As is usual tradition, I picked up the turkey and headed down to San Antonio last Wednesday.  I’ve discovered the secret to lasting 6 hours is to actually kill time with podcasts.  Typically I have a random playlist going on while I drive, but I find that listening to a podcast is pretty great.  However, a little ADD creeps in if the podcast runs a bit too long and I have to fight the urge to change tracks.  After so many years of making that 6 hour drive, it’s good I can find new ways to not fall asleep and die at the wheel.  It was getting kinda bad there pre-iPod days.

Fighting the disgust of taking my whole computer to San Antonio, I finally caved and took it for WoW purposes.  I also took Rock Band as well and taking out the need to camp out for Black Friday it was a relaxing Thanksgiving.  Had a nice Thankgsiving lunch, we don’t do dinner, ran an instance, and rocked out.  Strangely, I didn’t do a lot of Rock Band, but my brother and sisters played it quite a bit.

Even though I didn’t camp out for deals, I still went to Best Buy and picked up an 8GB thumb drive and some DVDs.  The 360 wasn’t networked as usual so I couldn’t stream stuff from my PC to the 360.  By the way did you know you can use regular ethernet cables to connect a networked PC to the 360?  Additionally I gambled this would work with my computer, so I wired my laptop to my PC as a wireless card and it worked!  I guess crossover cables are a thing of the past.  Anyway, I got all these DVDs and started burning some flicks to them, but something crazy happened on the first burn which made it unplayable after 2/3rds of the movie.  It was distressing but strangely, I decided to move the movie to my thumb drive and plug it into the 360 and it worked!  So I have a useless spindle of blank DVDs now.  Ah well.

We also went to World Market to pick up some strange and exotic food.  I finally found some panettone bread.  I tried looking last year after the holidays and the stores were dry.  However, I found some among other oddities from Italy and some kind of chocolate log.  The chocolate log tasted familiar, but this odditiy from Italy was a white nougat bar.  It had a foot like aftertaste, but otherwise was good.  The panettone was TOTALLY AWESOME though after heated up a bit.  Man it’s a great sweet bread.  Giada De Laurentiis has some recipe for them which after finally having tried just the bread, can only taste great in my imagination.

The return trip was uneventful but I have noticed a horrible trend at my apartment complex.  I live on a side street on the complex and as such I always parked out on the curb.  I was the only car ever on the curb.  Everyone else parked in the lot.  The street isn’t busy at all so I’m not concerned with the safety or anything of doing such a thing.  However, last month they repaved the lots.  So people were forced out of their spots.  But guess where they’re parking now!  Yes, on the curb, and occasionally right in front of my apartment.  So I get back and there’s no spot for me.  I’m forced to park in the lot which is annoyingly far away compared to the curb.  I don’t even know where half the cars come from!!  There’s only 8 apartments facing that street yet I see all these cars on the curb now that can’t possibly be from the 8 apartments.  Ah well.