Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	Enya - Amid The Falling Snow

Christmas!
What did you get? I gotta Tonka truck, anna G.I. Joe, anna space ship, anna race car, anna big monster that goes like ARRRRR.

A vibrating pillow for my back, an iced tea maker, a too-big leather jacket that weighs forty pounds and is likely to protect me from being shanked for hours after I take it off, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon (which is, surprisingly, not terrible...they might have accidently programmed a passable AI for once since MK4...), Final Fantasy XII, which, to my own shock, I've not yet opened, and some cute little things that will require me to take pictures and show you all just as soon as I get off my lazy ass. I wasn't the bringer of all the awesome, play-with-all-day toys that I used to be, but I was low on ideas this year, so I just bought expensive things for the family.

But what really has me is F.E.A.R., which I'd paid little attention to when it actually came out. It's a first-person shooter PC game, a genre which normally makes me motion sick within an hour of playing, but this one is surprisingly smooth and paced. Storyline or no storyline, this action is wonderfully smooth, and makes you think about what you're doing without being impossible. For some reason, I have the most fun when I'm getting my ass kicked.

Anyway. The book. It's here. I have a hard copy in my hands. I feel so wonderfully accomplished at having finished (almost) something. Even if it ends here, I have something with my name on it, something that has a beginning page and an end page and a cover around it. There are some tweaks that need to be made (margins, font size, cover error, a typo or three), but it's lookin' like 636 of not-eye-stabbing-pixel pages. There's a long rotation it's going to be put on to make sure everybody gets a chance to read it, so let me know if you want to read it and you're not listed:
Greg, Mark, Jess, Becca, Misty, Cassie, um....wow, is the list really that short, or is my memory getting bad? I was just going to have one person forward it on to the next person when they were done. If you want your own copy of the super-rough draft, it'll cost you $35, and I think I can have it shipped to your door. I tried to do that for mom, and I got a database error, so maybe Lulu.com isn't keen on that, and isn't good at expressing it.

Work is getting a little tense since the boss is rampaging (she's under a lot of pressure and takes it out on people), but in four to six weeks, I may be getting a $500 raise. That $700 one wasn't meant to be, it seems; I passed the test fairly well, but the people administering apparently disagree with me about what "performing the duties of a business services assistant" means. They think it means "being a business services assistant," and I think it means exactly what it says. State bastards.

Oh! And don't let me forget...Allie has proven to me once again why she is the First Wife, not just chronologically, but in status. I forgot to bring her card to Mom's so it could get scanned, but let me just say that there is no such thing, in this world or the next, as a snowman as awesome as the one Allie drew for me on the Christmas card she sent. You'd just have to see it. I don't care who you are, you would step down from any claim you had as supposed first wife after you saw this awesome snowman.

SO! To recap:
Mom celebrates Yule, does Christmas early, and is awesome.
I got awesome presents.
I spent a lot of money and was happy to do so.
Allie loves me good.
Work = poop
Book = joy