a new and glorious morn

Christmas was good times with family friends.

some highlights -

- Christmas Eve at a relative's house. Gradually getting better at karaoke (apparently being loud is most important points-wise). I TOTALLY ROCKED "EDELWEISS" AND EVERYONE SANG ALONG

- Christmas morning: so I haven't had the spare cash to buy good chocolate for a long time...but today I got 3 Valhrona bars! yessssss
as well as a PC movie editing system (anything is better than Windows Movie Maker) and Brian Azzarello's Joker graphic novel. Opened the box of genmaicha (matcha -a.k.a. green tea- and brown rice) packets I bought a few days ago. That tea turned out great.
Church had a really cool Nativity scene, with a manger made of palm tree fronds. Here's a picture.
lol there are so many palm trees here, might as well make use of the greenish fronds that fall

- Christmas afternoon and evening: went to the home of some family friends, where we usually spend Christmas. Lots of good food. For a while, I had been craving good persimmons but wasn't able to buy or obtain (a building at school had a bunch free but they had gone dry) any. But someone brought a bunch of persimmons to the party, and they left a ton over so I was able to take a good amount home. score.
Also got some good stuff like movie theater certificate money.

The little girl there got a Disney princess vanity for Christmas. What was particularly interesting was that the vanity and all its accessories doubled as musical intruments. Picture here. For example, the vanity itself became a keyboard (needed batteries to play though). The eye makeup was a harmonica and the lipstick a whistle. That's so strange it's brilliant. It's nice to see that they thought they had to add something else to sell the makeup toys to girls. Broadening horizons, one cracky product at a time.

I also ended up playing with the toy train set. The older (like, 50-ish) men also played with it too while talking. Train set toys are just that classic.
I took some pictures with the little toy robot there.

I'm still not great at Halo (3), but I did get to splatter and shoot a bunch of online people with a Mongoose, so I felt accomplished.

Later, I got sucked into rewatching the entirety of Be Kind Rewind with our friend Dominic. That movie always makes me teary-eyed at the end, argh, because it's about ~the power of movies~ and that's my dream. yeah.
My brother and I later showed some of the Kick-Ass trailers and we said maybe we can see it together when he's on break from college.


After getting home and taking a 3-hour food comagas pain nap, I woke up, ate some of my chocolate, and made myself a chai latte with the powdered mix I got from Walmart a week ago. Took a look around the kitchen. We have a lot of good food around. Great food possibilities too, mwhahahahahaha

Now I really want to plan a dinner for some reason. Cook and make drinks for everyone. After this, I'm checking out the recipes I bookmarked from tumblr.
I also want to make a short movie. Probably with my stuffed animals. My photo camera's video capabilities may be limited, but at least I have something that can shoot video.


Also, CHECK OUT MY SOLSTICE SPECIAL I POSTED
It was too much for LJ to handle, so I had to break it into two parts:
Part 1
Part 2


so now I'll check those recipes and make a little progress on my tumblr backlog before I go to sleep. Tomorrow, I guess I become British, because I'll obtain the Doctor Who "End of Time" (DO NOT SPOIL ME as well as watch a Boxing Day match wait nevermind Arsenal isn't playing? or are my streaming sites wrong?


ETA: I totally forgot - on Christmas Eve afternoon, I started randomly doing crochet after a year or two of not crocheting anything (not that I was great when I did it). I started doing random stuff and had the loose goal of making an asymetrical triangle. Instead, I made a tree. I WAS UNCONSCIOUSLY GUIDED BY THE SPIRT OF CHRISTMAS