Well, we've almost made it another week, huh?  Good news indeed.  And next week is short, given the whole Christmas and Boxer Day (for my friends outside the US) sort of "plunked" in the middle of the week.

I personally have Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off.  That's all... I'll work Monday, Thursday and Friday.  But it will be a good time to be at work, because the office will be quiet.  I should get a lot done.

Tonight was kinda cool.  Mark picked me up from work on his way to Austin.  We were going to the monthly dinner with the Bears, and the going was stressful.  I-35 is no fun around five o'clock, and it took a long time to get there, but actually, we made pretty darn good time.

Anyway, we get to the restaraunt where we were supposed to go, and lo and behold, no Bears.  This location was selected two months ago, and I had checked the calendar just this very afternoon, and this is where we were supposed to be.

Have I mentioned that I love cell phones?  Have I?  I do.

I called an officer, and he told me that at the last moment, we had changed restaurants because that place was packed.

REALLY?  A FULL RESTAURANT ON THE THURSDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS?!  SHOCK!

Um, why didn't someone call TWO FRIGGIN' MONTHS ago and make arrangements?  Why wasn't the whole group notified in time?  Why? Why? Waaaa.

For those of you who know me in real life, you can imagine what I was like right about then.  Unbearable?  Uh huh.  But I recoginized that I was being a rant-y asshole, and to tell the truth, I was even sort of pissing myself off, so I toned it down.  A little.

And the evening turned out to be nice anyway, even if I did have to eat at some place called the Golden Corral, but which should be called Fat People At the Buffet O' Crappy Food, but it was okay.  I got to see some of my very good friends.

Afterward, we all met over near 37th street off of Guadalupe and walked around looking at Christmas lights.

Y'all, you have NO IDEA how insane this whole lighting thing is.  Austin is known for and proud of it's uniqueness, and this proves it.  This is not your traditional suburban themed light show where the cul-de-sac all decorates alike, with the same white lights and the same wooden snowmen in the yard.  Oh no... this is Austin lighting.  This is a shining (hee!  a pun!) example of what happens if you smoke pot for years, and then decide to decorate your house.  It's all... cool.  And fun.

Some of the houses had lights still in the boxes, just staplegunned to the house and plugged in.  We saw an entire tree wrapped in foil and blue lights.  We saw a house that had a train out front, with a Barney tied to the tracks like a damsel in distress.  An evil Barbie with a Jack in the Box head held the rope, laughing hysterically.  One house was cheerfully lit with flashing pentagrams and stars and moons and by God (hee! an anti-pun) Pagans can be festive, too.  And don't forget the giant, rotating dreidel.  Even cars parked in front of people's houses had lights all over them.  No immovable surface seems safe from the doped-up homeowners!

So that was fun.  I, myself, am a dope and didn't take my digital camera with me, and Mark's?  Not so good in challenging lighting situations.  But we'll see if there are any worth showing here.  I'm very into lights myself, so you may see some pictures over the next week.

Oh, yeah.  As we were all leaving, we noticed what we initially thought was a statue of an angel praying, but then we saw that she had a white container full of money, and I slowly realized that this was a real person.  Well... you know.  As real as any other performance artist.

She was all white, and really did look like a statue.  As we put money in, she changed poses a few times, and then went back to her praying pose, waiting for more money from someone else.  Judging from the electric meters humming all over the place, I'd suspect that she needed it.

One more thing:  that entry on Monday?  The one where I bemoaned my Christmas spirit not being around?  Yeah.  Walk around Austin looking at awesome lighting displays and see if your hear doesn't grow two sizes that day.  I recommend some peppermint schnapps ice cream from Amy's right beforehand.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Totally off-topic comment, but your name came up at last night's Weblogger meetup. We've decided that the online journal community is overly vigilant (and sometimes violent) about insisting on a difference between "online journals" and "blogs." We argued that in most cases they are one and the same.

You were mentioned as one of those people who could act as a liason between the warring factions.

Could you help us navigate those waters and understand what the "other side" sees as the difference?

Link to my badly written wrap-up

and the link was supposed to be:

http://www.davidnunez.org/blog/archives/000229.html#000229

Thanks!

I like how you know that your good friends are Fat People At the Buffet O' Crappy Food.

:-)