Xmas Aftermath Action Report

I am currently at my in-laws house in Milwaukee. There are some wifi signals leaking in to the house and they are insecure but they are too weak for me to leech from. There are actually more secured than insecure which I thought was interesting. Seems that the days of the ignorant wifi sharing rube are reaching an end. People are actually reading their router manuals and setting a password. Of course if you are cool you just leave it open but only allow your MAC address to use it. Oy Glayvin.

Question: Is the christmas video of the kid going bananas over some toy in a box in that commercial real? My father-in-law says it is. I don't think it is possible for it to be real. The toy is called something totally generic like Robomega. I suppose the toy could have been replaced digitally. The reaction just seems so over the top that it can't be genuine. Apparently it's some original video submitted to some video blooper show. Seems phony. Especially both the kids flipping out over the same thing. Kids usually don't want or care about the same thing. Plus it's a boy and a girl about 3 years apart. Why do I care? I don't know. Why do you care? Fuck you.

EDIT! It was real. HERE IS THE ORIGINAL VIDEO

So the xmas booty list for 2006. Video iPod. Jodi went overboard and bought me a gift that she knew I would dig to offset a recent series of mistakes on the gift level. She went the extra distance and got it engraved so that I couldn't return it. This shows how well she knows me. I probably would have returned it because I think Apple is coming out with a new widescreen video player soon enough that this one will be obsolete. Either way it's very cool and I spent a good portion of the evening converting my ripped movies into iPod format with iSquint. Mostly for Ace's benefit but also some movies for me. As luck would have it as I tried to watch my first video on the plane to Milwaukee today the fucking thing froze and was stuck for about 7 hours. I finally was able to get on the webz on my father-in-laws computer and figure out the "un-fuck" sequence of random button pushes to bring it back to life.

xBox360 from my mom. My mom is the big gift champion. She always comes through. I have managed to not buy or play too many games on my original xBox which I got specifically to be ready when Halo2 came out. Since Halo2 came out I have played it almost every night for at least an hour. That is pretty retarded. Anyway now I am ready for Halo 3 to come out in November. I haven't really had a chance to get too into the xBox360 because everything I wanted to do involved downloading some content and that was insanely slow. to start the madness I got Gears of War, Call of Duty 3 and NBA Live 07. the NBA game is a call back to when I gave a shit about the NBA. Before the rules cracked down on the Knicks hard fouls and before the days of televised games only involving The Lakers or Rockets or Mavs or Miami or Detroit playing "insert West Coat team here". I think the Bucks have been on National TV one time that hasn't involved a playoff game. I look forward to playing all these games when I have the time....!!!

I also received in no particular order. A Cartoon version of the 9/11 report, a calendar of Bushisms, bike clothes, new glove/mitten hybrids, sweatpants (haven't had new sweatpants in like a decade), a twinkie cookbook (this was a dig from my mom to my brother from the time that I tricked him into eating a twinkie I had filled with taco meat) and other stuff which I cannot recall at the moment but which I equally appreciated.

The only thing now is that I need to buy myself the year long Lynda,com membership with tutorial files. I am truly poor.

On the plane flight out to Milwaukee we sat behind a family which a sick kid. This girl was coughing like she had tuberculosis and she did so without covering her mouth. Not only that, her parents didn't give a shit that she was coughing out on everyone. I can only hope that she wasn't contagious because if she was it was like hyper negligent behavior. They also had a laptop that they let their kids watch some old scoobydoo cartoons on but for some reason they elected to have the DVD player controls visible the whole time. Sorry, I can figure out how to stop my DVD's without a graphic display up the whole show.

Tonight we went to the Organ Piper for dinner. We went really early. Like 6pm and it was packed like a saturday night. Literally bursting with kids and overwieght freaks. The pizza is decent. The real draw of course is the Wurlitzer organ that is expertly played by the insane kids that they hire to play it. My father-in-law was saying there is a new chain out here called Papa Murphy's where you go and pick up the pizza and bake it in your oven. They are really focused on the home based experience and how cheap it can be. Comparing a fresh cooked meal and one you bring home and eat with a $5 6 pack of miller lite seems incongruous to me. And yet it was made. As with all discussions the point was made by one in-law and then the other. They like to parrot each other. They do it seperately and together. It's very much like the fox news they love so well. The stay on message. For example my mother-in-law mentioned that they saw the Rocky movie and it was good. Not going to in an oscar but a good time and the kind of movie you can take anyone to see. About an hour later my father-in-law said almost verbatim the exact same thing to me. It's really an interesting phenomena. Jodi and I probably do it too but I haven't noticed it.

I can't be sure but I think my father-in-law just turned the heat down on the thermostat AFTER I just told him that Ace is feeling sick. In fact I heard the heater shut off. I assume he just wasn't thinking. I know for a fact that he likes to keep the house pretty ice cold at night. I was just driving his car and I noticed that he keeps it at about 66 degrees. Thats a nice temp for the summer but when it's 38 degrees out thats not so much better. Okay it's better than 38 but you get my drift.

day 2 started off shitty. On every other trip we have ever taken to milwaukee Jodi and I have taken Ace to George Webbs for a nice greasy breakfast. For some reason this trip she totally forgot that tradition and decided that we had a discussion and agreed that we were going to stay in an eat even though there was only eggs and cheese to eat. In actuality there was no discussion. I asked incredulously if we were actually staying in for breakfast and she didn't respond.

I wanted to get out the house like crazy in general due to the busy-ness of my in-laws in their manic over-preperation for the coming family festivities. There is ritual over preparing of food in massive quantities to be done and we can't help at all so I choose to get lost. We drove to the Mayfair Mall so I could go to the Apple Store and buy the travel adapter for my Video iPod. I found what I was looking for with no problem. As always my Apple Store experience was less than amazing. I have unrealistic expectations that people there will be drawn to me and my Mac zealotry. Inherently they will know that I am a mac nerd and be cool with me. Instead the employees are usually not all that knowledgeable and I end up helping customers or whatever. Not very cool.

Its not like I am not aware of my own problems. It am acutely aware of the fact that I notice stuff others don't. I am just unable to make forceful statements as to what I think needs to happen. So instead of saying "Okay, Ace just dropped that lollipop. Lets get him a new one because when we open this one it will probably be all smashed inside the wrapping." I say "Well that broke" but let Jodi pick it up and buy it for Ace and act like an asshole when it's true. Which it was. Thats also kind of what happened with the breakfast thing yesterday too. I felt it should have been obvious but instead of saying "Well I was expecting to go to george webb for breakfast because we always do" I said "you want to eat at home? whatever." See, instead of "whatever" I should have said anything else. ANYTHING!

Both nights so far i have stayed up and watched TV from the kitchen while my father-in-law sleeps on the couch. He watches history or science shows and passes out and snores like no ones business. Both nights I have changed the channel on the TV to something more interesting to me. So instead of watching a show on Australia's killer spiders I watch Conan O'Brien. Both nights, within 5-10 mins of these shows being on he wakes up and abruptly shuts the TV of with a kind of "What the hell?" Then he walks past me and turns the thermostat down.