God Rest Ye Merry Dudes

It's Christmas Eve, which means it's time for people to turn into complete idiots on the roads, shops and sidewalks. Yes, you can try and cut across three stacked lanes of traffic and reverse-park your VW bug in a bus zone. Yes, you can enter the checkout queue from the wrong end and attempt to pay for a dvd player with someone else's credit card. Yes, you can stagger out of a store with fifteen bags of presents and a case of wine and try to barge past a family of six with their three rottweilers. Just don't expect your Christmas Eve to be completely joyous or entirely full of good cheer.

Even though I'm far from home and my close family, I'm not content to stay in my apartment and eat three fried chickens and a plum pudding for six all by myself. I'm heading out shortly to spend tonight and most of Christmas Day with the same friends who helped inject delicious liquid lard into my arteries at Thanksgiving. Hopefully my heart won't explode this time, either.

Santa actually paid me a visit last weekend while I was in a local snowboard shop, too... although he did need my credit card for just a wee minute as he was leaving.

He left me an Option Booter, built wide for people who have boats for feet, just like me. I'm hoping to take it for a spin between Christmas and New Year on one of the local mountains, and then have some fun at Whistler in January. Now don't get the wrong idea about me when you see the board - I am by no stretch of the imagination tubular or gnarly. I'm not radical, bitchin' or extreme to the max. My elbows might be a teensy bit hardcore, but that's about it.