reader's digest does chris's christmas vacation

hrm. current events are rather routine... the highlights are basically:

1. i went up to the mountain (crans-montana) with thomas and RK on sunday, and there was actually enough snow to go out, and we had a great time skiing/snowboarding.

2. last week i basically got my ass handed to me in karate class again. which is kinda silly, since we're not even really fighting---they just decided to do a suprise test on the memorized formal sequences, of which of course i remember basically nothing. my short term memory for repeating something you show me? pretty decent. instantaneous long-term recall? not bloody likely.

3. last night i went with krister to alex's yoga class that he's starting. he actually does a really good job. that doesn't change the fact that it feels weird breaking the whole "never do business with friends or relatives" rule, but at the same time i'm happy to be helping him out a little. and, yet again, it re-affirms my ever-present and yet still unacted-upon desire to be practicing more frequently (like, daily, in the ideal case). incidentally, i have been going to bed earlier---austensibly with the intention of getting up earlier and practicing (or even just getting up earlier)---though all that's really happened so far is that i get more sleep and wake up at around the same time as usual. i suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing either, but i'm a little disappointed just the same. anyway, afterwards last night, tia made a quick dinner for the four of us, and we sat around and chatted for a bit. always nice.

okay, got the recent stuff up to date. let's try to tackle some of my ridiculous "vacation." (is it still considered a vacation if it's nearly as taxing as being at work?)

lessons learned:

1. air france operated by air france, quite nice (i.e. our trip to boston last spring). air france operated by delta, rather crappy (what i got this time). luckily, i got a real air france flight going back, which was again reasonably enjoyable. but compared with delta, the continental flights i had been taking were even much nicer...

2. i do have to give delta credit, though, for being *extremely* accomodating with the whole bereavement thing. i gave them the phone number of the funeral director at forest lawn, and they traded me straight across my pdx->gva ticket for an lax->gva ticket three days later (no fees!). that was pretty fantastic.

3. christmas gifts went surprisingly smoothly this year, though that may have something to do with the fact that i probably spent way too much (there were easy big-ticket items that i knew would be appreciated, so i just jumped on it).

4. i desperately need to go back on my diet, and once i do, i need to stop making "exceptions" for vacations (i gained 15 pounds in the three weeks i was back; unbelievable).

5. even though you think the hard part is over once you finally find an available game console that you had been staking out the stores for, the real challenge is having to continue staking out the stores in order to subsequently find the additional controllers and accessories. [rolls eyes]

6. it is, apparently, possible to form a stable suspension of mangy cat hair in stale air and cigarette smoke. (cleaning out edna's apartment was a rather harrowing experience.) in slightly more lighthearted news, though, i guess i've been put in charge of having tom's old mechanical clock restored, which frankly is very cool.

7. funerals cost a ridiculous amount of money. tom's parents had already paid for the plots, and we fought tooth and nail with finley's to do everything as simple and inexpensive as possible, and it still added up to somthing more than $6,500. note to anyone who cares: when i die, have the state dispose of my body, and buy yourselves something nice with all that money. better yet, see if you can sell my organs on the black market and buy yourselves something even nicer with all that additional money...

8. despite some legitimate ancestral ties, OSX is not UNIX. in particular, i learned that apple's new abomination which calls itself the "netinfomanager" is in reality nothing more than an equivalently evil (if outwardly whitewashed) version of the windows registry. and it is every bit as unusable and inscrutible. regardless of how frustrated that makes me, i'm still very happy that i got mom and dad the three year service plan (the mac mini was just a side benefit; i was actually buying the service plan so they'd stop wasting money taking computers in to get fixed by idiots). hopefully i'll eventually be able to put together the configuration i had originally envisioned, but at least their happy with it for the moment as is.

9. sad occasion notwithstanding (uncle chet's funeral), it was really fantastic to see some so-cal friends again. jon, adam, mike, dave&co, joe... conspicuously absent was the boy (doug), but nothing can be perfect, right?

10. regardless of one's views on the whole "global warming" issue, things are indeed getting warmer at least over the short term history of my memory. i mean, my god, i remember winter being mild in los angeles, but i don't remember it being like the middle of freaking june! i swear to stalin, it was like 70 and sunny basically the whole time i was there. amazing.

11. an oxy friend decided to take me out to the range and teach me how to shoot. that was, well, an "interesting" (read: "terrifying") experience. mostly because the people one sees at a shooting range are just really fucking scary (on multiple levels). but i eventually started to get the hang of it. the last 5 of my third clip with the .45 i hit every time (and then wisely quit while i was ahead [smirk]). the rifles weren't much easier, though that might have been because we didn't spend a very long time calibrating them. oh, and the wind was pretty wild too, though that's likely just a lame excuse (i have no idea how much, if at all, wind would actually be able to affect something that heavy moving that fast).

12. and last but not least, (i should have known this already based on previous experiences, but i guess i'm still a slow learner) one should be *very* wary of returning to visit one's alma mater. it's never the same, and i seriously doubt that it ever gets better. seriously, i almost cried when i saw what they had done to the south houses. and the fact that they apparently deliberately 'prolonged' the construction just enough that only a maximum of **one term** of current students had ever even seen the old houses just makes me sick. okay, i'm going to leave it at that so that i don't get all emotional all over again.

well, that's probably not the best travelog ever, but it's better than nothing. if i think of anything important that i left out, i'll add it in later.