Post-Christmas Blogging

We started celebrating Christmas with family as soon as I got home from work on Saturday, Christmas Eve. We (Angel, the kids and I) went out to dinner with my mother, sister and brother-in-law at Outback Steakhouse ("No rules, just right!" - very traditional, heh). After much food and fun discussion, we let the boys open a few of their presents, to their merriment! We went back home and the kids and Angel watched "Madagascar" on DVD while I crashed out in a leanback chair (long day) till the movie was over (I got to enjoy it with Angel last night).

Sunday, we got up somewhere around 8:00 or 8:30 a.m., opened the remaining presents (to the boys' further merriment!)

I did have to go into work on Christmas, from 1:00 p.m. toll midnight. That was a first for me! I've worked New Years' a couple of times but not Christmas. The first half of the work day was pretty slow. I work in a tech support call center and I was getting maybe 2 or 3 calls per hour. So, I had brought my heavy duty headphones, plugged them into the front of the Dell computer and tuned into Yahoo! Launchcast between calls to pass the time (and oh, did it pass the time!). I also worked on some artwork for a comic strip Angel and I have been developing (more on that at another time). About 6:00 p.m., the calls started coming in, sometimes in waves. Overall, though, it was very manageable. There were about 25 of us maintaining the call center. By midnight, though, I was starving and exhausted and ready to come home (and I did). At least the company is paying me well for working the holiday!

Went into work Monday (th 26th) from 9:30 am till 8:30 p.m. That was hard, after working 10 hour days on Saturday and Sunday, but I managed (barely :). Today hasn't been so bad, I've been trying to get decent sleep to balance out all the work hours.

More blogging later, as I get more ideas on what to blog about...

Best Wishes,
Allen

A Pre-Christmas Family Evening

Yesterday, after finishing up the last minute Christmas shopping, Angel suggested we get tickets for the whole family to go see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. I was a little hesistant about taking the kids to a movie which I knew would have a major battle scene, but I've recently read the book for the first time and knew what was coming. I just wanted to avoid the quasi-debacle that happened when I took the kids to see the first Spiderman movie in 2002 (scared my oldest son, Adam, in a few places).

So we went, we saw -- and we enjoyed! I felt that the movie was very true to the book. My wife and kids really loved the movie and I was quite satisfied as well. Afterwards, we went to the Pappadeux seafood restaurant and had a sumptuous pre-Christmas meal together as a family. It was my first time having grilled fish and shrimp cabobs. I sprinkled a little lemon over it and, I kid you not, it was as good as steak in terms of taste and aroma and texture. They gave us so much food that we all took home leftovers! Yummmm...

It all made for a nice family outing.

Best Wishes,
Allen

Thank goodness for word verification!

I really didn't like having to remove the comments. When people are genuine (and not spammers), the comments are interesting and appreciated. But I was getting spammers automatically leaving rather annoying and disgusting links and junking up all of my blogs, so I removed them.

I decided to check in on IR Haven this morning, since I haven't blogged in several weeks (been working like crazy, my cable company job went permanent -- woohoo!). I noted that Blogger obviously figured out they were being spam-bombed and devised a common sense defense (the same kind of word verification methods like the ones eBay and Google use to screen out spammers). So I've turned comments back on and we'll see how it goes.

I'll try to do a bit more blogging in the coming days, a lot has been going on.

Best Wishes,
Allen