lost a buddy over there, and one of the guys he worked with was almost killed in a rocket attack, but the rocket didn't explode. Right now he is stationed about 90 miles west of Baghdad, in a mostly Sunni populated area and things have been calmer since the election, but by no means are they safe. He is due to end his tour in August and it can't get here soon enough.
I have some Christmas piccys that I will post when I get back in the friendly confines of my own computer. Right now I am still very much in the middle of vacation, and there is no need to hurry back.
For Christmas, I got my laptop (woohoo!!!!), now I just need to set up internet access with it and start doing real work on it. For the time being, I am just using it to play pinball, though I did start ripping music off of cds onto it, and I did some other minor things with it, like set up the password protection, and the firewall that was preinstalled. Apparently it has voice recognition too, but I didn't bring my microphone from home, so I can't start training it on my voice yet.
The final results from football are in. Starting from the very top, in the yahoo league I was in, I thought I was done a few weeks ago, but they had a consolation bracket for the 5th-8th place teams during the regular season. It was a free league and there was no money on the line, yet still I went through the effort of fielding a team even in the consolation games. I won the consolation bracket so I finished the year at 8-8. In the EA Sports league, I had cut the deal I mentioned earlier, at least I think I did, where we would just split the money rather than worry about the final game. Turned out to be a good move for me, because I lost in the final game 107-101, so I finished the season with a 10-5-1 mark, but will be splitting the combined first and second place monies plus an additional 30 bucks. And lastly in the myfantasyleague.com league, I won the league regular season points title, and I ended up first in the playoffs as well, winning the last game 102-92, making my total winnings in that league $455.
While on my vacation, I have been enjoying the trappings of good home cooked food as well. Some of the fine foods I have eaten over the holidays include ham, stuffed pork chops, stuffed chicken, pickled eggs, bagels, this killer apple pie my aunt made with caramel drizzled across the top of the pie crust, baked potatoes, corn on the cob, and much more. I will gain probably ten pounds on this week alone, cause we haven't even hit New Years Eve yet and the hot dogs and sauerkraut and I know my mom wants to make lasagna yet this week.
I would pontificate on something newsworthy, but I have made it a point not to read the newspapers all that much. I catch small bits and pieces, but it is too much like work for me to get all excited about on vacation. It's one of the advanatges about being out in the sticks, people care alot less about what is in the New York Times or the Washington Post here. It is more about how their lives are rather than someone else editorializing about what they should or shouldn't be pissed off about. Sometimes kids, simple is good and ignorance is indeed bliss.
Instead I have started reading David McCullough's 1776. I already had read his book on John Adams (and what a great read that was), so I am looking forward to spending some quality time reading this book.
I am two pogo badges away from having this entire year's album done. THose challenges should be coming out sme time today, with us having a week to finish them. Pogo also issued three premium albums with badges that you can work on at anytime, rather than waiting for the new ones to come out every Wednesday. I bought myself a set of them (it was all of 15 dollars), and bought my mom a set as well to go with the account that I started for her last Christmas. Now we are juggling computer time to get badges done. I had a head start on her, as I got mine before Christmas and I didn't buy hers until Christmas Eve, so I have the smallest album done, it contained all of 4 badges plus the bonus badge for completing it. Right now I am closing in on the 3 million token mark, too bad I can't win anything in there cash wise. The only things I have won so far are screen savers and wallpaper, and it has been a while since I even won that. Anyone looking for me in pogo, the handle is menelik6288. Your trivia question is there are two parts to that handle, menelik and 6288. Who is menelik? And what is 6288? Good luck and figuring that out, I've got all vacation for potential guesses.
On that note, I am off to see if the new challenges have been posted yet. If not, then I will just work on the premium albums. Take care all, hopefully the holidays went as well as mine seem to be going.
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