Wasn’t a particularly overwhelming haul this year as far as numbers goes, but it was still a very good Christmas. Andrea got me a $100 gift certificate for one of the tattoo parlors in town. I got her a copy of Office Space on DVD, Rayman: Raving Rabbids for the Wii, and I picked up a KitchenAid Artisan Mixer for the house.

We’ve definitely gotten our money out of the mixer so far. Making breads, cookies, french toast batter, you name it. I haven’t managed to get my hands on any of the attachments for it yet, but one of these days I’ll be able to grind my own sausage and what have you. That’s when I’ll acknowledge that I’ve truly evolved from the animals, when I can make processed meat products in my own home.

I let Andrea open her present on the 23rd, we started playing the game on the 26th, and we beat the game yesterday. Fun, tough in spots, but a good game to play between two people. We haven’t unlocked everything yet, but beating the game in under 24 hours is nothing to really sneeze at, I suppose.

Looks like now all I have left to do is celebrate New Year’s Eve (this year wasn’t my best), plan for a massive hangover on New Year’s Day, look into some tattoo designs, and work on making 2008 better than 2007. I’m not sure, but I might even have Chad do some video for the tattoo and we can release a video podcast of my being branded like a steer once again. Who knows.

I know it’s been a while since I updated this, so I thought I’d let you all know what was going on in the world o’ Jerry. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Oh, and thanks to everyone who sent Andrea and I holiday well wishes. It was very much appreciated, even if I didn’t send a reply text or phone call. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel the same or that I don’t care for you guys, I was just up to my armpits in busy.

So, happy belated religious holiday of your choice, happy New Year, and may 2008 be better than its predecessor.

So a couple of days ago Chad and I recorded Bomb Shelter Radio #33 that went up today and during the editing process I realized I’d done something kind of dumb. I have inadvertently challenged the guys at Diggnation to a drinking contest on-air. Now I don’t think this is dumb because I think we’d lose, far from it, I’m almost certain that we could hold our own with little effort. The reason I think this is dumb is because if they accept that means we have to go to San Francisco and drink with them…and I don’t have the cash for a hotel room because I suck.

I don’t advocate driving drunk, especially not 2 hours one-way. I doubt they’ll even find out that we challenged them though, because we’re a nobody podcast with a small listener base. It’s still a nice thought to entertain. Oh, and speaking of being stupid, apparently Chad and I are doing a drunken vidcast for the next episode of Bomb Shelter Radio either at my place of his. So tune in for that, we ought to be plenty stupid and entertaining during that episode.

I knew it was too good to be true when I got two podcasts done in one day without having Audacity crash on me even once. Turns out my techno-luck wouldn’t hold out as Bad Behavior, one of the anti-spam plugins we run on Way of the Geek, decided to see me as a spammer and block access to not just my personal blog but deny login access to the entire site for me. So I had to deactivate and/or delete the plugin completely, which wasn’t too hard to do.

In other news, our KitchenAid Artisan series mixer finally came in today and holy crap is it awesome! Heavy duty construction and from what I’ve seen some of the attachments available for it mean business.

Of course it got delivered in the five minutes I was gone to pick up the wife…that’s becoming a trend with the delivery people around here. They wait until I’m out and then, like ninjas, spring onto my porch, drop off the package (usually breaking it in the process), and then take off like a shot in the dark before anyone can see them. I’ve never heard of underground kamikaze package delivery, but if it did exist this would be the place for it.

Oh, and since Devin reminded me during this weeks show, I did receive my HD DVD player back from the repair shop and it makes me very very happy. Much upconversion of standard DVDs and the HD DVD menu functions being accessible during playback has become somewhat of a new toy for me at the moment. Speaking of the show, if you haven’t heard it already, you can hear it now. Either at Blubrry, Techpodcasts.com, or at the Way of the Geek HQ this weeks show is all about gift ideas for the geek in your home.