Simply Had A Wonderful Christmastime

Had a great day today with family. We exchanged presents, had a great meal, sat and talked--and though it started at a ridiculously early time--it was fun.

Lyndsay's parents gave me a terrific iPod dock/shelf stereo system called the Logitech Audiostation. It's not as small or pretty as the Bose sounddock...but it can pump some serious sound for a unit as small as it is.

I also got some shirts in my ACTUAL shirt size, a medium-tall. Lyndsay had some hilarious stories of making people put the clothes on the mannequin in the store and taking a poll to decide what would be best for me. I can just imagine how that went down...

Lyndsay got the Bowflex Select-Tech Dumbells. Have you seen these things? They're really neat. And now we can work out while we watch TV. This can only have good results...either I'll watch more TV so I can work out more...or I'll watch TV less because I don't want to work out, thus I quit wasting time. Win win!

And she also got a Palm Pilot as an early birthday present. She's very excited...it keeps her calendar, and it can hold little nursing programs like drug guides and coding charts. For her usual technology resistant self, she's pretty excited about this one.

And somehow, I got four flashlights. I'm still trying to figure it out...but in the event of a power outage, I'm totally set.

Merry Christmas!

It's 7:00 AM. And Christmas is over. Par for the course here for Christmas at Lyndsay's family. After all, we started at 5:45 AM. You can't just sit around and let the holiday go by, right?!

It makes me think back to when I was a kid and I used to force my family up at the crack of dawn...my poor uncle Joe was used to sleeping until about 11:00 or so, just because of his work schedule. This morning I felt a little bad for all those years of forcing him up 4 or 5 hours before he was used to getting up, just to watch me run around and yell and get stuff. Sorry Uncle Joe!

Alright...I can smell Christmas Breakfast cooking, so I think I'm going to go see what we've got...

Merry Christmas!

Happy Birthday, Dad!

In all of the Christmas hubbub, it's easy to get so caught up in the spirit of the season that I forget an important day...today is my dad's birthday! Yup. He's a Christmas Eve baby.

For as long as I can remember, to celebrate Dad's birthday we've had a party on Christmas eve night. It's always the same people...three families come over...between the four of us families, we have about 22 people total. And it happens every year, without fail. There were a few years where our family observed Christmas in different cities (in different states!) on different days. But you can always count Dad's Birthday Party on Christmas Eve at the Crews house in Greenville, SC.

For the last 20 years at least (that's as many years as I can remember), all of the kids have gotten together and hung out for the night. I always figured there would come a year when someone wouldn't be able to make it to the party...but each year, everyone always made it back in time. Then recently a couple of us got married and the group grew. The picture above is from last year's party.

So this year, for the first time, one of the original six of us kids will not be there. And the worst part is: it's me! It's very sad to know that everyone will be singing "Happy Birthday" and swapping gifts and catching up and that I'll miss it all.

All a part of growing up, I suppose.

I got a B!

I've been taking classes at MTSU to get my prerequisites for the CPA exam. It's been going pretty well. This past semester, though, I ended up in an accounting class I can only describe as "stinkin' hard." It was pretty apparent early on that my streak of A's would be broken by this class...the 55 I made on my first test was the initial tip-off. Luckily he curved that test 15 points (apparently I wasn't much worse than anyone else) so I ended up with a C-.

The semester went on, and it was more of the same. I had a pretty solid test average between 70 and 75. So when it came time to check my grade after I took the final, I didn't really want to since I was so sure it'd be bad news.

I've made 4 C's in my life. Each one was a traumatic experience. One was in Keyboarding in 7th grade from a lady who was possessed by a demon. And then two more were in 9th and 12th grade English. Of course...all of those "C's" were 85's, which was considered a C at my middle and high school. I went off to college to learn that an 85 was actually a very respectable B. Then my final C was in an Economics class at Samford that I had no business being in as a freshman. I was actually pretty thankful for that one.

So as you can tell by my obviously traumatic scarring, I don't handle mediocrity very well.

So I managed to avoid checking my grade for about a week. Finally Lyndsay made me check it yesterday morning...

...and...

...I GOT A B!! I'm not too sure how, but I think it has to do with homework grades, because I always did my homework though my professor never clearly explained how that figured in to my grade. Apparantly it was at least 10%...because that's what I needed to get up to a B.

So yay. Bring on another semester. I'm ready!

The Rockettes

Today we celebrated holiday cheer in a new way...Lyndsay's grandparents, parents, her and I went to see the Radio City Rockettes perform at the grand ole opry. It was quite the show. Hours of kicking legs, dancing people in animal suits, and a big finale of a live nativity, including camels, donkeys, and sheep...right there on stage! That's right folks. Living barnyard animals, right there on the stage. There was one sheep that was so still that I thought he was just a fake sheep they put on the stage to save the budget. But after holding perfectly still for a good four minutes or so...he started moving too! They spared NO expense.

It was quite the show. Merry Christmas!

Dirty Santa

This Christmas, I've had a record breaking THREE games of dirty santa. At the first one, I got the "Bourne Ultimatum" on DVD. I was pretty excited. In fact, I almost bought that movie and brought it to the party as my present for dirty santa.

Quick sidenote: I actually ended up buying and bringing the new Garth Brooks greatest hits cd/dvd set. I did this because Lyndsay said she really wanted it for Christmas. I figured I would seize the opportunity and kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, when the present was opened during the dirty santa game, she decided she was less interested in Garth Brooks...and more interested in Shrek 3. So now we have Shrek 3, too.

I played Dirty Santa again a few days later with the folks from work at the company christmas party, which was actually at our house. We had a 10 dollar limit, which makes it a lot harder to work with...but I gotta say...I was pretty impressed by the creativity. I was also pretty impressed by the UNcreativity. Three people stopped at the Starbucks in my front yard and bought giftcards. In my small office, 3 people meant about 20% of the people playing. So needless to say, Starbucks cashed in in a big way from our company Christmas party.

Anyway, back to the party. The best present for 10 bucks award went to the folks who brought the jumbo sized remote. I'm sure you've seen it...it's the remote with the huge buttons...the thing itself is so big you could just about flip it over and use it for a cookie sheet. The folks who brought it prefaced opening it with, "Don't get your hopes up...but...my grandpa does love his!"

I wasn't going to fight over the remote, so I opted instead for a wall calendar from my favorite TV show, "The Office"...it now hangs proudly in my office at work.

That was pretty much it for my dirty santa winnings. At the third dirty santa game, I ended up with a glass serving bowl with pink roses on it. I'm sure it was a nice bowl (the ladies tried to tell me it was), but I ended up giving it away after the game was over. One of my friends insisted if I wore it as a hat, it would keep the government from being able to read my mind. I thought about keeping it for that very reason, but I decided the government probably needs to be able to harness the massive processing power and intelligence capabilities of my mind...so as a service to them...I gave the bowl away.

Oh well...two out of three ain't bad. Merry Christmas!

Mixaloo

Just playing with this website called Mixaloo...thought I'd put together some of my favorite songs.