Merry Christmas!

I have gotten my overkill of holiday cheer for the last 2 days.

Christmas eve my sister in law has her sisters (and their kids) over for a "take-out pot luck". What is a take out pot luck? Everyone brings over some of their favorite take out food (except my sister in law who has to do barbecue meatballs). Mostly the kids play video games, and the adults talk. My brother and I are the odd men out, but no one seems to care. Gifts are exchanged and then my nieces and nephews are ducted taped to nestled in bed. I usually drop my gifts off that night as well.

Christmas day is spent over at my brother's house. I head over there in the morning so we can open gifts. In addition to my Secret Santa gift I got a shop vac (needed with my new furnace) and a 2 pound summer sausage from Hickory Farms. The sausage has been something of a running joke with my family. I am the only one who likes them, and this time of year my brother usually manages to find some dirt cheap. Now usually it is the smaller ones and I eat about half to 2/3 of it before it turns bad (yes, summer sausage can turn bad). The only time I have finished a summer sausage before it turned green and moldy was when I chopped it up to include in a chef salad for a week.

Pickings may have seemed a bit slim for me this year, but that is ok. I know my brother got slammed with expenses this year and I would rather he spend his money on the kids than me. Plus, frankly, I do not have a lot of room at my house for stuff. I try to be selective on what I let in, even CD & DVD wise anymore. I am going to be going through another round of purging this winter, but even then I may have to dump some CDs and DVDs just because the shelves are getting full. Thing is I pretty much my music & movies are the ones that I really want. There maybe a few I could dump. Maybe an iPod would help.

I also wanted to mention an article in the Denver Post (reprinted in my local paper) about Monster Cable's over zealous pursuit of a trademark. I was disgusted by this. Seems that anyone who is in any way using the term Monster in a business sense is getting sued, even when there is absolutely no way that there would be confusion between Monster Cable and the other company. The biggest WTF I had was Disney getting sued for "Monsters, Inc". I am going to try and put this in as many people's ears as I can because I think these people need to be stopped.