I’m not sure if I posted about it, but a while back we watched the movie Disturbia and noticed that one of the scenes was shot at the All-American in Downey. We watched something in the last two weeks that was also filmed there, but I can’t remember what it was. Stacie thinks it was Knocked Up. Then today I watched this video by Rise Against, and yep, it’s at All-American. I emailed the store to see if they have a list of everything filmed there. Crazy.

Merry Christmas yo!

I love listening to Medved and Hewitt right now and listening to people duke it out over Huckabee and Romney. Now that Huckabee is up front he’s being scrutinized. It looks like Romney and Huck are back in a battle for Iowa. But clearly this race can go anywhere.

Something that boggles my mind though are the head-to-head matchups between Democrats and Republicans. McCain is one of the most competitive Republicans, and Obama has big leads against everyone except Giuliani.

There are only a couple weeks until voting starts in Iowa, but this race can go anywhere!

Christmas is almost upon us, and I’m perfectly OK with not getting anything for Christmas. I’m a grown man (I think). But I know people like to get people stuff, so I’ll put my wish list out there. I’d also like to say that I enjoy getting people stuff, if it’s one of those really good gifts that the person could use. Buying you a fruit roll-up just because I couldn’t think of anything you really needed is lame.

The baby will most certainly be getting a lot of Christmas presents and other things as showers happen, but there are a couple things that I want for the baby that are on the pricier side.

1) A Canon HV20

I loved the home movies my parents took when I was a child, and I want to proudly say that my child’s entire life will be chronicled in high-definition. This is the best HD Cam out there, and I’ve been researching for months. I kind of hope they’ll come out with a slightly newer and super version in the next two months, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.

2) Main computer upgrade

I’m still running an old Pentium 4 2.8e that is almost 4 years old, and in this new day and age of multi-core processors, it can’t handle editing high-def video very well. Along with the new HD camera I also want to update the computer. I’ve got plenty of hard-drive space, but a dual or quad core cpu will be a vast improvement when it comes to editing HD in real-time and encoding.

The problem of course is that they’re both expensive! At first I thought about asking for Best Buy gift cards, but I can get the HV20 for practically $200 less online. I’ll probably buy the cpu parts from Newegg, but their gift cards are only available to Visa Verified customers. Lame. But regardless, now you know what I want for Christmas.

Oh how I pine for the Christmas vacation. Thee are too far away from thy present. Please hurryeth.

Nothing going on really. Rachel gave a shot out for my blog, so I’ll give a shout out for hers. New post up about Presidential election stuff. Suppose I should go over there and make my voice heard!

Kevin has some snippets from his quickly growing library of work. The second post down on his site has a link to his myspace page. Go check out the stories. Some intense stuff!

I’ll go completely random on this post. So far the Dodgers haven’t made any big moves this off season, and I couldn’t be happier. We’ve got some amazing young players, so let them play.

Is it Christmas vacation yet?

Back before Christmas I decided to buy some Nintendo stock. I had $500 sitting in a retirement account that was not invested, so I bought as many shares of Nintendo stock as I could. I didn’t buy enough.

Since then Nintendo stock has gone up 25%! In terms of investing those numbers are unheard of. Even on my measly $500 investment I’ve made over $100 even after the commission.

Of course hindsight is always 20/20, but have you bought your Nintendo stock yet?

Merry Christmas from Stacie, Boo, and the tree!

This was a little time-lapse photography fun. The focus is on the tree instead of us, but it still looks cool. The beard is down to a gotee.

Vacation is good for the mental health, but bad for the blog. I’m sorry blog that you haven’t got blogged on very much despite the greater abundance of time I have. Please don’t give me coal for Christmas.

Being on vacation has given us time to do some last minute shopping earlier in the week. Something I enjoy about getting a little older is it’s more about what I get to give and less about what I hope to get. Thinking of the "perfect" gift for somebody is fun, sort of a challenge for us. We sit down and analyze the person’s life situation and what they might need and see what we can come up with. Sometimes we have success, sometimes the gift seems less than perfect, but it’s still a lot of fun.

We’ve spent the last two days doing some baking. I had this great idea to bake people bread (banana nut and pumpkin) and Stacie baked several different kinds of cookies. I’m not a big dessert person, but it was fun buying bags of flour and sugar, hunting down mini-loaf pans, and actually making something. Now we just have to drive around and hope people are home.

Yesterday I drove to Sport Chalet in Torrance to obtain this bad boy. Why do I need a propane fueled catalyic heater you might ask? Because I’ve convinced Stacie that tent camping in Sequoia National Park in Decemeber will be fun (but a little cold, thus the heater). We’re planning to leave Wednesday, stay two nights, and then continue up to Turlock to meet the rest of the family. I called the ranger station yesterday and the highs are about 50, and the lows are right around freezing. While camping is an adventure in and of itself, adding in the extra challenge of the cold makes it even more fun. It’s been three years since my first winter Sequoia trip, and I miss it. Hopefully the weather cooperates and it stays dry.

Hope everyone is ready for Christmas and has a great day with family and friends. Merry Christmas!

Vacation is goooood. I’m very glad I became a teacher. The following are two accounts of people that have annoyed us over the last two days.

Yesterday at 5 a.m. the doorbell started ringing. "What the crap?!" I thought as we lay in bed still mostly asleep. A minute went by and then again "Ring ring ring?!!?!?" Extremely disturbed I went downstairs and looked out the window. A fool in a Raiders jacket looked back at me with an embarrased look on his face and said "oh sorry, wrong house." If you’re going to ring a doorbell at 5 a.m., make sure it’s the right house!!

Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, we are not a Walgreens Pharmacy. I understand calling once, asking me if I will fill your prescription, and then you find out that you have the wrong number. But when you call back 5 seconds later I realize here that you think you only dialed wrong, but no, you didn’t. I let the answering machine get it, because I can’t bear to tell you what a fool you are. Then 5 minutes later when you have a different person call and ask "Is this Walgreens?" I realize you’re totally in denial that the number you have is wrong. When you call back for the FOURTH time all I can say is "This still isn’t Walgreens" and hang up. Hopefully by now grandma or whoever has not died from a failure to obtain her prescription. I highly recommend you try the "internets" or even that old thing called the "phonebook."