Christmas Service

against my better judgement, i went to the christmas service, mainly to see undignified perform. i was pretty sure the rest of it was going to be trash. as i walk in to the lobby, who do i see, but dave lisco. wow, it's been ages since i saw him. we chatted a little bit, nothing major.

from the onset, the cheese factor was already really high. the worship was just kind of a hodgepodge of different instruments. it was especially bad because we were singing english along w/ the mandarin. but i did my best to sing along. the worship leader kept on messing up, and it all seemed very stiff and old.

afterwards, there were a series of performances made by some of the little kids. almost all of them danced to some extent, while other sang. i counted at least 20 video cameras downstairs alone. as i counted, i vowed not to subject my kids to this sort of blackmail or torture. it's just not fair or right.

the whole time, the youth that were upstairs on the balcony were really making a rucous. i couldn't really blame them considering most of them probably didn't want to be there. still, they should've done what we did, and snuck off to some room somewhere to chill.

eventually, ud came on. i was the only person to give them a hoot. i at least expected the rest of the yg to back me up, alas. their performance was really good, and i was really impressed by how quickly they were able to pull it all together. sure, there were a few mistakes here and there, but overall, it was very good. i gave them a final hoot as they finished before i left.


magic

after service, i went back to my place and waited for the boys. steve, ben, q, and jdc came over to play some sealed deck. i got a few good bombs, but i just wasn't drawing any mana. i won one match against ben, but lost 1-2 to both steve and jdc.


anarchy

on thursday, i spent most of the day looking for ways to edit the cardinfo.dat file for apprentice. i realized that there had to be a way for me to write my own patch for apprentice so that i could test my card game. i eventually found a few, some of which either worked, but didn't do what i wanted, or just didn't work at all. i found one that worked very well, but it was only a conversion tool. it converted between the .dat format of apprentice and .txt and vice versa.

i spent the rest of the night converting about 60% of the cards over to the new format. i tweaked a few rules and a few cards. i came to the conclusion that each player should be able to control more than one creature. how i'm going to work this out, i haven't decided yet. but we'll see.


short hills mall

i needed to pick up a lamp and a rug for my living room, so i decided to go to short hills to do a bit of shopping. i spent a little more than 20 minutes looking for a parking spot. i eventually ghetto ilegally parked somewhere. hopefully, i wouldn't get a ticket.

while we were in the mall, we saw a good numbe of cops patrolling the floors. these weren't mall security, these were cops. one of them had an mp5 too. not sure why they needed an mp5 around, but it was kind of nice knowing that it was there.

our first stop was pottery barn. i saw some lampshades that were really nice. they added a nice color and had an interesting shape. there was this nice square red one that was on sale, but after i looked at it and put it back, another lady took it. i then saw these concave ones that were 50% off. i really liked the shape and color, and picked them up. we walked around the rest of pottery barn and looked at some of the rugs. i didn't realize that rugs were in the upper hundreds, close to 1k. there were a few that were lower, but they weren't very good.

we peaked into banana republic a bit to see the orange clothing. i didn't want to go to the guys section because i knew that i shouldn't buy anything from there.

we eventually made our way over to crate & barrel. again, the rugs were way out of our price range. with the rug quest a failure, i decided to focus on the lamp quest. as we ventured into the kitchenware, i saw this really nice boxy lamp standing in the middle of the room. the lamp was on sale for 35$ usd. it turns out that this was the same exact lamp that sara had picked up not too long ago. i liked it so much, i decided to pick it up. i also saw a red bowl on sale, and picked up one for myself.

the lamp was a bit on the bulky side, not to mention the two lampshades from pottery barn. so we decided to drop off the stuph at the car. at the same time, i wanted to find some legitimate parking. i found a premo spot right out the door of saks right next to the handicap spot.

now that we had a good spot, we could really take our time shopping. we hit up macy's. i saw that the belts were 25% off, so i started rummaging through them. i saw this one really nice belt by kenneth cole w/ a buckle w/ a satin finish. unfortunately, there weren't any in my size. giving that up, i walked around to look for m. as i was walking, i saw another kenneth cole belt. this buckle had a satin finish w/ a horizontal slit. it happened to be the belt that tim and i were both looking at. at first, i wasn't sure i should get it, but i saw that i was reversible, so it could be both black leather or brown leather. it was too hot not to get. as we continued to walk around, i noticed a nose hair trimmer. the thing was originally 20$ usd, then 50% off, and then another 15% off. it ended up being only 9$ usd. too good to pass up. m picked one up as a gift to bach too. too bad my belt wasn't onsale.

after macy's, we went to papyrus. there were a good number of items 50% off. as i was walking around, i noticed a little chinese block stamp set in the 50% off pile. it was originally selling for 25$ usd. m was going to pick it up, but it ended up being misplaced and wasn't that cheap.