For x-mas this year, kat and I went to minnesota to visit her aunt’s family. This marks two years in a row where I haven’t been with the family over the holiday. Last year, kat and I passed on the x-mas thing altogether and went to vegas (now that’s a holiday!). It really is nice to make it through the entire holiday without having to worry about driving anywhere. Driving to oklahoma around x-mas is the biggest pain in the ass in the world. And then there’s the decisions on which houses to visit on x-mas. Seeing my dad and stepmom is always awesome, but seeing my mom is an extreme pain in the ass. And the gift giving, that’s also a nightmare. It’s easy to shop for the family that I like and make an effort to see on a regular basis, but the “holiday” relatives? How am I supposed to buy a present for people that I don’t even know. Let alone the fact that they’re much older than me, which already means it’s going to be difficult to buy them anything. They’re over 40 years old, if you haven’t bought it in forty years, you probably don’t want it. But I digress on the whole gift-giving thing.

Kat’s relatives were totally awesome. They took care of our every need and fed us all sorts of tasty food. I think this is the first trip I’ve gone on where I’ve felt rested after I got back. So there’s no need for a vacation from my vacation. It’s a nice feeling. It still doesn’t affect my insomnia though. That’s still an ongoing drama (as you may tell by the timestamp on this post). The cold was something else though. I really expected it to be a lot worse than it was, but really I think that once you hit a certain temperature, your body just hits a threshold and it just really hurts. -5, -20 it really didn’t feel different, it just hurt really bad and I wanted to get out of it as soon as possible. We didn’t have to endure it much though. We only left the house once during the whole trip, to go to the Mall of America. Not much to say about it; it was definitely the largest mall I’ve ever been in and it’s pretty cool that there is an amusement park in the middle, but all in all there really isn’t a whole lot to say about it.

I had some other nonsense to comment on, but I’m totally getting distracted by a kick ass acting performance by “The Boz” Brian Bosworth (Second link, it’s just too good! and probably NSFW - (not safe for work - for you non-farkers out there)). Stone Cold is a fantastic movie. I have no idea why it wasn’t up for a Single Oscar in 1991 (it must have been that damn “Silence of the Lambs” bullshit. “It rubs the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again.” Maybe Silence of the Lambs is a better movie than stone cold, but the Boz was stone cold before the Steve Austin dreamed about getting in the ring with The Ultimate Warrior.

Oh yeah, one last thing. Kat’s uncle told me about zappos.com, an online shoe store. Now I can continue my infatuation with shoes from the comfort of my own home. Their selection is unmatched by anything I’ve ever seen before. I’m going to be buying some shoes from there in the next few days, so I’ll have to post a report of how it went afterward.