Christmas Recap

Things are finally getting settled back home. Having been away for a week and a half visiting the future in-laws in Memphis for Christmas and New Year’s as well as going to Knoxville and celebrating the wedding of Bronwyn’s cousin, we got back last Tuesday meaning last week was a short one at work and this is the first “normal” work week I’ve had in a while.

Anyways, vacation was great. It consisted primarily of sitting around in pajamas watching the Discovery Channel in high definition. If you haven’t experienced that yet, get thyself to a Best Buy and tell the salesman you want to see some grizzly bears.

I also spent a lot of time acquainting myself with one of my Christmas presents, a shiny new PSP. When we weren’t watching the mating rituals of Galapagos iguanas, one of the things we would do whilst exploring Memphis was drop into the local Gamestops from which I quickly put together a core collection of PSP games. Most notable of those acquisitions are two peculiar games. One is Loco Roco, a game in which you roll a singing blob around a maze, all the while munching on bugs and berries to plumpify your Loco Roco. The hypnotic experience is akin to playing with one of those ink hourglass things that were so popular back in the ’90s, except that this sings and won’t break and stain your carpet. The second game is called Puzzle Quest, which is an unlikely pairing of a puzzle game and RPG. At first the concept seemed a bit too quirky, but the game appeared on the top of 2007 lists of quite a few sites, like Gamasutra’s Top 10 Games of the Year and Gamespot’s Best Game No One Played, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, you move around a map completing quests, collecting treasure, conquering undead hordes, and laying seige to cities, except that all manner of “combat” is determined in a puzzle game match up. As odd and dorky as it sounds, Puzzle Quest is ridiculously addictive. I had to give it a few hours of gameplay before the mechanics actually started to click and I figured out why I couldn’t beat the stupid giant bat (it’s his shriek spell, duh! Like Officer Michaels’ coitus interuptus of McLovin, I’ve got to block his mana collection).

At any rate, as great as my shiny white PSP is, it pails in comparison to Bronwyn’s other gift to me: the gift of bacon. It’s a collection of five of the top bacons of 2007 according to The Grateful Palate, which offers a bacon of the month subscription service, so they should know their bacon. We cooked up the first of the bacon this last Saturday morning for breakfast, opting for the Jim Oliver’s Hickory Smoked Country Bacon.

Alls I can say is, “Oh, Glory!”

Filed under Food & Booze, Movies & Television, Video Games, WTF?, Wedding | Comments (3)