Holiday Vacation

So I must say that I've had a fairly relaxing time of it this past week and a few days. I always look forward to the end of the year time as it's a good way for me to relax and just get rid of all of the built up stress from the past year. It's a very cathartic time for me.

The highlights of my time off have been:

-Spent time with Rabbit last friday backing up her yearly Gingerbread cookies. We ended up calling them Wookiee cookies this year due to... well... I was helping and they were brown vaguely wookiee-like shapes. =) We ended up baking up ~730 of the darn things. It was very impressive. We've got all the kinks worked out so we can do it all again next year. I'm SOOOO looking forward to it. It was great to spend time with her, too. I really enjoyed it.

- Spending time playing DragonQuest VIII. I love how it really is the essence of a classic console RPG with some REALLY nice additions. Whomever came up with the idea that when your party got wiped out to allow you to be rez'd back at the last church you saved at (with a loss of half of your on hand cash) instead of seeing the dreaded GAME OVER and subsiquent loss of HOURS of playtime... They need to get a massive bonus for that. I'm onlt 12 hours in for having played it all week, but it's a great game. I love the graphics and animations. Plus the voice acting is just hilarious. yangus r0x0rs!

-Had a "surprise" call Tuesday morning from the fence company. They were supposed to call me a week in advance of them replacing my fence but one of their teams ended up with time that morning so they were like "hi... is it okay if we do your fence today? Good they will be there in 5 mins." Needless to say I have a totally new fence. It looks REALLY good. I'm very impressed with it and very happy with how it turned out. I think choosing six foot all the way around really helped the yard end up feeling like a yard.

Now that I've got the fence replaced and will be getting the heat pump replaced (it's starting to die too... Ahhh... the joys of home ownership) it's time to try and figure out what my next "long term" upgrade options for the house will be. I think I've got an idea but am still working out the kinks on it.

- Got spend C'mas eve over at my friend Alex's parents house. He's someone I knew from college and was my first real GM for D&D. I had played D&D before then but never really "for real"... and never in a contiguous campaign like we had on Quillanor. It was a fun time. They made enough food to last for the whole year, so everyone was stuffed. And Alex, Mike, and Myself ended up downstairs to play the two new games I had purchased (Deflexion and Polarity. Two sorta science-y type of games) as well as Soccer on the PS2. We capped the night off by doing the yearly C'mas eve/Midnight drinks and snacks at Amphora. Very impressive and fun night overall.

- And the rest of the time is pretty much spent sleeping, or just cleaning up around the house, more sleeping, going over to see Evil and check out how he's doing, eating food, catching up on my comic books, sleeping, etc, etc.

I hope everyone else out there had a fun and enjoyable Holiday time. Now to get ready for the New Years Eve bash that the Hobbit is planning over at my place. She always says that I have a choice in the matter... But we all know that I really don't. =)

.unagwa