Courtland Christmas

Another year, another Christmas. The Courtland Christmas activities are as follows: On Christmas Eve we see a matinee at the local theater. This year we saw the Chronicles of Narnia, which was awesome and quite appropriate to see at Christmastime. We then head home to do some last minute gift wrapping and my father and I trim the Christmas tree while my mom gets our Christmas Eve buffet underway. We tend to have sandwiches, dips, and little frankfuters. This year we also had Swedish meatballs. Once we all fill our plates we put on National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation which is a great movie - one that still holds up after all these years. Finally, we gather around the tree and give each other one gift. The remaining gifts wait until Christmas morning.

On Christmas morning we open all of our remaining gifts. This is my dog's favorite part of the holiday as he loves opening gifts. He's not content to open just his gifts and will jump at any gift that we start to open. He's really not interested in what's inside, he just loves ripping the wrapping paper to shreds. Bless his heart.

Since I know most of you are more interested in what I got for Christmas, here's my collected list of gifts received from various individuals:

• Sweater, shirt, GAP gift certificate (Damn Sexy)
  
• Assorted 2006 calendars (keeping track of pay days)
  
• Holiday popcorn tin (just because)
  
• Cash (wouldn't you like to know how much!)
  
• Two scarves (Damn Sexy)
  
• Steamer (for my veggies)
  
• 20 piece kitchen utensil set (my roomate stole all my forks)
  
• The Art of Dramatic Writing (I'm writing a novel)
  
• Harrington on Hold'Em, Vol. 2 (I like Hold'Em)
  
• Spider-Man 2 (Spidey is the Man)
  
• Star Wars Episode III (the 2nd half is much better)
  
• Star Wars Battlefront II (seems slightly better than the first)
  

What did you get?

The Name's Bond...

You scored as James Bond, Agent 007. James Bond is MI6's best agent, a suave, sophisticated super spy with charm, cunning, and a license to kill. He doesn't care about rules or regulations and is somewhat amoral. He does care about saving humanity though, as well as the beautiful women who fill his world. Bond has expensive tastes, a wide knowledge of many subjects, and his usually armed with a clever gadget and an appropriate one-liner.

James Bond, Agent 007		71%
Maximus		54%
William Wallace		46%
Neo, the "One"		46%
Lara Croft		42%
Indiana Jones		42%
The Terminator		38%
Captain Jack Sparrow		33%
El Zorro		33%
Batman, the Dark Knight		29%
The Amazing Spider-Man		29%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

PTQ and MVP

Saturday was my big day. It was the first day that I head judged a Magic PTQ and also the first day where I was the highest level Magic judge working an event (the buck stopped with me baby). It was an extended format PTQ, just like last month's, so there wasn't anything new in that respect. However, after the last PTQ everybody realized that a lot of decks stand a chance to win and so we had a whopping 146 players. That's 8 rounds of Swiss and a ton of work for just me and one Level 1 judge to handle. Fortunatley, I had help from the non-judging part of my staff (mega thanks to Mark, Don, Mike, and Ray). In summary, the event went exceedingly well. There were no disasters, no misrulings made (as far as I could tell) and most importantly of all, I didn't have to disqualify anyone.

Sunday was another big day for me as I got some serious time back in goal for my soccer club. Unfortunately we started out with a fitness test which had us sprinting back and forth between cones with the speed picking up after each round of three sprints. After I broke my finger in August, my regular running regiment went to hell, so when this test was announced I was less than thrilled. After two of the run levels had passed I realized that I had been on my feet for 14 hours the day before (the abovementioned PTQ) and it normally takes me several days to recover from that sort of thing. Well, not suprisingly I did a few more laps of running and I literally couldn't feel my calves anymore. No lactic acid buildup, no siezing, I just couldn't feel them at all and had to sit down. So that got me a bit depressed, especially since I was the first to drop from my group. Later on I was just plain pissed as the coach tried to maintain that the running exercise was 70% mental. That is pure nonsense. Sprinting is no joke. My friend Chris form lab is a runner and he and anyone else will tell you that you have to work at improving your lactic acid threshold. There's nothing you can do when you reach the threshold - your legs will sieze up and that's the end of that.

Still, it was great to be in goal again and the coach was there this time, so I got lots of tips throughout the night. My team was struggling in the beginning, but by the end of the night we were on fire and I had a ton of great saves (so I'm told). At the end of the evening, the coach came over to me and said I was clearly the MVP of the night's practice. Not bad for someone with no formal training in goalkeeping, huh? Or maybe she just made me MVP to make me feel better about my abysmal fitness performace. Either way, I guess it's time for this fat ass to head to the gym and get to work on "mentally" dropping some pounds.

New Toy

I tend to not buy expensive things for myself unless I really really need them. A case in point is my tendency to hold onto laptops for almost a decade. And let's not forget that I still have my 14" TV/VCR unit that I got for Christmas 9 years ago. Not too long ago I decided to splurge and bought a digital camera. I must say I am loving it and it reminded me that I really like toys. Well, I've gone and bought a new toy. It's a Dell Axim X51v Handheld PDA. The main reason I got it was because I wished I had one when I was judging Grand Prix Philly. The format was Legacy and all the cards had been given errata which forced me to run to the front of the hall and look up card texts all weekend. But those days are now gone! I'm also looking forward to using the calendar function - I've reached the point where I have so many activities going on each month that I can't keep track of them by memory. I'm still amazed that I've reached this point in my life. Am I old now? At any rate, the Axim is super cool. It allows synching with files on my laptop and it has built-in Bluetooth so I can tap into wireless networks and surf the web and check email. Sweeeeet.