Well, I’m in the middle of a solid 12-day hiatus from my day job, and it’s just so extremely refreshing to not have to wake up early on a Monday.

Christmas was quite grand. I spent the majority of four days with Laura, even though she was working — I simply rode with her to work and played poker during her shifts. We did three such shifts, and I had a good time even if I didn’t fare so well at the cash games.

Laura surprised me with a Sony Reader. I’ve been looking to buy some type of ebook reader, but hadn’t yet pulled the trigger. The device is mostly great, although it does have a few minor drawbacks (mostly screen glare), I really love that I can “borrow” downloads from the Denver library and begin reading within minutes on the device. I haven’t been reading much lately, and I think the device will really make it easier for me to get back into it.

Satruday, we went out for a delicious fondue dinner in Louisville, followed by Sherlock Holmes and Nine at the movies. Sherlock Holmes was really bad, but Nine was somewhat interesting and probably the most watchable serious musical-ish movie I’ve seen in a while, if not ever.

Adam is back with me today, and will be continuously through early February. He had a good Christmas spent with his mom. I’m taking him to Omaha with me on Wednesday for a couple days. If the weather is reasonable, I’ll probably take him snowboarding this upcoming weekend after we return from Omaha.

Overall, things are really pretty great in my life, something I haven’t really been able to honestly say in many years.

New fucking decade coming up! Woot.

After a pretty lazy Thanksgiving break where I didn’t do much of anything other than sit around and eat, the past couple weeks have been a return to attempting to stay in shape.

Adam and I did karate classes four times last week, and three this week. During lunch on Thursday, I played indoor soccer with the Broomfield Lunchtime Soccer group, or whatever it’s called.

The soccer was interesting as I had previously never played indoor. It wasn’t an organized game, and not a lot of defense was played, but it was a good time and a good workout.

The ony problem: my feet hurt! After the layoff from karate, the callouses on the balls of my feet weren’t as strong, and I end up with the skin splitting open, which is pretty painful. I also have some type of foot injury from the last tournament. I’m not quite sure what happened, but anytime I do a round-kick, it’s not a great feeling on the top of my foot, towards my big toe.

The soccer didn’t help any of this, and throw in the fact that I’ve been doing numerous exercises to strengthen my legs, my legs are also quite sore.

So, it’s a lazy weekend for me. Christine is visiting tonight/tomorrow and we’re taking her to Cafe Brasil.

As a kid, I absolutely loved Dungeons and Dragons. No, not the role-playing dice game, but rather the Saturday morning cartoon.

Something about two years ago triggered me to add the DVD for the entire series to my Netflix queue, and it arrived this Monday.

It’s a great cartoon, or at least, it WAS great when I was seven. A group of kids hop aboard a roller coaster dubbed DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS and end up transported into a parallel dimension. The Dungeon Master, a polite, short old guy, gives the kids magical tools like a wizard hat and flame-like bow-and-arrow.

The kids use these tools to fight the bad guy, who follows them around wherever they go.

It was great as a kid, but it’s pretty boring for me today. Make no mistake, watching the opening introduction to the show brings back a lot of memories. A lot of my dreams over the years have included several images from that very intro. But that’s about all it’s worth: a solid trip down memory lane.

And oh yeah, Willie Ames (better known as Buddy Lembeck) does the voice of one of the kids.