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Second Christmas Away
Dec. 26th, 2008 11:31 amWell!
I feel I've been rather utterly spoiled once again this Christmas, mostly by virtue of having two families that sent gifts over for both me and Whitney, and possibly (here's a hint for you) also having a lot of relatively cheap items on my Amazon wish list rather than many larger things. This means it's been easily the most musical Christmas for me yet, with a number of albums that I hadn't got around to getting myself being added to my collection by various members of the family - "Ghost Opera", Kamelot's ascent into even more pretentiousness; "Machines of Mental Design", the Guardians of Time's descent into even more insanity (which is quite difficult to get hold of, apparently - I think my mum's eBay experience must have played a part here); "Gambling with the Devil" by Helloween, for which I was present at part of the tour even though I hadn't heard the album yet; "Sign of the Winner", an early effort by Heavenly; and "The Scarecrow" by Avantasia, a collaboration containing just about everyone listed above and a few more musicians as well.
I got the chance to speak with my family in Scotland over Skype (have you noticed that the futuristic videophones that Dangermouse used to use in the 80s have become commonplace now?), who had been sending packages over to the house and not indicating who they were from or who they were meant to go to, including one addressed to "David Leader-Picone", which just confused everyone all round. But I think that we distributed gifts among everyone correctly in the end. I think that the best part of the whole morning was my brother-in-law's gift to me, not because he'd found me a Space Invaders T-shirt, but because of the handwritten label from this enormously tall sulky baseball player saying how nice it was to have me as part of the family. Stop laughing, it was fantastic of him.
The Christmas tradition here is to go out to see a film after present-opening and breakfast, and after a lot of debate because of there being no obviously Christmassy films out at the time, we decided to trek further into San Francisco to see The Wrestler, in the hope that as implied in the trailer it was a sort of eventually happy redemption story. It wasn't. After going through several sort of Passion of the Christ-style painful sequences interspersed with occasional women, and watching him eventually pasting himself into oblivion at the end, the general feeling was that perhaps we would have been better off seeing Bedtime Stories instead.
After coming back from that, we spent the rest of the day lazily, with Whitney and I playing with a surprise gift that she had conspired with her parents to get me - after never owning anything by Nintendo for twenty-four years, two have suddenly come at once, as I'm now the owner of a Nintendo DS. I had put it on my list a while ago because of a significant number of people I know saying that I should get myself one, as an encouragement to get me playing some games that were released after the turn of the millennium again, but I'd forgotten that I had it on there - once again, after the iPod two years ago, they've contributed to my array of gadgetry. The games that they gave me with it are New Super Mario Bros, something that I promise you is called Elite Penguin Force (that my mother-in-law was very insistent came with the unit and wasn't her own choice), and Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
We spent half the day playing the last of those together - it's sort of like an interactive version of those Usbourne picture puzzle adventure books, with every step of an adventure providing a new puzzle related to your surroundings (or just as a result of someone turning up and asking if you can solve something at random). As strange as it sounds, it definitely has a lot of charm to it, and it's sometimes especially entertaining to hear attempts at British accents - particularly from the assistant Luke, who is voiced by Rouge the Bat talking like a falsetto Dick Van Dyke.
Even if the flight back in the New Year is as delayed as the one coming in was, I'm certainly not going to be short of entertainment.
I feel I've been rather utterly spoiled once again this Christmas, mostly by virtue of having two families that sent gifts over for both me and Whitney, and possibly (here's a hint for you) also having a lot of relatively cheap items on my Amazon wish list rather than many larger things. This means it's been easily the most musical Christmas for me yet, with a number of albums that I hadn't got around to getting myself being added to my collection by various members of the family - "Ghost Opera", Kamelot's ascent into even more pretentiousness; "Machines of Mental Design", the Guardians of Time's descent into even more insanity (which is quite difficult to get hold of, apparently - I think my mum's eBay experience must have played a part here); "Gambling with the Devil" by Helloween, for which I was present at part of the tour even though I hadn't heard the album yet; "Sign of the Winner", an early effort by Heavenly; and "The Scarecrow" by Avantasia, a collaboration containing just about everyone listed above and a few more musicians as well.
I got the chance to speak with my family in Scotland over Skype (have you noticed that the futuristic videophones that Dangermouse used to use in the 80s have become commonplace now?), who had been sending packages over to the house and not indicating who they were from or who they were meant to go to, including one addressed to "David Leader-Picone", which just confused everyone all round. But I think that we distributed gifts among everyone correctly in the end. I think that the best part of the whole morning was my brother-in-law's gift to me, not because he'd found me a Space Invaders T-shirt, but because of the handwritten label from this enormously tall sulky baseball player saying how nice it was to have me as part of the family. Stop laughing, it was fantastic of him.
The Christmas tradition here is to go out to see a film after present-opening and breakfast, and after a lot of debate because of there being no obviously Christmassy films out at the time, we decided to trek further into San Francisco to see The Wrestler, in the hope that as implied in the trailer it was a sort of eventually happy redemption story. It wasn't. After going through several sort of Passion of the Christ-style painful sequences interspersed with occasional women, and watching him eventually pasting himself into oblivion at the end, the general feeling was that perhaps we would have been better off seeing Bedtime Stories instead.
After coming back from that, we spent the rest of the day lazily, with Whitney and I playing with a surprise gift that she had conspired with her parents to get me - after never owning anything by Nintendo for twenty-four years, two have suddenly come at once, as I'm now the owner of a Nintendo DS. I had put it on my list a while ago because of a significant number of people I know saying that I should get myself one, as an encouragement to get me playing some games that were released after the turn of the millennium again, but I'd forgotten that I had it on there - once again, after the iPod two years ago, they've contributed to my array of gadgetry. The games that they gave me with it are New Super Mario Bros, something that I promise you is called Elite Penguin Force (that my mother-in-law was very insistent came with the unit and wasn't her own choice), and Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
We spent half the day playing the last of those together - it's sort of like an interactive version of those Usbourne picture puzzle adventure books, with every step of an adventure providing a new puzzle related to your surroundings (or just as a result of someone turning up and asking if you can solve something at random). As strange as it sounds, it definitely has a lot of charm to it, and it's sometimes especially entertaining to hear attempts at British accents - particularly from the assistant Luke, who is voiced by Rouge the Bat talking like a falsetto Dick Van Dyke.
Even if the flight back in the New Year is as delayed as the one coming in was, I'm certainly not going to be short of entertainment.
