I'm so sick. I hate being sick. Normally I don't even get sick. And if I do find myself being sick, it's for like 2 days. It's been almost a week now. What sucks worse is that I'm on Christmas Vacation. I've wasted almost a week of my vacation being sick. How's that for timing?

Speaking of Christmas. . . it was a weird one this year. Last year I don't think it felt very Christmassy, but we had the lights up on the house, and I was pretty excited about my gifts. It just didn't feel Christmassy for some reason. This year, we decorated the inside of the house super awesome kickass ("we" being Claire,) and I found a great tree (after 5 days of looking for the 'right' one.) Both very early. . . a few days after Thanksgiving. Still, Chistmas kinda snuck up on us. I went out of town for a few days the week before Christmas and before we knew it, it was 4 days before Christmas, and we hadn't bought any gifts.

So after I bought gifts, I was thinking they weren't as cool as last year. I gave Claire a nice Coach purse, some Spurs tickets for her and her sisters, a $100 flat iron for her hair (which looks like it cost $10 at Walgreens... why are those things so expensive?), a $100 mall gift certificate since I can't buy girls clothes, and some other knick-knacks. . . and it still felt like I gave lame gifts. Oh, and a kitten. Blech. I don't like cats much, but she seems to love the furball.

As far as my gifts. . . I guess I wasn't too excited because I didn't really "want" anything really badly this year. Games. . . pfft. I have more games that anyone would ever want. Plus, I can just buy my own games anytime I want. Then I won a 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor at a Unreal Tournament 2004 tournament in Dallas, and I found myself wanting a Shuttle so I could use it. Now, Shuttle's aren't cheap, and of course the one I wanted was $400 and there was only 1 left at Fry's a few days before Christmas. Anyway, I gave my list to Claire and figured that I just might get it under my tree. Well, she of course went to buy it, and they were sold out. She figured she could get me more stuff if she didn't buy it for me anyway and instead gave me a $200 gift certificate (in case I wanted to just by a P4 motherboard which was also on my list) and some games and stuff. Guess other people had the same idea because I ended up getting $325 in Fry's gift certifcates. :) Anyway, the day after Christamas, Fry's had ONE Shuttle back in stock (return maybe?) I ended up picking that up and some RAM to go with it. So, yeah, I got some cool stuff, but Christmas morning just isn't the same when you don't have that one big item to look forward to.

Hmmm.. that sounded a bit materialistic. Am I materialistic? I don't think so. I think we live modestly, and I don't really long for a bunch of material things. I'm just a big kid who loves toys. And I love Christmas gifts. Sue me.

I think it's interesting that of all the cool things I have, I've been playing Earthbound for the old Nintendo during my Christmas break. If you're a hardcore gamer, you'd know that Earthbound was never released for the NES. So I'm of course playing it on an emulator. . . on my Xbox of all things. With a wirelss controller. And a laptop nearby with a Walkthrough/FAQ loaded up on it. Connected over wireless internet. Somehow I don't think the makers of Earthbound would have ever thought someone would be playing their unreleased prototype game 13 years later on a Microsoft gaming system emulating the NES while reading a strategy guide on laptop computer connected wirelessly to the Internet that didn't even exist. Oh, did I mention that the emulator I'm using to play the game supports HDTV and 5.1 audio? Sure, the game itself doesn't actually support 5.1, but seeing that blue LED light up on my audio receiver while playing NES games still makes me laugh. I love technology.

Anyway, enough for now. I'm heading back to the world of Earthbound circa 1990.