The Final Week

The Final Week

On the Monday after Christmas, I went to fare spese at the Barnes & Noble here in Mira Mesa. It was a lot of fun--post-Christmas specials abound, and in combination with my just-renewed membership, gained me as much as 60% off some items.

For my shopping agenda, I used the gift cards people had gotten me for my birthday and Christmas. I had wanted to purchase the latest Star Wars movie, so I picked that up, as well as the 2006 Simpsons calendar, the book Freakonomics, and a Chronicles of Narnia calendar for Harold's boys.

Yesterday, Harold and I drove up to the DMV in Poway to straighten out the mess created when they didn't record the results of my eye exam in November. I quickly finished that up by retaking the exam and we (Harold, his son James and I) left the DMV within a half-hour of arriving. We spent the rest of the afternoon having fun with the Atari Flashback. Harold's kids still live in the virtual 1950s, so the Flashback's 2600-vingage games seemed newfangled to them. It was funny to watch them try to steer their tanks in two-person Combat. They didn't know how to work a joystick, so they just spun their craft around in circles, whining, "Daddy! I caaaaan't make it stop!" You may rightly believe video games to be a worthless waste of time and money, but a little hand-eye coordination is not a bad thing.

Today has been really quiet. I'm just working on writing. Tomorrow, I'll register for SD State's Writers' Conference, which takes place at the end of January.