A family Christmas, a little late

[robotech_master]

It is a novel experience lying in bed with an unplugged laptop on my lap, typing without the worry that my battery might run out within about thirty seconds of unpluggedness. Even now I'm having a hard time fighting the urge to leap out of bed, grab the cables out of the laptop bag, and hastily plug them into the wall.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Sunday evening, those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook will know, my brother Aaron picked me up in the "Chef Bus"—the short bus that he and his wife Karen bought for their ever-growing family (four kids plus a dog, and a fifth kid on the way), so named because Karen is a Pampered Chef dealer—and we trucked on down to the parents' home out in the southwest Missouri countryside for a slightly-late Christmas celebration. We watched the first two Wallace and Gromit shorts on the way down, during which time we took a bit of a wrong turn and ended up having to cut across back country roads to get back on course.

Most of Monday was spent playing Rock Band with me, Aaron and Karen, and various of their four kids: 8 year old Aeris, 7 year old Guinevere, 5 year old Rowan, and 4 year old Griffin. I hadn't expected to enjoy it as much as I did. I was just positive there was no way I would be able to hit enough of the notes to do any good, so I restricted myself to singing at first, only later branching out into bass and then, this morning, the guitar. (My one try at drums was a remarkably poor showing. I guess I just don't have the knack.)

As Aaron put it, the game combines everyone's desire to sing along with everyone's other desire to play air guitar. The way that you are rewarded for hitting the right buttons by hearing the notes play makes it feel like you are actually "doing something," even if all it is is punching buttons. And the natural inclination to dance as you get into the groove gives you a little exercise, too. Now I find myself wanting a PS3 and instrument set, though I know that would cost considerably more than I would usually be willing to shell out even if I had a job. But still, it has been a long time since I have had quite that much fun.

Alex and his wife Rachael arrived Monday night, and Tuesday was when we had our big Christmas present opening day. I wasn't really looking forward to it too much; to tell the truth I didn't really care much. I knew I probably wouldn't be getting anything really good. I had a few books and movies and things on my wish list, even a few e-book titles from Baen and others, but nothing that would set my world on fire if I got it. And I couldn't afford to give anyone else much of anything this year, so I wouldn't get to see them open my presents either.

I noticed something odd as the presents were handed out: there weren't any for me. I didn't really mind so much. I just thought Dad had forgotten, as he sometimes had in the past, and anticipated a little amusement when he remembered his mistake. I even whispered to Aaron and Alex that I was waiting to see how long it would be before he noticed.

Then they brought out a big long box, and had me open it. And son of a gun, if it wasn't a brand new MSi A5000 media-edition laptop. 15" 16:9 screen, Windows 7 home edition, the works. Karen even threw in a 12' HDMI cable, which she obtained at an obscene discount since she's an employee of a certain well-known big box store. And I was stunned.

When it came to laptops, I had gotten used to settling. The first one I owned was in college in the early '90s: one of the original IBM PC laptops, with no hard drive, two floppy drives, and an 80 by 15 (?) character monochrome LCD screen. It was old even then. The next one I had was a Wallstreet II Powerbook, in the early to mid 2000s, at which time it was about as old as that PC had been when I'd gotten it. And then finally, last year or so, I bought an old Toshiba Satellite from my then-place-of-employment in a used-equipment sale and installed Linux on it. All I really cared about was something I could use to read the web, my e-mail, write, and pop open a shell session to my Linux box for running my text-mode chat apps.

If my Satellite was prone to kernel panicking if I let it sleep, or had no working battery so I could only use it where I could plug in, I just figured it was the best I could do and dealt with it. A real laptop computer wasn't even on the horizon for me. The $99 Cherrypal I wrote about earlier was the closest I expected to be able to come.

And then…this. I still can't believe it.

Anyway, this morning we played more Rock Band 2, then packed it up after lunch and Aaron and Karen drove me back up to Springfield on their way to St. Louis. We stopped at the big box store briefly for Aaron and Karen to buy things (including a laptop bag for me), then they dropped me and my stuff off and were again on their way. Along the way we watched the other two Wallace & Gromits, then a couple of episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender that the kids picked out ("Sokka's Master" and "The Southern Raiders").

After being dropped off, I fiddled around some more with my new computer, ate the dinner plate that my parents fixed me from leftovers from yesterday's big Christmas dinner (sigh, it will be months before I see its like again), and finally showered and clambered into bed here.

Now it's time to close this entry and get to bed. Tomorrow I will be going out and about, including stopping by a coffeehouse or two to try out this new laptop on their wifi.

I still can't believe it's mine. This is one of the best Christmas presents I've ever gotten.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I'm really happy for you. That's a lovely story and it cheered me up no end. I'm glad you had a really good (if belated) Christmas, and that next year is much) better than this one.