I saw the movie "Apocalypto" at the new Century theatre in Union Square that is part of the new mall with Bloomingdales. The theatre has leather seats and they were big and roomy.

I really liked "Apocalypto" and am glad I saw it on the big screen. Some of the cinematography was so beautiful. I went to the Mayan exhibit that were here last year, and it was fascinating to see how the Mayans were depicted.

I didn't think the story was a bad as the reviewers said, and I loved the violence. However if you're not into violence then I wouldn't watch it. The amount of violence kind of reminded me of a porn movie. In a good porn movie, there's like a sex scene every five minutes or less. In "Apocalypto", there's a violent scene every five minutes which was fine with me. I mean, HELLO! It was a period piece and back then life and living was hard and violent. People killed animals and ate them. They didn't go to the butcher to buy meat.

I wasn't sure about the ending, only because I think I wasn't expecting it. But it makes sense. So I don't know what is the big deal about this movie. I loved that it depicted a non-white culture, and a culture there are so few movies about.

I had two work gift exchanges this year and there were completely different experiences.

The first gift exchange I went to was "funny" gift exchange. You had to buy a funny gift up to $15. Talk about a dumb idea. The gifts were so dumb, like a farting Santa, Homer Simpson slippers, etc. $15 is a lot of money to spend on a funny gift. And it wasn't fun at all because who wanted to steal stupid gifts. I rebelled and bought a $10 Walgreens card. It's kind of funny to me because you would normally expect to get a gift card from an expensive store. It would have been more funny I suppose, if I had a McDonalds gift card but I didn't think about it until I saw the commercials on TV.

The second gift exchange was much better and the limit was still $15. The gift were really great like a mini fondu maker, a 1 gig memory stick, expensive chocolates, etc. I was in the middel of the draw and picked a bottle of wine. My bottle of wine was immediately stolen, so I opened another present and got a mini fondu maker. I was so excited, but of course as is my karma, my boss steals my fondu maker, so I stole back my bottle of wine. It's so much more fun to steal gifts if the gifts are worth stealing.

The 1 gig memory stick was stolen three times. So was the fondu maker. But thank god I was able to hold on to my wine. At the first gift exchange, I ended up with a bunch of self-help books. I was a little upset, but the books are at least ones I wanted to read but didn't want to spend the money to buy.

But it is so not fun to steal a "stupid" gift. No one wants a farting Santa!

There's too much white space on my blog, so I am going to post the picture that was desktop background for a year.

Okay, I fixed the archiving problem and now they're back. Apparently I had code that was older than two years. Whatever!

I am all shopped out, except that I have to buy one more gift to buy because a friend of mine gave me more present than I was planning to give her. I was only planning to give her an ornament, but she gave me a calendar and an ornament.

I spent way too much money this year, more than I was planning to spend. I even took back a gift because a friend told me I was giving too much. That was hard but I did it. It was just a stocking stuffer anyway and not the real gift.