lady_curmudgeon and I drove up to Antioch last night so that we could crash at roho and enveri's place, which let us be able to see Curmudgeon's niece at 9 this morning without having to get up at 5 o'clock to make the eighty mile trek North. I must say that sometimes it's really quite convenient to have the keys to your best friend's house!Curmudgeon and I did our gift opening yesterday morning, since neither of us really wanted to wait until we got home tonight. Curmudgeon gave me a number of very sweet, useful and sometimes funny gifts. They included holiday-themed boxers (Popeye with "Nice" on the front, Bluto with "Naughty" on the back), lighters, non-holiday boxers, a pair of flannel shirts, $50 towards some iTunes purchases and a new beard trimmer. Curmudgeon got gifts from me, the cats and Santa -- a new 20" wide-screen flat panel display for her computer (that may need to be exchanged already thanks to a stuck pixel), a book called "The Art of Justice," a brass cat figure that sits atop a flat-panel display, a Garmin Nuvi 350 GPS navigator (we took that with last night just for fun and it does a really incredible job in navigating... though I'm curious why it chose an entirely different route to get us home than the one it took us on to Antioch last night), a pair of decorated ceramic cats, some kitty-themed calendars and a Roomba 4210 Discovery.
Seeing Cassie open her presents was a lot of fun this morning. Curmudgeon's sister-in-law is even more hilarious when she opens packages -- I have some absolutely awesome shots of her gaping in shock and delight as she pulls the final shreds of wrapping from a box. Curmudgeon and I both got very cool gifts from her brother and his family (picture albums of Cassie, a gift certificate to Pier 1, a gift certificate to Menards and some custom-made cards from Cassie) as well as a delicious Christmas dinner of ham, chicken, beef, pasta and pie.
The only downside I can think of for today's events is that we were subjected to one of Cassie's gifts -- a brand-new DVD of High School Musical 2, which Cassie is absolutely smitten by and could watch Again and Again and Again. That film made my brain itch. I much preferred playing with one of Cassie's other presents, UNO Attack! Now that was a game that Curmudgeon, Cassie, Curmudgeon's brother, Curmudgeon's sister-in-law and I all seemed to have a lot of fun with. Oh yeah, I also left one of my new books at Roho and Genet's place. Trust me, though, that doesn't even compare to High School Musical 2.
