I can't decide if I'm more like Scrooge or the Grinch

Merry Christmas, then, I suppose.

I'm a big fan of Christmas. I'm a big fan of anything that promotes goodwill, kindness, etc., and which results in me getting free stuff.

There are two things about Christmas that are important to me – presents and family. I'm not religious so I tend to pass over all those bits and focus on the things that do interest me. You can call me shallow for the whole liking gifts thing but, let's face it, what's the point in the gift-giving if everyone goes all preachy and spiritual and turns them down?

This year I ended up getting a huge number of sci-fi books. I knew I'd asked for a lot but it never struck me until I was actually sitting downstairs unwrapping them just how many I'd got in comparison to everything else. I found it especially strange that I didn't get any video games, given that I'm normally more of a gamer than a reader.

I guess it's because I've been getting most of the games I want at launch and I've been avoiding getting others because I still need to complete the ones I have. Though that said, I did notice that Steam (Valve's online games distribution doohickey) was having a sale so I went on and got Psychonauts. Took ages to download but it was only £5 and it's supposed to be brilliant. I may get a couple of other things off there later.

Actually, now that I think about it, I did get one game-related thing for Christmas:


Yeah, it was Erin's idea. She got a Toad for herself.

I also picked up some large chunks of chocolate, a few comedy CDs, some DVDs (including the Key To Time and Davros Doctor Who boxsets which together add up to... I'm not really sure but several days constant viewing at least) and the usual array of calendars, book tokens and so on.


So, the other thing about Christmas. Family. We had my mother's parents and my father's mother round for lunch, as we normally do. Unfortunately, this time, my little cousins weren't there as well. Now, I love those guys but I'm not above using them and the ease with which they get bored to my advantage. Nobody wants to have a meal around bored children who've finished their food. Nobody wants to let said children run around the house.

The solution? Let big cousin Alasdair take them to go play games. Everybody's happy.

This year I basically just ate my food as fast as I could* and kept making excuses about going to check on various downloads and backups that I had running. On a side note, that seems to have become something of a tradition – last year I had some hefty OS X updates to download and this year I was getting Psychonauts and backing up my iMac in preparation of installing Leopard tomorrow.

But back to the whole family lunch thing. I'm not someone who ritualises eating and the conversation at this sort of thing tends not to interest me. It's nothing personal but when everyone else gets to talking about the new roads or old friends' back problems or anything I don't really care about I tend to find it dull.

And if anyone tries to engage me in small talk, it's always about either how I'm doing after the surgery or what my plans are for university.

Bah. I could go on all night about my hatred of chatting and small talk and I'd never get any sleep. I think I'm going to call it a night here so that I can go to bed and hope that the district nurse shows up late tomorrow so that I can lie in.

As always, I'll have more to say tomorrow.

Hope you had a nice day.






*Rhyming entirely unintentional