I am SUCH a geek.

But a happy geek. I am sitting with three computers here - four, if you count a desktop which has no monitor or keyboard and isn't running, but I don't. One desktop, the work laptop, the personal laptop I'm hoping to use with/for work....

I'm chatting with my friends, listening to holiday music, and occasionally watching Scott play a game. I haven't installed my game yet. I'd have to stop chatting with my friends and reboot.

It's a nice holiday. I'm starting to destress, too, which is doubly nice.

Very happy geek. *nods*

Mom and dad are nice. For one thing, I survived my gag gift - I told dad, since he'd retired, that he was really a user now. And I gave him a box full of (literal) bells and whistles.

Hehehe. Also gave them kitten toys, and then some real gifts, including a fleece throw.

Gift exchange is fun. We got smoked salmon, and a book of bread machine recipes/tips/tricks. And I got a CD of the trees coming down around their house. Wow. Naked house! Eek.

Which brings me to more happy geek - I stuck the CD in my new laptop, and discovered that Windows XP discovers the CD has pictures, and offers to slideshow them. At full screen. It's actually a very good display: I like this feature. I may build CDs of images to a theme, to take advantage of it....

And mom and dad brought over a pasty, all ready to be cooked. It's almost done cooking now, and I am very much looking forward to it!

Pasty.

My mother is a good cook. My mother is a very good cook. I've known this almost all my life, maybe all of it, even while I was small and whining about the fact that my mother had put (cooked well or not) green beans on my plate!

She makes a very good pasty. I had two servings, Scott had one. Now there are a variety of tinfoil-wrapped servings in the refrigerator, some snack-sized and some meal-sized. I may freeze some of them, but I haven't decided yet, so we'll see.

It was absolutely delicious. Getting it unwrapped wasn't that bad. (Mom had warned me that it wanted to fall apart. It did, but unwrapping it in place - using a thick plastic spatula to hold the just-finished portion up just enough to let the plastic out from under the next section - worked perfectly.) Put it in, cooked it. (55 minutes. 400 degrees. And for a miracle, I hit 400 - which is set at about 430/435 on my oven, yay ovens - on the first try, so I didn't waste more time fiddling wtih the oven temperature.)

Mom, what did you put in that pasty, besides the meal and potatoes and stuff? I went all domestic. I mean, all the dishes except the baking tray are in the dishwasher, and the baking tray is clean.

I don't do domestic, often. But apparently when you give me a nice pre-made pasty that just wants baking, I can be inspired to it. Mmmm.