Blazing into the Holidays

Time is counting down to Christmas. As stated earlier the brunt of shopping is out of the way. We are about to head out and brave the mall and Target once again for the last of stocking stuffers, Santa pictures, and a haircut for Austin. We will also need to get stocked up for Christmas meals. Just one of the nice things about the family gatherings is that the burden of food preparation falls a little on everyone. I picked up fixings for a green bean casserole the other day and have stocked up on sparkling cider, but otherwise we haven't shopped food yet. Not a big deal as we aren't planning on making cooking a major focus on the day. Neither of us are into cooking a turkey or anything that requires hours of supervision. I think a canned ham, turkey breast, or something along the throw it in the oven for an hour level is where we are at this year.

The closets are stacked with presents. Still need to find time to get the kitchen put together, but that will be a tomorrow afternoon project. Hopefully all of the parts are there.

We will be taking video and hopefully distributing or posting some of it up for family and friends to see. It would be nice to actually put some of that video to good use. As it is most of our video it sitting on miniDV in the cabinet and we haven't been very good about using the camcorder. I think being so far from the family it will be more important to capture some of the holiday fun.

Okay, I am that much of a dork

I am really enjoying having the larger monitor, but Erin can't get used to it. She is still clinging to the laptop. I think I will get a wall mount for it to put it a bit farther back from the user and also a little higher. The computer itself is running well and looks like it is up to the task of 1:supporting the higher resolution monitor and 2:dealing with streaming web and flash content.

Time will tell, but the Windows 2000 OS may not have been the best choice. It works, but most of the new hardware is leaving it unsupported. The Roxio DVD decompressor that I use on the laptop is not backwards compatible with W2K. Most sounds cards also leave W2K behind in favor of XP/Vista. I will say one thing, not having to worry about authorizing the system has been convenient. Not a big deal as I can upgrade to XP later without too much hassle.