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I’ve always liked two-dollar bills. I think one reason is because they’re unusual. There are always the funny stories about clerks in stores who refuse to accept them because they’ve never heard of a two-dollar bill, and so on.

I keep a little hoard of cash in my car, because now and then I need to split lunch with some friends, or pay someone for gas, or just come up with a few bucks for some activity where a credit card isn’t going to work. My stash is running low, so I thought it would be fun to replenish it with some Thomas Jefferson bills.

In the past when I’ve gone to the bank and asked for a few bucks’ worth of twos, they typically only have a few on hand. But this week, Laralee went and they had a whole stack (the teller had to go back into the vault, though). So I now have a nice stack of 50 two-dollar bills, about half of which are fresh, uncirculated ones.

These will probably last me for six months– I don’t really use cash much– and it’ll be a good time.

Today’s Comcast bill included this little gem:

Umm… this is for the business-class internet connection at my office.  I wasn’t aware there was a MultiLatino Package in internet service.  But hey, five bucks is five bucks…

Yesterday I woke up well before the sun (ugh) and headed up to Copper Mountain for a day of skiing with some friends.  Dave, Mark, Franz, and I all piled into Dave’s BMW and hit the road.  We managed to get on the mountain just after 8:30 when the slopes opened, and by the end of the day I think we managed to ski nearly all of the blue runs.  The weather was almost perfect for skiing: around 25 degrees, sunny, and no wind.

In the early afternoon we ran into our friend Norm, and he joined us for the rest of the day.  Here are he and I at the peak, somewhere around 12,500 feet:

We skiied right up to 4:00 when the lifts closed, amassing an impressive eighteen runs in all.  After grinding through traffic on I-70 for a while, we stopped for dinner at Beau Jo’s in Idaho Springs.  Man, I love that place.

All in all, it was an awesome day.  Good friends and good times.

Alex and I caught a matinee showing of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug today.

He was out of school a bit early, and I wanted to beat the opening-day rush.  As it turned out, I’d read the wrong showtimes online so we arrived at the theater well early.  We ended up seeing it in 3D, which isn’t a real draw for me, but it turned out to be nicely done (and Alex had never seen a 3D movie before).  Surprisingly, there were only six other people in the entire theater with us.

The show was quite good, as long as you completely suspend any notion that it’s like the book.  I think it would be better to advertise the movie as “based on characters by J.R.R. Tolkien” because there were all sorts of made-up scenes and even a magical new cross-species love story.  Of course in the books there were not only very few female characters at all (excepting Arwen and Galadriel, who were still very minor).  I guess Peter Jackson felt like we needed at least one strong female, so he introduced Tauriel, who’s a beautiful elf who totally kicks orc butt throughout the movie.

I liked her character, although the love story was a bit stretched.  I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I completely missed the fact that she’s played by Evangeline Lilly of Lost fame.  Like all guys who watched that series, I was a big fan of Kate.

All in all, both Alex and I thought it was a good flick– arguably better than the first movie– and we’re excited to see everything wrap up in the third movie next year (or are there plans for a fourth? sheesh).

Attention, people who want to sound sophisticated:

It’s almost always grammatically incorrect to use “and myself” in a phrase.  For example,

I think people are so afraid to say “and me” that they look for anything else.  Even worse than the above is the inevitable, “… from Steve and I”.  Aieee!

The classic PC game Doom was released 20 years ago today.  Ahh, I remember many long hours in the campus computer labs blowing the smithereens out of low-resolution monsters, and using the rocket launcher in ambushes against my friends.

So many things about that game were amazing: the 3D textured walls, the fact that you could play against other people over the network, the ability to create your own maps (WAD file, anyone?),… truly, it was a landmark in the world of computer gaming.  Kids these days take all of that stuff for granted because pretty much every game since then has incorporated those things.

I remember that Doom became so widespread that the campus IT team would actively search student accounts (on the Novell Netware system, no less!) and delete the doom.exe file.  Of course, being the clever guys we were, we’d simply rename the file to something innocuous like unicorns.exe.

Good times.  I should install it on my system and fire it up, just for old times’ sake.  Happy birthday, old friend.

Since both Laralee and I are terrible at coming up with gift ideas, it was great when she thought of something pretty cool for her mom.  As a family, we all sat around reading classic Christmas stories while Alex recorded them on his Mac.  He then did a little audio cleanup, converted them to MP3 files, and we’ll burn them to a CD for mom.  She can then listen to her grandchildren telling stories– many of which are from a collection of Christmas tales that she gave us many years ago.

I, of course, picked the most classic Christmas story of all:

Today we worked on mailing our annual Christmas cards… all 221 of them!

Last year at the annual white elephant Christmas party we attend every year, someone brought an amazing gift: a Blankeez family-size snuggie. It was absolutely hilarious.

As it turned out, it was just an empty box because the whole thing is a gag.  This year, as I consider what to bring to the party, I’m wondering if a similar gag gift would be appropriate.  I found the Extreme Chores video game pack, as well as Connect-a-Cord:

But I feel like the best one is going to be the iArm:

Apple fans will especially appreciate it.  Hah!

I just had one of those customer service experiences with ThinkGeek that put a smile on my face and made me want to share how awesome they are. I’d purchased a t-shirt for a Christmas gift, and the one they sent to me isn’t what I ordered. I jumped on their online chat tool and had the following conversation:

Thanks, Janna and ThinkGeek. That totally rocks.