Gift card fail

I hope everybody had a happy Christmas full of family, food, and fun! On Christmas Eve I was at my parents house where we ate KFC, pizza strips, Subway, exchanged gifts, and watched the Patriots come from behind to beat the Dolphins. I received a $50 Amex gift card from my parents, as did my wife. On Christmas we went to her parents for more family, food, presents, and fun, but no football (or basketball for that matter). Yesterday we were home organizing, breaking down boxes, etc, until around 8:30PM, when we decided to drop some boxes of donation items off at Savers. When i got dressed in the morning, I put the two Amex gift cards in my pants pocket, or at least i thought I did. When we got in the car to leave, I gave one to Joy since it was hers. So theoretically I should still have one in my pocket. Well we dropped the items off, went into Savers, went next door to Best Buy, then down the road to Target where we bought some house things that we needed. As we were checking out, I went to pull my Amex gift card out of my pocket, but it wasn't there! It must be at home, I thought, so we went home and looked all around the apartment and outside in the parking lot. The only reason that I could think of why it fell out was when I had pulled my keys out of my pocket. Our search turned up nothing so we traveled back to each store's parking lot (the stores were closed by then) to see if it was there but alas, no luck. If anybody found it on the ground and took it, hopefully they needed it more than I do!

Merry Christmas Eve Eve!

Ok, I am a little late because its actually Christmas Eve here in EST zone land. But somewhere, somebody is having a happy Christmas eve eve. I actually got in the mood this week with a little gift giving at work and some Christmas music (Transiberian Orchestra of course). But then again it was almost 60 out this week, so it still feels a little like Spring. Still on the subject of Christmas, I don't ever think I believed in Santa. In fact, I will not pull this blanket of lies over my kids heads either. Rationally and scientifically it makes absolutely no sense and I hope they can see that. We live in an age of unparalleled information, all available to us at our fingertips. With a smartphone and an Internet connection any knowledge in the whole world is immediately discernible. Santa? Santa is a relic of a time long gone, not to mention he has nothing to do with Christmas. One person at work said that Santa is Jesus' brother. Ummm, I don't think so.

No Christmas Tree, No Christmas, not lit up like a star

One week until Christmas! And we are still unpacking boxes! Thus we shall not be putting up our (fake) Christmas tree this year. I'm still not sure whether or not this feels like home yet. Or perhaps, after a long time of living out of our backpacks and suitcases, I feel at home wherever we are. I do like having our own place though. Having a dishwasher is amazing. Also, living in Warwick is great too. Everything is close by and visiting our parents, both sets, is now a ten minute drive.

Game of Thrones

I just finished watching Game of Thrones on HBO. Actually I don't have HBO. Or cable for that matter. But I do have the trump card: the Internet. In the past this meant watching it on your monitor or LCD. Well my 22" LCD is nice, but not nearly as nice as my 40" TV. Which would you rather watch something on? I can either use a VGA cable to hook up to my TV or I can copy AVI files to my PS3 for my viewing pleasure.

But back to Game of Thrones. I finished reading the book a little while ago and I really liked it. My brother recommended the HBO series so I started watching it and was really impressed. They did it in ten, hour long episodes which game them plenty of time to develop characters and tell the story exactly as the book did, with almost no literary license. The characters and speech were spot on and the visuals were great. It gave you that epic feeling like Lord of the Rings did. The only downfall is the amount of nudity, which was not really in the book. Perhaps this is just HBO being HBO though. I wish all book to "movie" adaptations could be done like this. Imagine Lord of the Rings as 30 hour-long episodes! You would get to see and experience so much more of the book. I will start reading the next book in the series soon and should finish by the time they make the next season in April.