Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged christmas party
It's A Penguin Christmas
Dec 25th 2007
Yesterday was the majority of the planned Christmas celebrations for my family with our gift exchange happening in the afternoon and then going over to my grandparents (mothers side) in the evening.
I got to my parents house around 11 because I had to shred some stuff and I'm too cheap to buy a shredder myself. I had cleaned my bedroom out the previous days and I had a stack of old pay stubs and stuff that I had to dispose of. That took an awful long time to shred. After that I hung out and watched the ER Christmas episode marathon on TNT until my sister and her husband arrived shortly before 1am at which time we commenced with the gift opening.
Probably the best part of the whole thing was two presents my mom gave to my dad and my sister. My sister has a habit of, lets say..using a lot of tape when wrapping gifts. Using A LOT of tape. Usually taping up every single opening in the paper that could be used to gain a foothold for the opening. She does it to one package a year, usually to my mom. So this year, my mom got revenge. She gave both my sister and my dad (for laughing at her when she's trying to open it year after year) presents that contained boxes wrapped inside of boxes inside of boxes, all taped up, with just a little note inside (although my dad got a gift certificate to the restaurant they like to eat at in his)
It was a penguin Christmas for me. My mom made me up a really nice penguin themed shower curtain and a couple of penguin themed pillows. There was also some penguin related kitchen stuff, including a really cool set of plates with penguins ice skating and on each plate, the penguins keep falling down and off the plates. I kept thinking my friends who already thing this obsession is becoming a problem are going to think I went off the deep end.
In the non penguin department and yet still decorational department, my parents have this really cool crystal thing that rotates while shining lights up through the crystal to illuminate a 3d design inside of it that I liked when I was over there. This year they found a fish related one, which I tried to take a picture of over to the right, but it's extremely hard to do since you can't use the flash and it needs to be a little dark to get the effect.
Moving into the non decorations was a set of screwdrivers which I really needed, as well as a tool box destined to slowly empty of screwdrivers as I scatter them around my apartment never to be found again.
And then finally I got my own little in-car GPS unit because I keep borrowing my parents GPS to go places. It's a Garmin Nuvi 650 which appears to be in full working condition. I just need someplace to go with it now.
My dad got a Wii which was the result of a scheme my Mom and Myself tried to pull to keep it secret. We tried using my credit card to make the purchase, but it triggered my fraud protection after wal-mart had denied the purchase after which we used my moms credit card and it worked. Chase still called me and wanted to authorize the charges on my card though, so…it had potential to be a minor mess. It turned out all right though.
We set the Wii up and played a little bit of Wii sports before having dinner (mmm, lasagna) and heading over to my grandparents house for the traditional Christmas Eve party. As usual, the highlight for me was the traditional game of Pitch which was almost usurped by something called apples to apples, which I am assured is a fun game, but it's not Pitch. The girls team won the first two games while the boys team won the next two. After that I left the game, so I don't really know what happened in the tiebreaker match. I went back to my parents and we played a little more Wii type stuff, and then I took off to go to sleep.
Today I'm going back to my parents for some more Wii action, and the christmas cinnamon rolls of course. I should have some more pictures of the penguin stuff up later. I only took a picture of the crystal now because it was hard for me to describe properly.
It's A Rock Band Holiday
Dec 23rd 2007
I just got back from the christmas party thrown by my dad's side of the family. As I've said before, sometimes this party can be a little…less than entertaining. Mostly due to the people there I don't really know and/or get along with. This year though, it was pretty fun. Everybody was cool, lots of good conversation and food and stuff. We walked in to the spectacle of one of the dogs (there's usually a TON of dogs at this party) wearing a reindeer costume and looking very pathetic. All the other dogs were picking on him and it kept flopping in front of his face so he couldn't really see all that well. Pretty entertaining for a bit, but they took it off him quickly.
The highlight of the event though, was Rock Band. One of my cousins (her husband actually) has Rock Band and he brought it over so we could play it at the party. We played for a couple hours, with various people rotating in and out. I managed to play all of the instruments and sing some as well. I started out at guitar and played that. I was going to play drums after that, but my sister accidently bumped the difficulty on her bass part to Expert so I swapped with her quickly.
Then I got talked into singing. I picked War Pigs as the song and apparently I knocked it out of the park because people were commenting about it for the rest of the night. It's probably because I'm known as the quiet guy who doesn't talk much. Of course, I can also sing pretty decently (if the song is in my range) so I probably ended up surprising some people. I also ended up doing vocals on Tom Sawyer and Enter Sandman.
Just a mini Rock Band review. Pretty fun game for parties. I like the way Guitar Hero handles the guitar parts more than how Rock Band does it, and I also like the feel of the Guitar Hero controller. The drums were pretty fun, but hard to get used to because of all of the stuff you had to do at once when playing them. Overall, two thumbs up, but I probably wouldn't want to pay the full price for the set unless I was going in on it with other people.
All in all, a good way to kick off the Christmas party season. It finally feels like Christmas time to me.


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