Today is Boxing Day – the celebration of “Good King Wenceslas”. The day when people recover from the exhaustion of the Christmas holiday.
Our first order of the day, once people were awake and moving, was to get everyone ready and out the door to go see Night at the Museum. We were over prepared for big crowds and arrived at the theatre right at noon for a one o’clock showing. Because so much of Dominica’s family was going with us we had to be ready and waiting at the door since a quarter after eleven. So we were ready and waiting for the movie to start for close to two hours! The movie theatre never ended up filling up although it was fairly busy. Personally I think that home theatres are completely killing the movie theatre business. They do so much to make going out to the movies uncomfortable and expensive and in so many ways inferior to the home experience that it just isn’t worth it. They are artificially giving the theatres an advantage by allowing movies to release their first and only then going to DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray but that can only last for so long.
Night at the Museum was really good and had a surprise cast that I was not expecting. It was a lot of fun and it was very family friendly which you don’t get too much of these days. I am really glad that we went to see it. Everyone really enjoyed it.
After the movie we went back to the house and I worked on setting up the Grices’ new computer. That, of course, takes forever. As I was setting it up we realized that this was one of the first machines that I have ever set up of Windows XP that was not going onto a Windows Domain which normally takes care of a lot of the setup process for me. It has been years since I did a clean install of a personal use machine. It was amazing how hard it was to set up and how much stuff you simply “had to know” to be able to get it to work. It was a simply unreal amount of set up and it was very obvious that if you don’t have someone knowlegable about Microsoft Windows there is no way to get it really working well or safely. I have gotten so used to Linux (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu or the BSDs like PC-BSD) with their super simple install process (much easier than Windows) and far easier post-install setup that I have totally forgotten how terrible Windows is to work with like that and how completely impossible it is for a casual user to use. The average Linux installation is so much easier I can’t believe that everyone hasn’t switched all ready.
While we were setting up the computer Francesca decided that there were some additional computer parts that she would like so we all decided to go out to dinner and then shopping. Everyone headed out to Denny’s for dinner and then we went to Best Buy to get some computer supplies. We were unable to find a single thing that she needed at Best Buy. I knew that Best Buy wouldn’t handle everything that she wanted but never imagined that they wouldn’t carry basic hardware like a DVD burner! (They had legacy DVD Burners for people with old PATA equipment but modern SATA machines like the Grices’ new HP require modern equipment that Best Buy hasn’t even told their staff about yet apparently!! It is unreal that people shop there!) So that was a complete waste of time. But at least she didn’t buy a bunch of stuff at double its normal prices. Amazon and New Egg are totally the places to get this stuff. We did fine the complete Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series at Best Buy and had to get that along with Mel Brook’s History of the World Part I which is an awesome movie, maybe the best Mel Brooks movie ever, but amazingly he never made a sequel which would have been awesome.
By the time we were heading for home I was feeling really sick. It really started before we went to eat but it wasn’t very bad and I really didn’t take any notice of it. By the time that we had dinner I was just starting to realize that something was wrong and by the time that we left Best Buy I was in pretty rough shape.
I spent the rest of the evening fighting with what appears to be food poisoning. Francesca got a little sick too but nothing like what I did. I was so sick that I did not manage to even really go to bed until almost four in the morning. It was a really rough night.