Summer & Tyler

This year's Christmas was nothing short of wonderful. It was my first Christmas with my wife, and her first with our family. Unfortunately we were short Amanda, Ben & Ethan, as well as Trevor and his family, but it was great just to have Natalie fly in from the East Coast. She apparently had to take some extensive time and planning just to get out here since the biggest storm in years was hitting DC just before she was scheduled to fly out.

I've go so much to be thankful for: an amazing family with loving parents who've led by their honorable examples, great siblings who make life much richer than it would've been otherwise, and an amazing spouse who is never short on love and a zest for life. I still can't believe how lucky I am, and it was wonderful to hear my parents express the same sentiments when they said that Summer was the best Christmas present our family could ask for.

Anyhow... enough of the sentimental stuff. We've been having a ball with the various toys we've managed to acquire over the course of the holiday. Admittedly, Summer and I are not very good at delaying gratification so we ended up giving each other 1/2 of our presents before Christmas. The Canon 7D has been a ton of fun to play with. I'll post some pictures here, but I'm thinking it's maybe time that we build a separate photo blog site since I'd hate to flood this page with nothing but pictures. However, I will mention that it's tough to not take amazing shots with this camera! There are so many shots I'm pretty proud of taking, even though I know it's probably 95% the camera compensating for my inexperience.

I also got summer a touchscreen PC for our Kitchen. It's very similar to the iPhone screen in that you can zoom, use multi-touch, and easily navigate without the mouse or keyboard. The only reason I got it was because it was super cheap. We found it for only $599, when it normally retails for about $1,250.

The whole thing is wrapped up in the back of the monitor along with a 500 GB hard drive, 4 GB RAM, a decent webcam, and a built in Wireless N card. It came with Windows 7, which is leaps and bounds better than any other previous Window's version. So yes, it's a wanna-be iMac, but this puppy has a much better sound system, a touchscreen, and it came for about 1/2 the price. We watched Emmet Otter's Christmas Special last night on this (6 of us on 2 couches) since I didn't have it in DVD format to play.

I haven't seen this in 15 years. Anyone remember seeing it? (It was only on HBO, so in our family, that meant HBO had to be in the free preview mode if we were lucky enough to catch it)