Merry Christmas 2013, and the rest of winter break

Merry Knishmas everyone. That's a Chowder reference if you don't know. It was their version of Christmas. As for my version of Christmas, it was great, like always. I saw friends, family, exchanged gifts, made a very special gift for my parents, and so much else.

So I guess I'll start out with the Pre-Christmas stuff. About a week before the end of the semester, I ordered an OUYA on eBay. It was the kickstarter edition and still had all the plastic on it. Since I couldn't be sure it made it to my dorm on time, I shipped it to my house. It was waiting for me when I got back. I really love it. One day Happy Gamer will do a review of it. I told ZeldaMaster93 and the rest of my friends on google plus and ZM93  game me a hard time about it since all the reviews he's read have been negative I guess. When we hung out, I brought it over and we played it. He's still not sold on it, but I still love it. We hung out and that was fun. We watched Akira on Funimation.com. We were going to watch his recording off of Toonami, but since he screwed up the recording, he didn't get the first hour, so we watched it on Funimation.com. We had trouble with Chrom loading flash, so I told him to get Opera. Opera worked perfectly, as expected. Great movie. We really liked it.

So what is this very special gift I got my parents? Well my parents and grand parents, like many of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, recorded almost everything we did on video tape. My grandparents got a camera that recorded on standard VHS because, as my grandpa said to the store clerk, "I want a camera where all I do is put the tape into the VCR." When we got older, my grandpa bought another video camera because they also have my cousin that needs to be recorded but since EVERYTHING we did was no longer together, my aunt needed a camera as well. He bought a camera that used Hi-8, and since my dad already had extra VCRs for making back-up tapes, we took the Hi-8 camera and my aunt took the VHS camera. We have 36 or so home movies on VHS tapes and I don't know how many Hi-8 tapes. I haven't dug out the Hi-8 tapes. Anyways, last summer we bought an Elgato composite capture card and I was going to convert all our tapes to digital. Unfortunately, the bed bugs prevented me from doing that. I spent a couple days unpacking stuff from the basement trying to find the tapes. After unpacking my vinyl records, penny collection, computer accessory bag, pokemon cards, and lots of other things, I eventually found the tapes. I set-up the converting station in our computer room, complete with our high quality VCR, 2 VHS rewinders, and other computer for surfing the web while the tapes play in real time. I was able to get through 5 or 6 tapes. My parents are happy that I was able to get at least some of them done. Plus they never use that room and it's quite out of the way of guests so they don't care that it's rather messy in there.

Now for the Christmas festivities. We always exchange gifts with them either on Christmas Eve or the 26th. This year it was Eve. As has been tradition since we were little and believed in Santa, we went to the local McDonalds "while Santa put out the presents." Apparently McDonalds was doing an "XBOX ONE and many other XBOX prizes give away instant win peel off" game. I ordered food that would maximize the number of pieces I would get. I ended up getting 2 XBOX 360 XBOX LIVE games; The MAW and Ms Splosion Man. Yay. After eating we went back to their house and exchanged gifts. They bought me my TV for my room so I didn't get much from them. We gave them gift cards to their favorite restaurants, like cracker barrel and red lobster. We put them in Blu-Ray and DVD cases just for fun and unwrapping. It was a nice time. We visited and the like. Really good time. Fast forward a couple of hours, it's now 8 PM and it's time for 24 hours of A Christmas Story and my annual tradition of watching it until it's been 24 hours or I get sick of it. Like most years, it was "24 hours passed."

Well it's Christmas morning. I watch A Christmas Story before my parents told me to go wake up my brother. He slept a lot. It reminded me of my first college winter break. Just like how he woke me up 2 years ago, I woke him up saying "I am Krampus, you have been naughty, I will whip you." I'm not going to spend the time explaining who Krampus is. Basically if you were naughty, instead of Santa giving you coal, Krampus would whip you with a switch. Anyways, we wake him up, he gets his coffee and showers, and now it's time to exchange. I open up the stuff I got on Black Friday; DKCR3D, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Ratchet & Clank Collection, Batman: Arkham City, The Internship, a PSN 20 dollar gift card, and various different candy. Sorry I don't have the camera when writing this so I can't show the picture. I can show you this one though.

This is our hamster Swiffer. We wanted to have him involved in the Christmas festivities. We set-up our little fluffy nativity that my brother and I played with when we were little and wanted to get a picture of our hamster in it. Look at him looking at Jesus. Moments later, we had to tell him not to eat Jesus. Didn't you know that there were giant hamsters back in biblical times?

Well our family of 4 Christmas festivities are done. My brother and I played our games. Well fast forward a couple of hours and it's time for the big family dinner. Instead of being at our house, it was at my grandparent's friend's house, the same one that plays the accordion. What was fun is my nerdy cousin and aunt came as normal. We worked at setting up the host's smart TV, and we successfully did. There aren't many apps that he would use, but now he can if he chooses to. Dinner was good. What was a really nice surprise is that my Uncle whom I haven't seen or talked to in 11 years called. Since his parents are my grandparents friends, the hosts, it made sense that he would call and wish them a Merry Christmas. It was great talking to him again.

Now since the OUYA is really small and all the parts fit nicely in my little cooler bag, I brought it to show my other nerdy relatives and maybe play it. I was able to hook it up to the TV and we played the couple of games I had on it. They have a NES so they know videogames. They enjoyed seeing it and playing it.

Now is when the Christmas blog tends to end, but not this time. Since we haven't seen my other grandparents in a long time, we spent I guess "2nd Christmas" with them. We went to see them the weekend after Christmas. It was really nice seeing them. We talked, exchanged a couple gifts, grandma gave me a tour of the valuable collectables, and just enjoyed each others company. They got me a really nice Coleman bag. It fits so much more stuff than my cooler bag. They also gave me ties and socks. They have a 1 show movie theater by their house and they were showing Frozen. I should review it. It's AMAZING. After seeing them, we stopped at my Aunt's house since she's halfway between us and them. She gave us gum, really good gum, and axe soap. It was fun seeing her.

Well that's it for Christmas. Now just for the other fun things I did during break. I'll start with New Years. New Years was really tame. Normally one of our camping friends hosts a New Years Party. This year one family hosted a little get together on the 29th. I told them that they're having the party 2 days early. That was fun. Back to New Years. I rented The Tuxedo and It's Kind of a Funny Story. After I watched my movies, it was time to watch the ball drop. I watched it with my parents, then they went to sleep. I stayed up a couple more hours.

One really fun thing we did was we went to see my nerdy relatives at their house. It was past new years so no gift exchanging. Since they have a working NES, and I still need to replace the 72 pin connector on mine, I brought my copy of Action 52. I told them I never tested it, and my mom gave me a hard time for spending $200 on 1 game that I didn't know if it worked or not. I told them it'd be awesome if it ended up being Cheetahmen 2. It was Action 52 and it worked. We played a couple of the games. Many of them suck, but some are good and it's a piece of videogame history. However, before playing, we went to my uncle's shop to see where he works. It's really cool. After playing Action 52, we played "Wits End," old people vs young people. Young people lost, oh well.

OK, so what else was there that happened this break? Well I saw mskate. She's doing really well. She showed me her blog, I showed her my blogs, we hung out and talked. Really good time. Another thing I did was I went to target and got some after Christmas stuff on sale. I got many bags of chocolate coins and all the cookies and cream Hershey bars they had left. All 6 of them. They were all broken, but they were 30% off. I also got ZeldaMaster93 a gift card since that's what we agreed on for a gift every year. I got him a happy birthday gift card, and it's a joke since his birthday is in July. He gets me an Amazon gift card. When I gave it to him, he gave me his "Really? REALLY? You're an idiot look." I also hung out with mbinski and we played with the OUYA. Since he's a computer guy and general nerd, he enjoyed playing with this open sourced android console. That was really fun.

So this was my Christmas vacation. It was really fun. Well this has been Pokematic signing out and bu-bye.