happy 2004. first post of the new year.

sheeeeat, it's been a while... my last post was just before finals started so i guess i'll sum that up. finals ended up being about the usual difficulty, which means some were easy and some were just impossible. somehow tho i ended up pulling off 5 A's and a B for a 3.8 this semester, heh. so basically i say that explains enough and i won't go into all the details. ;)

the colorado 2nd house christmas vacation project year 3 definitely felt like the busiest one we've had since our first xmas there in 2001. i'll try to sorta sum it all up. the first couple days were the most lax, and we mostly just sorta sat around the house for a couple days not doing anything, which was fine with me. it'd didn't take long for lauren and i to set up the gamecube, especially since we brought a bigger tv for our upstairs area. i started off trying to move a bit further in metroid prime, not being able to get anywhere, i moved onto crash nitro kart adventure mode, got about 80% done there now tho. but as soon as lauren put in mario kart it was obvious that was gonna be the game that stayed in for the rest of thet trip. we basically raced our sweet asses off, finishing all the goals in the game pretty quickly, so that we got to the point that we were just choosing random characters and racing all the tracks. usually by the end of the day we were sick of playing so we moved onto satellite surfing between VH1, MTV and fuse. apparently i had to completely catch up on some pop/mv culture that i hadn't absorbed this semester in my semi-boycott of mtv. vh1 had several of those borderline-annoying categorical countdowns going on, so somehow i ended up glued to "the 100 most shocking moments in rock & roll" and "the top 40 celebrity feuds of all time" and shit.

once we actually motivated ourselves to get off the damn couch we rode the 4 wheelers (although at that point there was a faulty spark plug in one so we only actually took *a* 4 wheeler) around the property, went skiing, and played foosball in the basement. the skiing was on the 23rd, and apparently nobody wants to ski 2 days before christmas so it was pretty badass having the slopes with so few people there. we stayed pretty safe tho and mostly stuck to greens, only 1 blue to relearn after the year hiatus. lauren and i went into town a little bit for some errands and shit, but mostly we just sorta hung around the house. i did finally decide to read lullaby, i bought the damn thing in like september. lemme insert a little plug/review for it here:

lullaby
by chuck palahniuk

he's written like 5 of these books, and i'd sort 'em like this:

5) choke
4) survivor
3) invisible monsters
2) lullaby
1) fight club

my rewiew is basically: they're all fookin great, really. in other words, you should save up yourself a good $13 or so and go buy at least one to get a taste. and if ya do that, ya might as well go for fight club, even if you've seen the movie. all of chucky p's books are great tho, but admittedly if you're a really conservative semi-religious "everything offends me" type, don't bother. he's really apocalyptic and whatnot, with the swift ability to knock you on your ass using only words and the like, haha. you can read them in like 2 days pretty easily, so i suggest you pick up one of chucky p's masterpieces and give yourself a nice break from harry, ron and hermione.

alright... wtf was i talking about again?

yeah, so then we had a pretty low key christmas. not that it was a bad christmas or anything like that, just a "low key" christmas. heh, honestly, at this point i really don't even know what the hell the holiday's even about. it's pretty apparent we're not actually celebrating jesus' birthday, so what exactly are we celebrating? in our family, i think it functions more as a "here i bought you some shit, did you buy me some shit?" type occasion, which apparently works out pretty good, ha. i racked up the usual array of clothing and gift cards, as well as a handy HP digital photo printer which compliments my digicam pretty nicely. i guess i just say it was low key cuz for some reason since we had to finish all our xmas shopping before the trip and things like that it just felt like xmas was already over already or something. i think from like the ages of like maybe 15 onward each year you sorta realize a little something more about how you really feel about the "holiday season." it's one thing when the whole santa claus gig exits your family, then another when you get into a stage where your parents understandably don't know what the hell to get you anymore, so you just get an envelope with a check and some clothes. now i'm just sorta moving onto another stage where i look forward more to celebrating xmas (in my eyes, purely seen as an excuse to exchange gifts and sing songs forbidden from the months of january to november) with my girlfriend/wife and eventually kids moreso that my immediate family. i guess after you've had 22 christmas's you start to wonder if there isn't something else you'd rather do instead of what you've grown so accustomed to. i better start another paragraph here to explain a bit more:

see, before '01 the tradition always involved christmas eve spent at my grandparents' house, then christmas morning with the immediate family. but since we built the 2nd house in westcliffe it's pretty much standard that we spend the xmas week or so there instead of in dallas where the grandparents are. part of the thrill of that wasn't "ooh i get more gifts and shit from people," but moreso that we actually got to see, y'know, other members of our family. my dad's brother and his family of 4 also live in dallas so we'd always see them, then another brother and his wife from soCal would come every other year. so especially when all 3 brothers + family were together, and even occasionally the 4th brother and others, it made for like 12-20 people and a pretty rousing good time. but nowadays my immediately family celebrates the holiday off on our own in secluded colorado. don't get me wrong, it's extremely cozy and wintery, but it just doesn't have the same feel simply because we don't even bother to see anybody else. i'm not a family guy really at all and i've never been very close to any extended family but to me to some extent that just seems all wrong. so i guess when it's just the 4 of us opening gifts and maybe having 3-5 minute calls with a few relatives on the phone wishing them well it just feels a little uninspired and not as worth celebrating.

although no one really said anything, this last christmas was actually the end of a certain era. that was the last christmas where i'm still in college, thus it was the last one in which i was actually still sharing a roof with my parents. by this time next year, i'll be in my own apartment living on my own working and living for myself. while obviously i'm still included in whatever the family does, in some ways it means i'm a completely different role player in the family regrading those kinds of events. it'll be up to me whether i want to go to colorado for 10 days or not. i mean who knows what can happen, maybe alayna and i celebrate xmas ourselves, maybe i'm staying in san antonio for a few days, maybe we're doing our own thing in dallas with friends, maybe we took a trip somewhere, there's no telling. so i'd imagine if i think this christmas felt different, i can't imagine how i'll feel for christmas '04.

moving on on the recap...

on the 26th zach flew in from dallas and alayna from SA an hour later. so most of that day involved just getting them to the house and getting everybody set up and reacquainted and whatnot, since my parents hadn't seen alayna since the summer. alayna and i exchanged our gifts, where i ended up with a shirt and a trendy denim jacket.

the 4 of us went to the royal gorge in canon city on the 27th and took plenty of pictures and video (still working on/deciding if i can try to post some of these pics somewhere or something) which was pretty cool since we were able to get some actual fast food and get away from the parents for a bit. just a sidenote: that was the first fast food place (arby's) i've ever seen that had a fireplace in it. we made it back in time to go to a favorite restaurant [in the middle of goddamn nowhere] and listen to some live music while eating what alayna claims to be the best chicken she's had anywhere.

on the 28th we had my dad's youngest brother and family over at the house for a few hours since they were driving through colorado. that was cool, but pretty much ate up all the daylight hours. at night the 4 "kids" went to one of the few places to hang out in westcliffe, the cliff lanes bowling alley. nobody actually felt like bowling so we just played foosball and pool instead, then had some late snack bar dinner.

the 29th was sort of the humbling roller-coaster day of the trip. the 4 of us went skiing at monarch, which was a good idea, and for the most part ended up maintaining that. only things that thwarted that were the huge post-christmas crowd and alayna's little freakout session in the middle of the slopes. lauren and zach stuck together at first, retraining zach on bunny slopes (he hadn't been skiing in 2 years) and hitting some greens while i coached alayna down the bunny slope. apparently i had sorta overestimated how quick alayna would pick it up again and it turned out we kinda had a lot of "rebuilding" to do. it's funny cuz alayna's a really adventurous type chick, not really scared of anything, but you get her on a sloped mountain with snow on it and she's not exactly herself. so after i retaught her some basics i convinced her she was ready for some greens. to avoid the 10 degree chill and huge crowds on the beginner lift, we went to the top and tried to go down the green "rookie" run. the idea was the 4 of us were gonna all go down it together, which was intended to be cake for me and lauren and somewhat of a task for zach. unfortunately things didn't really go that way. the fear of the mountain, not her lack of skills, completely froze alayna up and i had to do everything i could to keep from losing my temper and helping her as best i could. the poor thing had to cry it out a little bit first, then she seemed to gather some courage and she did much better after that. it's hard to tell whether it's sad or cute, but it's funny cuz alayna's not nearly as bad a skier as she thinks she is, but she's twice as afraid of the mountain as everybody else is, so she just has trouble willing her mind to do what her body wants her to. we ended up splitting up (i obviously thought she could benefit more from her own practice time on whatever run she wanted) so i hit several blues. i think i've been skiing 4 times now and i'd consider myself a decent intermediate skier. i've gotten to the point where the blues are more fun than the greens, just that any of you that have skiied a lot know the well-groomed almost-mogul blues are much different than the soft gentle greens, heh. hopefully i'll be back there soon, maybe to try out snowboarding.

somewhat unexpectedly, the nights of the 28th and 29th ended up involving a lot of 3-player (my sister had given me a GC controller) battle mode shine thief action in mario kart. we just sorta stumbled onto it, but it'd ended up being damn fun. we wouldn't go as far as saying battle mode is shit in the new mario kart, but we were definitely more into racing than battling with just 2 of us playing. but with 3 (and soon 4, since i just bought a wavebird controller the other day too) people it's fuckin great playing shine thief with several people battling to keep the shine. hopefully i can host several mario kart battle mode parties this semester, make it a drinking game or something.

pretty much all of the 30th was blown with the 12 hour drive back to dallas. once we got back everybody was pretty damn exhausted.

as part of her xmas present, i gave alayna tickets to the dec 31st stars game, so on the new years eve we headed downtown. we rode the dart rail down to the west end and ate at hoffbrau, then hit up the AAC. we ended up with a 1-1 tie (my rant about the stars this season is a whole other post) but she had a lot of fun, since she's trying her best to become a hockey/stars fan, so that sealed it for me. we caught the train back to plano and drove back to my house to celebrate the new year with some drinks.

on new years day we didn't do much, just did some shopping and met my parents at EZ's for dinner. yesterday i sorta continued touring alayna around dallas by taking her first to the galleria then over to northpark. we had a fun time just walking around, shopping, gettin starbucks and giggling at shit like we were better than everybody else, heh. hard to believe if i'm not mistaken it was almost 4 years to the day since i had last even been to the northpark mall. afterwards we blew a gift certificate at maggiano's little italy, which is attached to northpark. yeah, oddly enough, don't always assume a restaurant connected to a mall is really casual. turns out the inside of that place is pretty fuckin fancy and we were hella overdressed. we ended up mostly laughing it off and having a decent dinner anyways.

so today alayna flew back to SA and basically most of my winter "vacation" is done. i'm gonna be in dallas for the rest of this week, get some dental/eye appointments and errands done with before i head back to CS prolly early next week. until then it'll be a pretty slow week here at home, but hey, i've earned it.

hell of a long recap there, boy.

cheers,
justin