2013 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 9 – Jamming with the Disney Five

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One of the things that we’re trying to do more of this year is decorating inside the house … in addition to the actual Christmas tree and all! We’ve never really had much for interior decorations, but as I’ve mentioned in previous years, Sara and I really want our house to be one of those warm and cozy, all-encompassing holiday homes around this time of year, and as you’ll no doubt see in future posts, we kind of splurged a bit this year to get that ball a’rolling all the more!

I stumbled across these Disney figurines at Hallmark about a month ago and thought that they’d fit well in a home that’s both very much into Christmas and into Disney. They’re supposed to be an incentive to get you coming back every week to pick up the newest one throughout November, but honestly we got the first one during that initial visit and then went back and bought the other four all at once yesterday.

For what it’s worth, I tried to get them sooner, but apparently the store that I thought was a Hallmark store in the mall closest to home is actually an American Greetings store, which is a different thing, so they didn’t have them…  😳

Now admittedly I’ve only actually heard them play in the store while I was walking past the display … I haven’t had the guts to turn on the motion sensors on them yet because they’re likely to be playing night and day at that point, which we don’t need … but it is kind of cool how they’re setup to all play in sync if they’re near one another, so that’s neat!

The one exception that I have to this series is that they screwed up the fab five by including Daisy Duck here instead of Pluto!!! Who really cares about Daisy?! Was this some affirmative action thing to get another girl in the band??? Sure, we’ve already got a dog (kinda) with the likes of Goofy, but Pluto is someone special … sorry, Donald, but I guess what I’m saying is that I’d rather have you be alone so that Mickey can have both his girl and his dog play in the band.

Happy Holidays! 😛

2013 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 8 – Baby’s 0th Christmas

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Earlier this year Sara and I had a conversation about buying our unborn baby presents for Christmas in the event that she was pregnant during the holidays, but wouldn’t be actually giving birth until next year.

At the time, I’m pretty sure my general response was, “You’re crazy. You can’t actually buy gifts for the baby until the baby is actually physically present here to receive said gifts.”

I guess you could say that things have changed a little bit since then, in that now I only sort of think that she’s crazy.

Also, I’ve kind of been buying a few gifts here and there for our unborn baby myself, too…  😕

It finally hit me today while we were out shopping when I kept coming across all sorts of books and toys and games that I was like, “Oooh – that’d be fun to buy for our baby!” and then a few minutes after, I kept having to tag on, “…next year.”

This is sort of a strange time for us because on one hand, it’s starting to get more exciting and more real every day, from the clock on our dresser that counts down the minutes to picking a name and hoping that it’s a good one to the fact that Sara’s even starting to show now, and yet there’s still a thought looming in the back of my head that this might not work and something could go wrong between now and May. I try to remind myself that it doesn’t do any good to think that way, even if it is the truth, and in a way, kind of immersing ourselves in all of this baby stuff like getting the house ready and even putting a few gifts under the tree for our little boy to be helps with that.

Don’t get me wrong – I still think that she’s crazy, but at the same time, I kind of get it, too, and chances are pretty good that there will be a couple of gifts from me underneath the tree this year even though he won’t be ready to open them yet, too.

Above is the ornament that we picked out today at the mall because Sara insisted that she wanted her ornament from me this year to be a pregnant one. The girl doing the personalization was a little confused at first when she had to double-check that zeroth was what I really meant … said she’d never heard that before! The math does check out, though – if next year will be baby’s first Christmas after he’s born, then what else could this year really be?!

Well THIS oughta be good for my productivity…

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After this whole kerfuffle, along with even more added kerfuffles in coming to find that I can’t even mount the new TV in the bedroom like I want to because the studs aren’t centered in the wall like they need to be, so there isn’t enough room … I finally decided that I needed a little stress relief, and as I had at least gotten the new TV setup and working on the dresser to the point where the old TV is no longer needed, I ended up going ahead with my master plan to move it back into my office so that I can play video games on it while I’m supposed to be working!

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It’s funny the nostalgia that I have with this TV because the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how much of my teenage and adult gaming was done on it – mostly when I lived up in Michigan, but also for about a year here in Florida before I relinquished it to being a bedroom TV after I got my new big screen. It fact, I do believe that this was actually considered “a big screen” back in the days when tube televisions were all the rage!

31″ glorious, albeit extraordinarily heavy inches … I think I got it as a Christmas gift from my Mom one year when it was on sale for Black Friday. The thing has got to be at least 15 years old – I can’t remember if I got it before or after I graduated, but I figure that I must’ve played all of my older PS2 games on it (The Simpsons Road Rage, GTA3, Vice City), not to mention I’ve always had my classic consoles hooked up to the beast, too.

So that’s what I did tonight – after lugging this monster across the house and thankfully not throwing out my back in the process, I dug around in the garage until I found my old SNES and low and behold, it still works! Well, it took power supply #2, but it still works! 

Ideally I would’ve loved to play the regular NES right off the bat, but that’s not going to happen for a while – it looks like the thing is actually still all tore apart from the last time it didn’t want to work anymore, so I might have to play around with it for a while to see what’s up with that first. I guess I did decide that I don’t want to pick up a top loader after all, as apparently despite fixing the connection issue, instead now it has bars in the video display which are pretty annoying, so instead I’m going to see what I can do with some of the latest repair tips that I’ve found and go from there.

Apparently I also need to clean my SNES because the plastic is this disgusting yellow that I learned has something to do with the fire retardant chemicals in the plastic that they used, but I think I have some options for that, too, so I’m sure new posts will magically appear as I begin to experiment with those a bit…

But in the meantime, I’ve spent the last 3 hours alternating between writing and playing Super Mario World, and it’s been a whole lot of fun, and I hope that I can alternate appropriately in the future so that having some of my favorite games at my fingertips can be a good motivator rather than a distractor.

I made it as far as the Butter Bridge before calling it a night tonight, which is pretty impressive in my book! I remember when Super Mario World first came out with the launch of the SNES back in 1991 – Super Mario Bros 3 had blown us away not too long prior, and yet this newest version introduced Yoshi and save points and secret levels … I actually recall getting in trouble playing this game at Walmart – I’d only been playing for, like, two minutes and there was somebody behind me, and a sales guy came by and told me, “If you don’t let other people play, I’m going to turn it off.”

It kinda makes me curious if the save batteries in any of these things actually still work! I kinda doubt it, and I don’t feel like taking the risk with them at this point, but it seems like the last time I fired this thing up years ago, I was surprised with what I found, so who knows?!

Nonetheless, I think it goes without saying… stress relief – achieved.

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Dear Best Buy, Your Customer’s Time is Worth Something, Too…

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I think it’s time that we as consumers started demanding more of the companies that we support with our business.

Specifically, when they make a mistake that inconveniences us, I think that they should acknowledge that and make at least a small effort to be sympathetic to their mistakes. Is that too much to ask???

I wanted to write about this because I’ve kinda been fuming all evening after my interactions with Best Buy went increasingly sour regarding the new TV that I ordered from them on Black Friday. You see, it arrived via UPS yesterday – a day late – but more importantly, it was damaged in shipment and the screen had been shattered. It happens … stuff gets piled on top of stuff that it shouldn’t, contents shift during transport … I’ve driven a delivery truck before, so I know that sometimes these things happen, but it’s how the error was actually handled that really rubbed me the wrong way…

I called BestBuy.com last night almost immediately after I disappointingly found the broken screen. I spent a good 20 minutes on hold before I finally reached someone who milled about before finally asking why I hadn’t called the store instead. I explained that it was a BestBuy.com order, despite being placed in the store, and the store doesn’t even stock that item, so I called the number that was on my e-mail from the order.

He called someone at the store and transferred me to her anyways, who was actually really nice and told me to bring the TV in today and they would take care of it there. When I mentioned that her store wouldn’t have a replacement because stores don’t carry that model, she replied that maybe it could be exchanged for a similar model, or I could have a new one shipped there instead so that I didn’t have to worry about trusting UPS again.

So jump ahead to today … I took the broken TV in to the store and actually got the same Customer Service guy who had ordered it for me on Black Friday last week, and at first he seemed like he could take care of everything, even though he had to check with someone else for procedures. When he noted that they still didn’t have that model in-store, he suggested that I go over and look at the other models to see about a comparable, and in the meantime he would figure out what the other options were.

I did that and found a guy who helped me to locate the next model up in the same product line. I decided that I really wanted to stay with Samsung because right now we have two other TVs from them in the house and I’m fairly satisfied with them, so here’s what we came up with:

Pretty much the only difference was the refresh rate – everything else stayed the same … Smart TV Apps, size, brand, no 3D. It seemed like a decent option that wasn’t too much more expensive, and they had the replacement in store, so I hoped that would be the end of it.

Take it back to my new friend at customer service and he looks it up, disappears for a bit, then comes back and says, “No, it’s too much of a difference – we’re not allowed to go more than $200 over the sales price…” to which I reply, “Then this is actually perfect because it’s only $170 over that.”

But no, because apparently they’re going by the Black Friday price that I bought it for, not their current list price, even though that’s what the TV is actually worth and you’re not comparing apples to apples if you compare a sale price to a non-sale price. From their perspective, somehow it was actually a $350 difference, which from my perspective is just dumb.

The best that he could do was to give the new TV to me at the Black Friday price, which was a difference of $150. And there was no way in hell that I was going to get duped into buying even more TV when I’d brought in a damaged TV in the first place!!!

And then it got worse … my other option to have another one just like the first one shipped out … didn’t exist anymore … because the TV was now discontinued and they didn’t have anymore left.

This is where I started to get pissed.

Nevermind that I’ve been shopping at Best Buy for probably two decades, ever since my Dad started shopping there when I was a kid. Nevermind that I’ve bought pretty much every major appliance in my house there, and my old TV, and countless other video games and movies and accessories.

I’m told that the reason they can’t give me the upgraded TV is because of an agreement with Samsung that’s out of the store’s hands and that the store can’t just take a $180 loss and call it a day, so instead we screw the customer because the first TV that he tried to order got damaged in shipment and now we can’t get him another one unless he either picks something else or pays us even more money.

It was at this point where I was trying really hard not to be that asshole customer, and I knew that the customer service guy wasn’t directly at fault, but Best Buy didn’t exactly give him much to help keep me happy.

After another 30 minutes of waiting, he magically might’ve found another TV like mine (less the broken screen, that is) in another store on the other side of town, but he was waiting for them to call him back to confirm. While we waited, he explained that he could have it transferred up to his store, which would take another 3-5 business days … plus I would have to come back a third time to pick it up.

At that point I explained to him that I thought all of it was ridiculous and that I didn’t feel like my time was very valued to Best Buy, but I think I’d been written off as one of those customers by then. Really, the nerve of me being upset because they sold me a defective product, then wanting a replacement without having to go out of my way to get it!

The longer I waited, the angrier I got as I counted down the time lost between UPS’s delay in delivery and the time on hold the night before and now the time wasted in the store.

Once the store finally called back and confirmed that they did have it in stock, despite all odds, I told him that I’d just drive down and get it myself because at least it could be done that evening and otherwise it was going to require another trip on my part anyways. He cut me a gift card for the exact amount of my purchase and that was about the end of our interaction … no further apology or sympathy after working with me for over an hour.

Of course, when I got down to the other store, the first girl I talked to had no idea what I was talking about and cited that she’d been working the phone all night and hadn’t talked to anyone from the other store, so we waited some more – this time with my wife in tow – until finally a manager came by who had been talking to the guy from the other store and knew exactly what was up, and then went and got the TV and helped get us rang up.

He mentioned that the only reason they had them in stock was because they had been ordered for a customer and never picked up, not because they have a bigger show floor like the first guy had proposed.

And despite his ability to help give me a TV that wasn’t broken, he wasn’t particularly sympathetic either … I retold him parts of the story, thinking that maybe he would step up and help make things right after my wife suggested in the car that I should’ve asked to speak to the manager at the first store rather than just taking his comments in relay, but the most I got out of him was, “Yeah, that’s a long drive from XYZ Store…”

Yeah, no shit, and I just did it because YOUR COMPANY fucked up.

I guess my point in retelling this story here tonight that already has me riled up again is that even now that I have the new TV home and it’s all hooked up and it looks great, I’ve still got a bitter taste in my mouth from Best Buy because between last night and tonight, they wasted about 5 hours of my time and even as just a customer, my time is valuable to me.

Sure, you can say, “Sorry for the inconvenience – I understand that you’re frustrated…” but why should it stop at that?

What’s it worth to keep the customer happy so that he actually wants to go back and shop at Best Buy again???

It certainly wasn’t $170, which would’ve been the difference to just give me a slightly better TV right there in the store.

It wasn’t even a $50 gift card to say, “Hey, pick out a couple of movies to watch on your new TV on us because we’re sorry that you had to run all over town for this.”

After 5 hours of wasted time, 60 miles of driving round trip, and loads of frustration with a company that said that it wanted to help me, but only if it could do so without it being inconvenienced any way in the slightest, I’ve technically got the TV that I ordered from Best Buy a week ago, but I’m not a happy customer and I probably won’t buy my next one from them, either.

Why should I if my time isn’t valued to them just as much as my money is???

To be honest, it’s always really bothered me when I’ve had to deal with customer service departments for issues caused by the company where they didn’t come back and offer something proactively simply to say, “Hey, sorry man – our bad.”

My local HoneyBaked Ham store does it – if they screw up my sandwich and I have to wait while they remake it, or even if I mention that they did something wrong with my last one, they’ll throw me a coupon to get my next one for free because they see me in there all the time and they genuinely want my business.

CreateSpace, the vendor that I use to print my books, did it, too – sending me entire cases of books when I found bad ones in the mix because the loss was worth it to them to keep me happy. That was with the very first order that I had with them, and even though subsequent orders for other books also experienced some issues, I stuck with them just the same because I knew that they’d make things right no matter the cost.

And I know that most companies don’t do things like this because a random customer lost here or there might not be that big of a deal to them, but if more of us collectively started to demand it, then maybe they would be forced to start to care and they’d strive to do better. I know when I threatened this evening that I’d never buy from Best Buy again if I had to go with a refund, one of the responses I got was, “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but that’s fine.” Maybe he didn’t mean it like that when the words slipped out of his mouth, but the entire interaction as a whole sure made me feel like it didn’t really matter whether I shopped at Best Buy in the future or not.

Which I suppose is good because next time, I won’t. 

Next time I have a TV or something for my home theater to buy, I’ll order it online from Amazon, and even if it costs me $40-50 more, and even if UPS screws up again and smashes it in shipment, I know that Amazon will stand behind its sales 100% and will do whatever they have to do to make things right if they make a mistake.

Best Buy proved to me this evening that they’re not willing to do whatever it takes. They technically fixed the problem, but they didn’t to anything to fix the customer relationship. That’s something that can’t be broken simply by dropping it off the back of a truck, but it’s also a lot harder to fix once it’s broken, too.

2013 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 7 – The Holiday Rush

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Can I just take the rest of the month off to do Christmas stuff and we can all circle back around come the new year???

I always tell myself every year that I’m going to ease up on the creative projects after Thanksgiving so that I’m not tripping over my own feet trying to get everything done and enjoy a little holiday cheer at the same time, and yet here I am again with an ever-growing to-do list without an end in sight! So here, a week into December with Christmas a mere 18 days away, is what my current holiday to-do list looks like…

Put Up Christmas Lights
I wanted to have them up the weekend of Thanksgiving, but that didn’t really happen and at this point I’m doing even worse than I did last year! The problem is that I should’ve dug them out of the garage and figured out what all I needed to replace last month so that I’d be ready to go when Turkey Day passed and the ban on holiday lights was lifted from my home, but now I have to do it all at once and it’s just so much work that I’m having a hard time giving up what it’s going to take to get everything sorted out.

Seriously, I used to put weeks into my Christmas light displays up north, so I really want to do them right, but so far I’m not exactly living up to my standards from a decade ago before I moved to Florida! Plus, it doesn’t help that hardly anybody puts up lights on my block, so the neighborly incentive there is virtually nil. 🙁

Put Up Christmas Tree
After outdoors comes indoors, and again, I wish it was up already, but this year our family room has become somewhat of a storage area for all sorts of crap from around the house and it all needs to get stuffed away into the back bedroom before we can even start with the tree … and I’m not really looking forward to that. 😛

Finish Decorating Indoors
There really isn’t much to do here – a bit of garland here, a pair of red & green candles there … it’s just that right now the bits and pieces that we’ve picked up from stores are all located on the island in the middle of our kitchen, so we really just need to put them up!

Figure Out Christmas Cards
Last year we really phoned it in, so this year I want to get back in the groove of actually sending out photo cards to everyone and actually doing them on-time. I feel like Christmas cards are kind of a dying art and I don’t want to be one contributing to their ultimate demise, plus it’s another opportunity for us to share the news with family on the far reaches of the globe that we’re pregnant, so really, I just need to snag a quick photo of us to go alongside the latest ultrasound pic and then send it off to the Walmart 1-hour photo center…

Get Presents in the Mail
Ok, so believe it or not for this one we’re actually doing above average, in that many, many gifts have been ordered and more are still in flight from the likes of Amazon and other online vendors … I think we just need to pick up a few random odds and ends and we should be good to race to the post office in this department. Considering that last year’s gifts in part made it to my sister’s house by June when we came to visit, my goal of before Christmas in 2013 actually makes a lot of sense!

According to USPS.com, my deadline for priority mail is 12/21, but I’d really love to have them out sometime early that week so that sled dogs and whatnot aren’t required to get them that last mile in the event of the typical, last-minute Northern Michigan snow storm…

Keep Writing This Blog!
I think I’m doing pretty good with the holiday posts this year, don’t you?!

When you look at them that way, I guess the list doesn’t look all that bad after all! Just need to get to gettin’ and stop stalling, and I’ll be back to other forms of procrastination in no time…

…but don’t tell Santa that I said that…

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Dream Journal : Drinks are on Me

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We had moved into a really big house.

I mean multiple levels greater than two, a waterfront view, wrap-around swimming pool … the kind of house that you’d expect to see on MTV Cribs, except I’m merely a writer and have never had to/gotten to contend with crazy women throwing their panties at me on stage while I’m trying to work.

Anyways… 

So we were having this party that was fairly big – I remember estimating in the dream that we probably had 75 – 100 people there, and everyone was just hanging out, enjoying the sun and the pool and whatever. The pool, in particular, was kind of cool because not only did it wrap around the yard, but it even I guess somehow went inside the house … I remember seeing a house like that on one of those Million Dollar Homes shows, so I’m guessing that’s where the inspiration was coming from.

At one point I remember talking to my cousin and uncle about whipping out our diving gear and going exploring … not sure if it was that deep, although that one show did feature an underground room that was technically inside the swimming pool!

There were also a bunch of kids there – like I said, it was a gathering of all of our family & friends, many of whom now have children, so they were all running around and frolicking and doing whatever it is that kids do, and at one point several hours into the day (I think the party was an all-day affair?), I remember asking a friend if we should take a quick run out to the store to go pick up some board games that the kids could all play. The landscaping around this house was incredible and seemed to grow even more vast as the dream progressed, so by this point there were a number of large, stone tables and chairs situated around the bends in the pool where people could sit and eat and drink and generally be merry while they watched others splashing around in the pool.

But apparently the most significant aspect of my party, as is the case with most parties, was the booze … because it was free! It seems that the community that we lived in was one that had all sorts of fancy amenities like concierge services and whatnot, and one of those services was private catering, in that I basically paid these people to bring in bartenders and presumably food and everything, and they set up a couple of bars by the pool and mixed drinks throughout the party – whatever people wanted.

The dream finally ended with all of our guests gone home and me chatting with our concierge liaison about how much all of the drinks had cost me that day. She said that she hadn’t gotten the final tally from her staff yet, but kind of laughed as she showed me a slip that said $10,235. Mostly in alcohol.

I spent the final moments of my dream mathing the hell out of that number to try and figure out if she was, in fact, just joking with me or if it was an accurate figure after all! At 100 guests, that would mean that each guest consumed roughly $102 in alcohol each … which at $5/drink was 20 drinks a piece … i.e. there would’ve been a lot of drunken people stumbling around by the end of this party!!!

Also, consider that not everyone would’ve been drinking, or at least not my pricey booze, which skews the number even further. I tried to reason that even at five drinks a piece throughout the day, that would’ve only been a bill of $2,500.

Maybe the bill also included catering or something, though admittedly I didn’t remember seeing any in my dream … mostly just the steady flow of tropical drinks from the bars!

Or maybe the numbers were padded to include compensation for her staff because that’s something that commonly happens with catering bills – instead of paying an Event Fee or a Catering Fee, each plate of chicken ends up costing you $35/each instead of $25/each…

After mulling about the figure long enough, I think I finally came to two distinct conclusions:

  1. The number must’ve been wrong and somehow $1,700 was a more appropriate figure.
  2. OR The party was awesome, and maybe when you live in a $10 million house, you don’t so much worry about things like the random $10k catering bill here and there…

But yes, all of those calculations did happen while I was still inside my dream. 😛

Wikipedia for Commercial Use

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I thought that this thing that I got in the mail the other day was kind of weird.

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On the surface, it’s supposed to be a contractor referral guide that’s clearly advertising supported – why else would they have paid to print and mail me a copy? In a quick read through his website, the business model is actually that this guy picks the businesses himself as opposed to simply featuring any business that writes him a check, so ok – whatever … I don’t know who this dude even is, but whatever…

What really caught my eye, however, was when I started flipping through the relatively thin book and took notice of a number of familiar links at the bottom of most pages:

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Basically, they’re using articles from Wikipedia as filler material in between all of the featured businesses! Totally legit, just like the people who reprint entire books worth of content from Wikipedia, but I guess being a writer myself, I just can’t help but think why include this stuff except for the reason that you need to fill space and you want to put something there, but you don’t want to have to pay for it.

I mean, is there really much benefit to the reader by reprinting Wikipedia articles like these alongside referral ads for businesses that do them???

I guess I’d like to think that if it was important enough to put a guide of sorts together to highlight the best in these home repair fields, then maybe it might be worth paying a couple of hundred bucks to a freelancer to write something … anything that’s a tad more specific to what you’re trying to do than just pulling free entries out of an online encyclopedia?! Again, totally legal and all, don’t get me wrong, but maybe throw together a list of Ten Ways to Improve the Value of Your Kitchen or How Professional Cleaning Can Save You Time and Money to get a little more personal than Wikipedia does.

And you know me, I love me some Wikipedia, but this just seems lazy to me.

On Reminiscing…

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I sometimes spend a fair amount of time looking back at the past things that I’ve done in my life … maybe a little more than I actually should, I don’t know. But it intrigues me to occasionally wander back to those places that I’ve already been, whether it’s to simply bask in seemingly simpler times or even consider something that happened from a different perspective that one can only have when they look back at themselves 5 or 10 or 15 years after the fact.

I don’t necessarily wish that anything had turned out differently in the long run. Don’t get me wrong – I’m very happy with the life that I have today and everything that surrounds me, and if we’re talking space-time continuum here, then no, I wouldn’t ever want to go back and risk changing something that could have drastic effects on where I’ve ended up today or even what might happen to me beyond now in this life into the future.

With that said, sometimes I do look back at those various times in my life and wonder what would’ve happened within that unique moment if I had done things differently … if I had moved to Florida a few years earlier or if I would’ve taken my first major writing gig a little more seriously than I did. Of course, the thing about retrospect is that it’s easy to look back on the past and talk about the things that you could’ve done differently, whether it be not putting deadlines off until the last possible minute or returning phone calls that maybe you weren’t mature enough to return at the time. When you’ve got all of this new experience that came after those random moments, it’s only then that you could ever really know that maybe there was a better way to handle certain things.

And as bittersweet as sometimes it is to look back at those times and think, “Man, I should’ve done this differently…”, at the same time I also try to look at where I am right now and know that it was those moments in the past that have helped to shape me into who I am today. I may not have taken my deadlines very seriously back in 2004, but I certainly put a heavier weight on the commitments that I make today. Just as I’ve learned things about trying not to hold onto grudges as much and not cutting people off who are important to me just out of spite and even simply the importance of taking some time every now and then to simply look around and soak it all in where I am right here and right now, because another 10-15 years from now, I’m going to be just as nostalgic about this time, too.

I guess that’s the curious thing about how nostalgia works, or at least how my nostalgia seems to work because it never seems to be limited to only that one golden time in my life when everything was perfect. It’s more like a window that just keeps growing and growing as time passes, from childhood to grade school to my college years to my late 20s and even simply looking back at what’s happened more recently. This world feels so big that not only do I want to go out and experience all sorts of new things, but I also want to remember and relive the things that I’ve done in the past, too.

That classic quote – “Don’t live in the past – instead, live for the future…” – feels like it falls a little short for me. I want to do both, and ultimately I think that as long as one can maintain a decent balance between the two, sometimes there’s still a lot that we can learn from our past that we never would’ve imagined while we were busy living it at the time.

2013 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 6 – Love Me Some … Gingerbread?

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gingerbread

Fans of my pumpkin blog may have noticed that my enthusiasm for pumpkinhood sort of dropped out a bit early this year. I might still post a thing or two pumpkin-related before the year is through, but I’ve just been really busy with other things … I’ve even got a whole pile of pumpkin stuff sitting here to review that I never got around to…

And that said, December is also a conflict for my pumpkin proclivities in that along with pumpkin, I also enjoy lots of other flavors that are associated with this season, like peppermint and sometimes even eggnog, but most notably gingerbread!

I’ve actually joked from time to time that I might start a new blog called Love Me Some Gingerbread! once I’ve officially said everything that there is to say about pumpkin, and I probably would’ve started it already if it weren’t simply for a lack of time, but the same thing amuses me about gingerbread when I start walking through the stores and see things like the Twix and M&Ms shown above dabbling in this flavor typically reserved for houses and men and other cookie-shaped forms.

Just for the record, the Gingerbread Twix were actually pretty good, but the M&Ms tasted weird to me … almost more nutty than gingerbready.

I also tried some Gingerbread Spice Tea a few days ago and that one is ok, but I think the best of all is the classic gingerbread cookies. A few years ago Sara & I made some Mickey Mouse shaped ones and then dipped the ears in chocolate to the point where the chocolate was too heavy and made the ears fall off, but they were SOOOO good!

So yeah … gingerbread … I likes it a lot.  :santa: