I’m back

Well, I made it back (4 weeks ago). It was truly a thrilling vacation, which I will sum up here:

• Parents: We visited the wife’s first, then mine. It’s a toss-up as to whose are crazier, with the slight edge going to mine. Just to cover my ass, I’ll say that no one in any of our families is legitimately crazy, or even crazier than your average American. They’re standard parent crazy. I’m 26 years old, yet still can’t make my own sandwich while at home. Granted, my father makes a mean grilled cheese, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of making my own.
• Hanukkah/Christmas: Because the wife (and by no strange coincidence, her family) is Jewish and mine is Consumerian, I got to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas this year. I made out like a bandit. A couple of games (3 DS, 1 Wii, for all of which I am planning some sort of mini-review), some books (I do read occasionally) including a fix-it book, perfect for all the shit I break around the house, plenty of new clothes (no one wants to see me naked), and a handful of other great stuff, so desirable that I can’t even remember it. Oh, my sister got me a T.V. and some shaving cream, a potent combination and one that spells her true feelings for me (“you’re lazy and never shave”). All in all, I scored big time.
• Nokia 770: One of my favorite Christmas presents was one I bought for myself, the aforementioned Nokia 770. I read a lot of reviews of it and many people complained, I believe unthinkingly. The 770 is a great device at doing what it is supposed to do: browse the web. It’s a little slow, Flash-based sites don’t always run perfectly, but for 95% of all web-browsing and web-based tasks, it performs admirably. The biggest selling point for the 770 is the screen. At 800×480, I’ve used 15-inch monitors with worse resolutions. Web pages look normal on it, which cannot be said of other Internet devices, namely any smart phone. It was great on my trip, allowing me to check various web sites from the road, keeping away the demons of Internet withdrawal. The T-Mobile GPRS connection I used (no wi-fi at either parents) was slow, but faster than the dial-up connection at my parents and it didn’t tie up their phone line. The device was generally stable, except for the poor performance with Flash, kept me in touch with important news (I die if I don’t read Slashdot at least thrice daily), and let me escape the nonsense and insanity of visiting my parents.
• New Year’s Eve: We split up our drive home by stopping for several days in NYC to visit my sister and celebrate the New Year. I hate the New Year’s holiday. I have no problem with the advance of time it signifies, I despise the activities it inspires. Millions of morons, unaccustomed to drunkenness, all get together to make fools of themselves. As my sister correctly identified, New Year’s Eve is amateur night for drinking, and we are far from amateurs. So we had our own private party, bearing a theme determined by my sister and combining two classic themes of yore: drinking and games. We played board games and made cocktails. It was really quite fun, despite how complicated The Game of Life had become in our absence from the game.
• Games: The glog is going to be updated soon. In sum, I won Zelda: Twilight Princess. It rocked. I’ll expand later. I got a chance do a lot of gaming with my brother, an activity which we have not been able to pursue together for quite some time due to scheduling and locative problems. We played some at the ‘rents house, but really got into it when my brother came and visited me in Virginia for a couple of days in early January. We’re both students now, so shared winter break and the irresponsibility inherent therein. While here, we locked ourselves in my basement. Often we were not playing the same game together, but playing our own game next to one another, helping each other when we got frustrated. It was geeky brotherly fun at its most supreme.

I made some New Year’s resolutions, like everyone else. Mine are quite simple, bearing a strong resemblance to my past resolutions, like everyone else’s. In an effort to keep myself honest, I’ll be keeping track of these here until I get bored.

1. Running: I am streaking this year, meaning that I plan on running every day, naked. No, not really naked, but I am running every day this year.. Actually, it will only be 364 of 365 days this year: asking me to run on New Year’s day was too much for my hangover. I’m proud to say, I am still on track for 364.
2. Dog: My dog is a spoiled, ill-behaved puppy. I want to correct some of this by training him more often. Progress has been good with his training, as I have become more diligent with it. He’s still spoiled and misbehaves frequently, he just can stay on command most of the time.
3. Classes: I managed to perform decently last semester as measured on the standard GPA scale, but could certainly have done better. Considering that getting my master’s degree is my job now, I really should be doing very well. My pledge is thus to organize and plan for my work better (no more week-long coffee binges to get my papers done). All my class material is organized in tabbed binders (putting my legal assistant skills to work) and once I get all my syllabi I will start work on papers and other long-term projects.

Those are the main resolutions, not including the standard write more, communicate more, be more on top of my shit, etc. I resolve about such things every year and fail each within days. To keep my morale up, I’m not going to monitor my failure. At least, not as regards New Year’s resolutions. You will continue to see other, specific failures documented here regularly.