A good holiday

Posted on | December 26, 2008 | No Comments

On Christmas eve Mom, Dad, Bryan, and I enjoyed a nice steak dinner, had a few bottles of wine, and ended up playing on the Wii together way into the wee hours of the morning. We started off watching A Christmas Story until the cable went out, then I hooked up the Wii and off to the bowling lanes we went. After a few rounds and another bottle of wine we moved onto Tiger Woods Golf and spent more the next hour or so trying to figure out what in the hell we were doing while in a drunken haze. It was a lot of fun, especially when Dad broke out the tequilla …

The next morning, after a breakfast cooked by Mom and Dad, fueled by copious amounts of coffee and water, we all sat around the tree and exchanged our gifts. Then it was time for me to get to work. I had hooked up the new media system the day before but had just left it loose until I made sure everything worked. Now it was time for me to do the professional install part and make all the cabling look nice and pretty and disappear into the background as much as possible. That took several hours … the OCD in me came out a bit and I think it ended up nice. Somewhere in the middle of that I had started a rib roast and after three and a half hours of slow cooking we all sat down to another nice meal. It’s amazing how much beef I have had in the last few days! Typically I eat chicken nearly everyday at home so this has been quite a treat.

Today we all went out to the outlet malls and did a bit of shopping followed up by dinner at the “Honkey Bucket”. I had never heard that phrase before but apparently that’s slang for Cracker Barrel … that’s so wrong, but so damn funny … lol

Tomorrow I am hoping to meet up with some old friends before heading back to the big D on Sunday. It will most likely be a day of playing things by ear but hopefully I’ll see at least two of them. I already managed to have lunch with a good buddy from high school on Christmas eve and I was able to find all my yearbooks and a slew of old pictures, so all in all I have managed to accomplish most of what I set out to. From here on out whatever comes is like icing on the cake.

Ok kids I hope you have had at least half the fun I have had this Christmas and I’ll see ya’.

Category: personal

Gazun-tike …

Posted on | December 23, 2008 | No Comments

Today was a good day in the “bury” as a friend called it … lol You know, I had forgotten just how small this town is?! It’s amazing living in a big city like Dallas and coming back here and looking for the things I am so accustomed to, like multiple Starbucks. But that’s cool, it’s always good to get back to your roots and come down to earth after being away for a year.

This afternoon I climbed into my parents attic and besides sneezing my ass off I found my high school yearbook, old fraternity keep sakes, and a small bag of pictures I didn’t remmeber. It made me laugh for a while lookng back at all the quiet innocent boy pictures of me and seeing just how far I have come. I found quite a few pictures of old girlfriends and a few special pictures of a certain friend at her prom walk. That made me really laugh. It was so wild how I was absolutely infatuated at that age. The post card I never sent to her from Mexico really spelled it out too. What a lush I was … lol

Tonight I spent a few hours working on a web site for a dear friend’s child. It made me feel good to give something back and hopefully help someone along in their education about all things web related. The site isn’t my best work but it’s a start for them and I hope it stokes a fire inside to keep going in other ways of learning.

I also cooked and cleaned for my parents tonight. I started at about 11:30am today by pulling and prepping some spare ribs, and then cooking them for about six hours at a very low temperature. The rub I used turned out to be a bit more spicy than I intended and I had to rinse off one rack for my brother, but the other one turned out pretty good when combined with a nice spicy barbeque sauce. As always I tried to make sure I was the one cleaning up and giving Mom a break too. I guess you could say I tried to be a good kid, unlike the time spent in my childhood years. I’m not sure I was a complete hellion but when I hit college it was quite a mess. I suppose I have always felt a desire to redeem myself somehow.

So now after a few bottles of wine with the parents I am finishing up some web work and prepping for the new home theater system I will be installing for my parents tomorrow. I have always been the guy who enjoyed reading technical manuals so this is fun for me. It’s a small system and relatively easy to install, but I want to make sure it looks nice and OCD with all the cables labeled and velcroed. Sometimes the ADD/OCD thing just gets going … lol Oh well, It’s all good.

Ok kids have a great Christmas eve, and remember, it’s not always all about you.