Merry Christmas!

This was one of the best Christmas celebrations either in spite of or because it was so simple. I got some really great gifts including:

• Final Fantasy 6: Grand Finale - this CD has some AWESOME symphonic recordings of the best songs of FF6
• Fantastic Plastic Machine: Les Plus - a great remix CD of that funky Japanese DJ, FPM. I’m sure you’ve heard him in commercials and movies and didn’t even know it. For example, one of his songs from this CD was in the second Austin Powers movie.
• Linux Shell Scripting with Bash - to help me continue honing my programming skills
• A great book on creating surreal artwork with Photoshop
• Hollywood Shuffle - a great movie about Blaxsploitation films
• 1776 - a book about the American Revolution
• some other stuff that was ordered, but didn’t arrive on time

But my favorite part was giving my presents to my family members. I made a calendar for my mom and her brothers with old pictures from their childhood since their mother died this year. I don’t know how my uncle in Miami reacted, but my uncle who was with us in Tampa was near tears. I’m glad I was able to make them emotional in a good way as they remembered simpler times. I think that’s one of the reasons God gave me the talent of photography and photo editing. Oh, and I gave my cousin a blog for Christmas as one of her presents. She loves to write and now she can write for the world. She has some great poetry up. You can check out her site here.