For my four years of college I did not procrastinate once. Every time I got an assignment I rushed right home and did it straight away. Okay you can’t tell but I just fell out of my chair from the absurdity of that statement. It is true that on a few rare occasions I did do things well in advanced but those cases were the exception not the rule. Therefor it should not be surprising to anyone, including myself, that when last week rolled around I was shocked to find out Christmas was a week away and I was about 10% done my shopping.

In my defense someone stole a week from December. Before Monday there was three weeks until Christmas and then suddenly Monday rolled around and there was only two. But not even two, seeing as I am leaving on the 24th there was really only one and half. And in the case of the Barlock secret Santa there was only a week. So somehow I went from having three weeks until all my shopping had to be done down to one week, all of this crazy time travel in the span of one night’s sleep. I blame the physics.

Thus Monday morning when I awake and I realized that time had snuck up on me like a robber in a dark alleyway I did what any normal person would do in that situation. Ignored the problem until Tuesday. Thanks to Amazon free two day shipping for a month I was able to get all of the family presents as well as all of Stephanie’s in the course of a week. I had already taken advantage of awesome two day shipping to buy movies for myself a couple weeks ago and thus I had already gotten used to amazing free two day shipping. Unfortunately this came back to bite me in the ass for my secrete Santa gift because amazon did not have what I need and the people in OH that did wanted to charge $40 for two day shipping.

For a break from our normally scheduled programming. For those of you who have buried your head in the sand come the Day after thanksgiving until the 1st of the year for the entirety of your life I shall explain secrete Santa. Here are the steps:

1. write everyone’s name down who you have tricked and contrived into participating in the event
2. all of these names in a bag
3. pass the bag around to everyone having them take a name out of the bag
4. Now it is likely that some person drew their own name, so go back to step 2
5. Now that everyone in the group has someone’s name other their own each person gets the fun task of deciding what gifts to buy for their person.
   1. Typically this depends on how many days this is going to go on for
   2. And how much the group has set the spending limit at for the total of the days
6. Go hide under a rock until new years to avid the difficulty of picking out X number of gifts under Y number of dollars for person Q who you have no idea what they would want if you were spending 1000 * Y on them let alone X number of gifts for the price of a candy bar.
7. No using the candy bar idea, its mine you can’t have it.

Lucky for me we had a step 2.b (yes I know there was no 2.a, but 2.a did not sound as cool in my head as 2.b) which was to write down suggestions for items under X number of dollars. Unfortunately for me I could not read the persons hand writing This is impressive for this mystery person because I can read my own hand writing is practically a foreign language for some of the stuff and the stuff I could read was over X number of dollars. Okay I exaggerated slightly, which I would normally NEVER do, there was one item I could both read and was under X number of dollars not only that it would work perfect to spread over Y number of days. To bad it was Tuesday night finding out that to get the gifts here before the fun began I would have to spend more in shipping then I was on the gifts themselves.

I went ahead and ordered them anyway hoping they would get here on the three day side of the three to five day shipping window. I can now tell you they are going to arrive in four days, which would have been fine if they shipped on Wednesday. But apparently company Q did not have the time to ship me the merchandise until Friday. You do the math. Now that you are done the math you realize this was a problem. Luckily I have been known to solve problems on occasion. SO I did what any computer science major would do when he had a problem, I asked a team mate for help. Good thing he had a brilliant idea. Once this whole thing is over with I can explain in more detail.

Besides my Secret Santa gift buying adventures other stuff in my life did occure. Which reminds me, note to world do not go to the mall a week before Christmas and expect to be allowed to do any of the following:

1. Turn into the parking lot
2. Park in a parking space
3. Cross the road into the mall
4. Find your way around the mall

But I did make a great discovery during the course of learning the above four things. My mall has a LEGO store. That’s right, and entire store that only sells LEGO. This deserves repeating. My mall, has a store, whose only merchandise, is LEGO. For thouse of our audience who are slow on the uptake, I have a slight affinity for LEGOs. Every birthday and Christmas gift from the time I can remember until Highschool was LEGO. In the movies kids stay up late under their covers looking at porno magazines they “stole” from their uncle or at guns. I would stay up looking at LEGO catalogs deciding which BIG set I would ask for next. A big set was one valued in the $100+ range. Once I had decided which one I wanted I would stare at it in the catalog for hours playing with it in my head.

Then the day would finally come that I would get it. I would put it together with my lightning quick honed LEGO building skills and marvel at it. Then I would do what any kid would do that has spent weeks if not months dreaming about the toy he now has in front of him that he wanted more than anything in the world. I would tear it to pieces. Luckily this is an acceptable thing to do with LEGOS. Enough about my favorite toy in the world for now, I am sure I will find ways to bring them up more in later issues.

Amazingly between all the shopping and drawling I managed to go to work and be crazy productive considering it was the week before Christmas week. I also took Stephanie and her roommate Anna out for dinner at the Carolina Ale House. Which does in fact serve consumables other than Ale, which Stephanie’s roommate Anna was sure to clarify before we left reminding me that she was under 21 and thus cannot drink. And while I was really looking forward to see her cry after telling her I was buying and then brining her to a place that only sold things she could not have, I eventually did give in and admit that they sell food there too, very delicious food in fact. This was actually the best day in three weeks because it was the day of Stephanie’s last final. And while she was stressing out about her finals more than enough for everyone at UNC I was stressing out about it more than her. My stress coming from her stressing out at me leaving me with nothing I could do or say to make it better which is a situation I don’t like being in. But Thursday marked the end of the school stress and marked the beginning of me teasing her about her obsessively checking her grades every five minutesnormally you would think this was a sarcastic statement but in this case it is true, she literally would check like every five minutes. This is funny to watch because I have watched her do it for two years now. And every time is the same results:

1. Steph stress about classes
2. Steph stresses about not having enough time
3. Steph plays Neopets while stressing about not having enough time
4. Steph stresses about finals
5. Steph stresses about getting her sure to be awful grades because she had no time
6. Steph gets A’s in everything.

While the nice boyfriend police would say I am awful for my attitude towered this whole affair, there’s only one more semester of it left then its over forever. And while I would schedule myself some time to learn not to be amused at it, with my habit of procrastination by the time I acquired the skill she will have graduated. For more in the bad boyfriend department see here.

The end of semester celebration was not the only celebration of the week. Saturday was the Barlock Christmas party. The guest list was the Barlock’s, 30 or so of their work friends, and me. So I did what any man in this situation would do. Drank my way through half a bottle of wine and had stirring conversations with people I did not know about everything from flying, to the correct classification of hats, to the exciting shenanigans I get up to at work. When I spilt half a glass in front of Chris (Stephanie’s dad) I cut myself off. Truthfully that was probably more from my general clumsiness then the wine, but the wine sure as shit didn’t help. All in all it was an exciting time and the food was delicious.

I have already written to much. So I will stop here. I am going to have to learn to be more concise.