Christmas Vacation

Don’t think I got a chance to say it earlier, but HAPPY NEW YEAR!

My Christmas vacation comes to an end tomorrow when I head back to Seattle. It’s been a fun 2 weeks. Spent most of my time sleeping and eating and relaxing. Didn’t really get anything that interesting for Christmas, but I did get myself a TomTom GO 700 Portable GPS Navigation during the American Express My Wishlist promotion for $300 (with a potential $100 rebate). It’s pretty neat, though I find myself using that screen to drive instead of looking out the windshield when I was playing with it. It has that 3D mode and it feels like I’m driving in a video game. Other stuff I got included some gift cards, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, some new clothing, and this really cool dragon puzzle thingy (picture to come later).

I also hung out with a bunch of friends during this vacation. SueOn and I went Christmas shopping the day after Christmas at the Citadel and the place wasn’t as crazy as I would’ve imagined. Then again, we went around 11am, so maybe all the good deals that were supposed to happened at 7am was already over.

Speaking of shopping, I went to Fry’s for the 3rd time to purchase a wireless bridge. My uncle’s setup needed a bridge to connect his Slingbox with wireless router. Searching on Fry’s.com for “bridge” resulted quite a few available wireless bridges, however I was shocked that they didn’t have any bridges available in the retail store. The closest thing they carried were wireless print servers. By default, most wireless routers don’t come with client/bridge mode. I didn’t really have time for something to be shipped, so I was contemplating if it was better to go with Ethernet through power outlets or a wireless print server. Both were $100. I ended up getting the wireless print server (Netgear WGPS606) as it had a whole bunch of extra features. I’m still shocked they didn’t carry a simple wireless bridge in the largest electronic store.

Anyway, back to meeting with friends. I met up with Ungsunghero and chilled at his new place and had dinner. It’s been a year since I’ve seen him and it was really fun catching up.

Then Decathanerd, Cari and I took a 3 day trip up to north California. Our initial intention was to visit Mechy, but he apparently had a “vague” memory of trying to booking tickets to fly home on Sunday, but ended up getting tickets for Monday because Sunday was full. It was a shame since I haven’t seen Mechy in quite a long time and was hoping to see him again this trip. We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and saw tons of cool fishes and stuff. Decathanerd was testing out his new Nikon 10MP digicam which took some really nice pictures. My pictures will be uploaded shortly (probably when I get back, since my upload speed here sucks). We also met up with some friends and played on Cari’s new Nintendo Wii. It was really fun. Now if I can just find a deal… We visited Berkeley on our last day to check out the new buildings. Unfortunately we visited Berkeley on New Year’s Eve and due to our unfortunate luck, every place we wanted to go to was close (i.e. Student store, Sweet Hearts, gellato place, Quickly, Yogurt Park).

We got back around 10ish and I met up with some Mark Keppel friends to break into the new year. JoeHK, DNG, Kyle, Glendia, LilSneezy, MMouse, Vvorivi, Ohfuee, Norybic and I all counted down and cheered with apple cider, though some had theirs spiked. We went to Garden Cafe afterwards and just chilled and chatted. We went back to Glendia’s place afterwards and basically gossiped about everything. Glendia even busted out the year book and we went through it telling stories of things I never knew.

The day after, SueOn came back from Minnesota and he tried to get a group of people to have dinner with me, but it being last minute and all, not too many people made it. Though the food at Tofu House (Korean BBQ) was really good.

Afterwards, I met up with Ohfuee, CDPlayer, and Decathanerd and we went bowling. I was rather pathetic (probably since I haven’t bowled in such a long time), I got 68 followed by 58 or something like that. It was rather disappointing. We went over to ABC Cafe and chilled till they told us that we needed to move our car and that’s when we realized it was 3am already.

I did have to apologize to GwaGwasan and LilPebbly because they had called me the previous day asking if they could come over and give me some snowballs they had made, and I ‘promised’ I called back when I got home. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do so since I came back at 3am and had totally forgotten about this the next morning. They decided to call me again and I felt really bad for having not called back. They dropped by around 10 today and gave me these cookies (called snowballs apparently) which were really good. It was like cookies with pecan nuts covered with powered sugar. Yummmm. We chatted for quite a bit and it was nice to see them again.

All in all, my break’s been great. Too bad I have to go back. 🙂

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