We’re inching ever closer to the end of the holiday season.  My sanity remains intact thus far, or at least as much as it was before the holidays.  One pseudo-Christmas and the New Year remaining, and then I can get back to the predictable drudgery of my normal schedule.

Friday was a generally unremarkable beginning to the long weekend.  We were let out of work early, and I spent the rest of the afternoon running errands;  Out to Microcenter to do a little last-minute shopping, swung by the Scooter shop to see if my helmet was in, (which it wasn’t… One of my co-workers had the rather innovative idea to paint my head with shoe polish in the meantime,) and dropped my car at the shop to get inspected.  After all that was done, I spent the rest of the evening putting together my new PC, which was my Christmas present from me.  It came together very nicely, if not exactly as planned.  For those who care, which I would imagine are very very few, I shall detail the specs of this super-duper new machine.  After much shopping, research, and gnashing of teeth, I decided on an Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard.  I’m sure most of you have already moved to the next paragraph so I won’t waste keystrokes on how and why I finally came to that arduous decision.  The rest of the components were a bit easier to select;  most were picked by the all-important “on sale” criterion.  For storage, it has two 320 gig SATA-II Seagate drives, plus an extra 80 gig SATA-I generously donated by Martin for some backup space.  For the rest, I went with an AMD 2 GHz dual-core processor, 2 gig of DDR2 RAM, a 512 MB Geforce 7600GS video card, and two 18x DVD burners.  All of this almost comical overkill is housed in a very nice Antec P180B case with a 500 watt Ultra power suppy.  I added a few other niceties also, like a built-in memory card reader and a CPU fan that rivals our home central air unit in both size and cooling capacity.  If I wake up tomorrow and decide I want to be a serious gamer or maybe a graphic designer, I’ll be ready to go in the PC department.  Until then, I will be the proud owner of a machine capable of the fastest game of solitaire in the neighborhood.  The only “glitches” encountered in the project were the hard-drive setup and the Linux install.  I had intended to set up the two 320’s in a raid 0 array, mostly because I like saying “raid array.”  It was acting a bit odd in that setup though, so I scrapped that part.  I had also originally planned to put a Linux install on the 80 gig drive, and dual-boot it with Windows, which would let me get rid of my Linux box that sits in the basement.  This turned into a several-hour debacle and a non-booting PC though, so I ended up giving up on that too.

If you managed to power through that stretch of tedium, that brings us to Saturday.  Most of the day was spent restoring stuff to the new PC, and tweaking it for optimal performance.  Which is to say, jacking it all up and then trying to get it back to working order.  Sigh.  After a generally wasted day, we crossed the river and hit the Martin’s Christmas party.  It was… Loud.  I have known quieter evenings at the Brooksider.  Oh well, all in the name of festivity.  I did enjoy lots of good food, including some almost-award-winning pork and a passable effort at a brisket.  I slunk off a bit early in the evening, leaving Donette to fend for herself in the gift exchange.

Sunday I woke up nice and early and threw a brisket on the smoker, in preparation for the Christmas dinner.  That was a pretty effective day-killer;  Cold-weather smoking takes a bit more attention I guess.  It ended up taking 12 hours, so not much else was accomplished during the day.  We had the grand idea to watch a few Christmas classics for evening entertainment, but were quickly reminded that they suck, so we went to bed.

Monday we got up bright and early and dug into all our gifts.  I got a new PC, some new kitchen knives, and a new shirt!!!  The surprise was somewhat tempered by the fact that I’d purchased all this for myself in the previous weeks, but it was exciting all the same.  (Santa did leave me some goodies in my stocking, but I can’t go into that for fear of having to share.)  The puppies got stockings full of toys, which they promptly destroyed, and Kane got a snoot full of catnip.  Donette got everything she wished for too, which was yet another year of marital bliss and a steam cleaner.  Score!!  Later in the afternoon we headed north (again…) for Christmas with Donette’s family.  After quite a large gift exchange we enjoyed an awesome BBQ dinner; Ribs, beef, and pork with all the sides.  Perhaps not exactly the traditional holiday fare, but I’ll take some ‘que any day.  My second overloaded plate was my undoing… I was thoroughly uncomfortable for the rest of the day, if in a contented kind of way.  I wound down the holiday down at the Brooksider, watching the football game.  Unfortunately, the sole Miami touchdown proved to be the undoing of my Fantasy Football season.  Although my team was on an 8-game winning streak, and favored by a whopping 28 points to win it all, every one of my players managed to pick this week to go on an uncharacteristic touchdown drought.  Arrrgghhhh!!!  Oh well, second place still pays better than last, I guess.