But yeah, we had a good time, and neither family nor friends could get enough of the boy. He's as big a hit on the road as at home, which makes us rather happy. However, everyone we visited owes us, oh, let's say 5 visits to Rhode Island - each - before we attempt going up again ourselves.
The weirdest thing we learned on our Maine excursion: according to the Taiwanese exchange student staying with my sister's family, gastronomic delicacies in China include dog, cat, and first trimester unborn fetuses. Thankfully, she did not tell us this while we were eating.
My in-laws got me a guitar! Woot! This is exactly the sort of thing I need to help me with my "turning 30" anxieties. You're not old if you learn to rock. I may be kidding myself, but honestly, I don't care. I need this sort of thing to sleep at night, so don't take it away from me.
Managed to read BOP! More Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson while I was in Maine. If you're unfamilar, it's the book that collects all of the little bits and pieces that went uncollected in the giant Box Office Poison collection from a few years back. It sounds weird that a book that claims to be complete would have anything left over for another book, but think of the stories in this far-smaller volume as DVD extras. Nothing here really adds to the story in any major way, but they're fun to experience all the same. The bulk of the book reprints the BOP Color Special (in stunning black & white!), while the rest is made up of smaller stories that ran in various anthologies and other people's books, as well as a 24 Hour Comic spotlighting the character Caprice that serves as a prequel of sorts to Tricked (which is excerpted here, too - at the time of publication, Tricked was still a work in progress). It's probably not the book to start with if you've never read Box Office Poison, but for fans of that series and of Robinson in general, it's definite must-reading.
Exciting New Year's Eve for us: Chinese take-out, a few episodes of 24, kid in bed by 8:30, and then off to sleep for us by 10:30. I don't think we've seen midnight on New Year's for a couple of years now. We're not big party people, and as far as holidays go, it's never been one of the important ones for us. The big thing now will be conditioning myself to start writing 2006 whenever I have to date anything. It usually takes me a couple of weeks to condition myself to that.
I did end the year with a very mix-tapey iPod playlist (inspired by my reading of Mix Tape by Thurston Moore), creatively titled 12/31/05:
- Eye of the Tiger - Survivor
- The Laws Have Changed - The New Pornographers
- The Bird That You Can't See - The Apples in Stereo
- If You're Feeling Sinister - Belle & Sebastian
- Tennessee Flat Top Box - Johnny Cash
- Battle of Who Could Care Less - Ben Folds Five
- Surrender - Cheap Trick
- Listen to the Band - The Monkees
- The Mothra Song - The Alilenas/The Cosmos (from the 90s Godzilla Vs. Mothra film)
- What I Do on a Saturday - Steve Burns
- Othello (live) - Dance Hall Crashers
- In the Garage - Weezer
- Son of a Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield
- Pretty Mary K - Elliott Smith
- Hannford - Bob Hope's Crotch (my friend Jeremy's one-man music project)
- Free Me - Emma Bunton (Shut up! Her album is really good!)
- Can't Hardly Wait (Tim version) - The Replacements
- 21st Century (Digital Boy) - Bad Religion
- Till My Head Falls Off (live) - They Might Be Giants
- Rockin' Stroll - The Lemonheads
- To Sir With Love - Lulu
- Gigantic - The Pixies
- The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight - R.E.M.
- Short People - Randy Newman
- Divine Hammer - The Breeders
- UHF - Weird Al Yankovic
- Green Hornet theme - Al Hirt
