Day 10: Marion Raven

Here's another of one of my recent favorite singers, Marion Raven. She's Norwegian and was one half of a former pop girl group called M2M. She kinda reminds me of Avril Lavigne.

Day 9: These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

Okay, seriously. Why is this song considered to be a Christmas song? Julie Andrews lists a bunch of different items that make her happy. A couple of them make a reference to winter, but there is nothing that connects the song to Christmas. So why must we be subjected to another annoying song, especially when it has nothing to do with Christmas?

Anyway, here are a few of my favorite things:

Optimus Prime
Alyson Hannigan
A comfortable bed
Putting on socks that are fresh out of the dryer
Mom's macaroni & cheese
Watching Transformers in IMAX
Seeing a favorite singer in concert
A full day of skiing
Putting on sneakers after a full day of skiing
Having my car pass inspection without any work being required
Finding a really old coin
Carving a new stamp and putting it in my logbook for the first time
Randomly quoting lines from Monty Python and someone following suit
The color blue
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Owning someone in a game of Killer Bunnies
Pepe LePew cartoons
Halloween
Lying in the outfield at Holman Stadium during the 4th of July fireworks
The opening scene of X-2: X-Men United
Roast beef sandwiches from Bentley's
The country of Morocco
Collecting keychains from around the world
Stepping outside after a snowstorm, but before the snowplows have gone by

Day 8: Christmas List 2010

There is no Christmas List for this year. I do not see a point in maintaining a list. I won't be celebrating this year. Seeing as how I will be alone on December 25 this year, I won't be putting up any decorations. I won't be buying any gifts. I'm not asking for any gifts. I am going to do the same thing that I did last year. Instead of buying gifts for people, I am going to be donating that money to charity. I ask everyone to do the same for me. Instead of buying me something, donate the money to a charity. I don't care which one. Red Cross, Breast Cancer Awareness, the local homeless shelter, the preservation of Victorian architecture. I don't care. Something you care about.

I will be donating to the Free the Slaves charity this year. I read an article about modern slavery in a recent issue of Reader's Digest. It's tragic that there are more slaves in the world today than any other period in human history.

Yes, I will be alone on Christmas. My parents have left for a trip to Sudan. Their church is supporting a church growth effort over there, and my parents have gone to provide supplies and services for the people. They will be gone until the second week of January. I am here to work and take care of the house and feed the cat in their absence.

It's not like I'll be missing anything. Sorry to any family members who read this post, but our Christmases are very boring. At 9am we gather for the only family breakfast in the entire year. at 9:30 we gather around the tree. My mother makes the same joke that I should play Santa Claus and hand out the presents. The opening of the presents goes until 10am at which point Christmas is virtually over. I usually go back to bed or surf the web. At around 3pm I remember that there's a marathon of A Christmas Story going on, so I sit down to watch that.

No decorations will be going up. The only festive thing I did was bring out some game pieces I repainted with Santa Claus outfits. That took all of two minutes.

My parents have done this before. Left for Sudan for the holidays while I stayed behind. That year was particularly hard for me. I saw no one all day on Christmas. I didn't even see Gaylin. He probably didn't want to hear me pissing and moaning about being alone on Christmas. I think I went out to the movies that day. The Phantom of the Opera, I think.

As of right now, I have received several offers of hospitality. Some from family members. Some from friends. One from one of my co-workers. A couple from people at church.

It's encouraging to think that there are people who don't want me to be alone on Christmas. But I really don't know what I'll actually do. As of December 8th, it's not that big of a deal. But I know myself enough to know that it could get worse the closer we get to the 25th. The feeling of loneliness that I'm feeling right now could deepen, causing me to spiral and become more depressed. Then on the 25th I won't want to be with anyone.

I mean, I'm getting more depressed as I write about it. Dammit. Sometimes I think I'm a glutton for sorrow. I should probably stop now before this gets any worse.

I'll close with a picture of my repainted Christmas game pieces.

Day 7: Lucy Woodward

I recently discovered the singer named Lucy Woodward. She started out doing pop songs. She never really made it big. Her second album was sort of a mix of jazz, swing and pop. Her third album recently came out and it's pretty much all jazz, blues and swing. I don't really like jazz music, despite my self-appointed nickname. But I really like her style. She's sexy without being trashy. A little more burlesque. I saw her in concert once in Cambridge, MA. I even met her and got her autograph.

Here's a video of her most recent hit. It is steamy-hawt!

Day 6: Taking Up a Collection

I like finding old coins. I think that they're neat. There is so much history that comes attached to them. Of course, I'll never know that history. But it's interesting to speculate about it.

The ones that I like are the ones that are older than I am. I am always on the look out for coins that are from 1940 and earlier. They have been used for so many different purposes and traveled to so many different locations.

It would be so neat to track a penny back through time to find out where it has been and what it was used to purchase. There is a website that tracks paper money. It's called www.wheresgeorge.com. You may sometimes see dollar bills with the message "Track This Bill" stamped onto it. I used to be a member, but I haven't logged on to the site in years.

I only collect the coins that I find in the world. In a cash register, as loose change, off the ground, etc. I never go to coin collector shows. To me, found coins are worth more than bought coins.

I will sometimes keep other coins, as well. Every once in a while, I will find a foreign coin in the registers at work. I'm not talking about Canadian currency; I see those all the time. I've found coins from Jamaica, England and Ireland to name a few. There are also some souvenir coins that have no monetary value.

My collection probably isn't worth much more than how much money is there. But it's worth it to me. When I leave this mortal coil, I would have no objection to someone putting the coins back into circulation. That's my whole fascination with the coins. Their history. And when they rejoin circulation, their history will increase.

Day 5: Cinema Sticks

This past September I organized a letterboxing event here in Nashua. The theme for the event was cinematic history. A fairly simple theme for my first event. I carved a series of stamps that showed famous scenes from different movies, as depicted by stick figures. For the event, there were a total of fifteen. Since then I have added more stamps to the series because I keep coming up with new ideas.

Try and see how many of them you can guess:

Day 4: The Saga of the DVD

This past week I bought myself a Blu-Ray player. I've been wanting to get one for a few years, but they've always been pretty expensive. For a little while, the cheapest way to get one was to get a Playstation 3 which could read Blu-Ray discs. On Black Friday of this year, I bought a new HDtv. Samsung, 32", 720p. The price was pretty cheap. And with prices this low, I finally caved in and bought myself the player.

The purchase was pretty uneventful. Unlike the time I bought my first DVD player...

I don't know what year it was, but DVDs were still relatively new. VHS was still the better seller. The prices had come down enough for the DVD players. There was one movie that I really wanted to watch on that format. It was Dark City and it was one of my absolute favorite movies. Still is. So one night I drove down to the local Target store. I didn't know much about brand names, so I bought an RCA model player after about twenty minutes of hemming and hawing about which model to get and if I really need a DVD player. I also purchased a copy of Dark City on DVD because I needed something to watch on my brand new player.

I brought it home with me and brought it into my bedroom. I opened the box and hooked it up to my tv which I had bought a couple months earlier for about $50 at WalMart. I turned it on but got nothing. I tried changing the channel on the tv to channel 3 because that's how all VCRs worked. Nothing. I tried every channel. I couldn't get anything. After translating the instruction manual into something resembling the English language, I discovered that the TV needed to have an AUX channel in order for the DVD player to work. My cheap-o TV that I got from WalMart didn't have one!

I was at an impasse. I couldn't watch movies on my new DVD player because my TV didn't have an AUX channel. I sighed and thought, Fine. I'll wait to get a new TV. My parents' TV was dying and its picture had a bright green tint. I made an offer to them; I would buy a new tv, and they would get my old one. They agreed. I decided to wait about a week to get a new TV.

Well, it never works that way with me. A few days later I had grown impatient and needed to watch something with my new DVD player. That night I drove down to south Nashua and went into Best Buy. After much deliberating I settled on a nice 18" Samsung TV. I brought it out to the car. Much to my dismay, I found out that I could not get it into my car, a 1986 Toyota Camry. No matter how much I twisted and turned the box, it would not go in. Back seat, front seat, trunk. It just was not happening.

Parked next to me was a lady with a minivan. Unbeknownst to me, she was watching my efforts and escalating frustrations. She came over and stated the obvious that I was never going to get the TV into the car. We discussed options for a little bit, and she offered to put the TV into her van and follow me home. It was risky, me letting her put my new TV in her van. She could drive off in the other direction, making me $130 stupider. But she was a good Samaritan and helped me out. She followed me home with my TV, even though it was ten minutes out of her way. I offered her some compensation but she declined.

Now my TV was home. I had to struggle to get it into my room because the box was so damn big. I tried to hook up my DVD player to the brand new TV. Imagine my ire when I discovered that I couldn't. The TV had a Mono Sound System. I needed a Stereo Sound System! The cord that connected the two devices had three prongs. The TV only had room for two. I chose the wrong TV!

Suffice it to say that I was extremely pissed off at this point. After letting loose with a stream of choice four-letter words, I was still determined to get it right. I checked the time. It was about 9:15pm. There might be time to return the TV and get a new one. But I didn't want to go through the fiasco with the too-small Camry again. Thankfully, I still had my old car. It was a 1985 Ford Mustang with a hatchback. I was sure that the TV would fit in back.

There was one problem. It was the dead of winter and I hadn't driven my old car for a while. It was parked to the side of the driveway, deeply embedded in the snowbank. And at that point, the snowbank had turned to mostly ice. I got out the shovel and started to chip away at the bank. Thankfully it was not solid ice, just snowflakes that had iced over. I was able to wiggle the car out after about fifteen to twenty minutes of shoveling, chopping and general mining. I was definitely impressed that the car started, especially after being in the freezing cold and not being driven in quite a while.

I packed up the tv and loaded it into the Mustang and drove back down to Best Buy. I got there about ten minutes before it closed. I returned the TV and went in search of a new one. At this point I knew what I needed. In order for the DVD player to work, the TV needed to have an AUX channel and a Stereo Sound System. I found a 19" Samsung TV that had those requirements, and it was $10 cheaper than the previous TV! Things seemed to be looking up for the first time.

I brought the TV home and pushed it into my room. I hooked it up to my DVD player. I changed the channel to AUX.

And I got nothing.

I couldn't explain it. I wasn't getting anything. I rechecked all my connections. Checked the plug. Nothing. Not a damn thing was happening. At that point, all the energy drained out of me. I had no more fight left. I couldn't go back to the store because everything was closed. There was no way I was going to watch Dark City. I hypothesized that the reason I could get any satisfactory results was due to compatibility. The DVD player was an RCA brand. The TV was from Samsung. I reached the final decision to just get the same brand name devices. But I was not going to go through the hassle of returning and buying a third TV. This time I would switch the DVD player.

A couple of nights later, I packed up the DVD player and loaded it into my car. Then I ventured out in the middle of a snowstorm. I drove back down to Target and returned the player. I bought a new one, a Samsung brand this time.

I brought it home, hooked it up to my Samsung TV and--Hallelujah!-- it worked! I sat back to enjoy Dark City on DVD for the first time!

Now whenever I buy a new device to watch movies and such, I make sure that the brand is Samsung. Not because I trust it over any other brand, but because I don't want to go through the hassle of dealing with any incompatibilities.