Merry Christmas!

I hope all of you had a great Christmas. Ours was one of the best so far, I think. My best gift was just seeing the kids happy.

The new Wii is a lot of fun--it's some kind of special anniversary version that came with an extra Mario game plus the usual Sports disc. Oh yeah, and it's red. The kids are busy running Mario to death. I played quite a lot of bowling and tennis (btw, I almost look like I know what I'm doing with Wii tennis--completely the opposite of how I would look on a real tennis court), and after about the fifth round of bowling I really started wishing I had some demons or zombies or various other monsters to shoot or hack apart with a sword or something. I'm going to have to find something with a little more violence in it.

I fired up our little fireplace today, for the first time ever. It's nice. Doesn't do much to heat the house, but I still like it. I'll have to see if I can get my chainsaw working and start cutting up some of the dead wood around here.

As far as material gifts went today, I got a couple of new shirts, a new toolbox, some chocolate-covered cherries (a traditional gift for the adult males of our family, for some reason), and $50 cash. I also count the Wii as part of my own Christmas because I know I'm going to have fun playing with it, too.

I stuffed one of those pre-paid Net10 phones in my daughter's stocking. We activated it this morning and took it with us because I wanted to check its signal strength. That sucker had 5 bars solid all the way from La Vernia to Gonzales, while my T-Mobile phone is completely without signal starting around Stockdale until just outside Gonzales. The rest of the time the best I could get was 2 or 3 bars with T-Mobile. The Net10 phone lost its signal completely for a little while around the Nockenut area on 1681 on the way back (alternate route because I wanted to see if it had a signal back there in the boonies) but it just beat T-Mobile all to h***. I think I'm going to be switching mine and my wife's phones to Net10 also.

By the way, the reason we use T-Mobile is because way back in the olden days when we first got cell phones, back when T-Mobile was Voicestream and Jamie Lee Curtis did their commercials, that was the only company that got any coverage out here at all. We had tried AT&T before that but their coverage out here sucked--I actually had to stand on the roof of my truck one time to get a signal for a semi-emergency. Even now I have to stand next to a window to use my cell phone at home, and then I only get 2 bars and have to stand on the east side of the house or it goes completely dead. My daughter can go anywhere in the house with hers and get 5 bars.

And Happy New Year!