Merry Christmas everyone! Wow, I finally got some useful presents this year, which is a first for me.

I needed a new wall calendar for my bedroom and I got a big calendar and a smaller calendar for work.

I have one of those home fragrance burner things from The Body Shop, which I've been wanting for awhile now.

A friend gave me an astrocartography reading with San Francisco, London and Bombay India as the chosen places to check out. I've lived everywhere where there is a line; interesting huh? I don't think I'm supposed to be living in San Francisco, which I've known for about two years now. Check this out - Las Vegas is supposed to be a good place for me to live. I can't imagine living there because I have to live near an ocean and I don't like to gamble.

And my cousin sent me Joel Osteen's newest books. I love that man's sermons.

Speaking of pastors, Rick Warren has been on TV a ton and I really, really like him. I love his book "The Purpose Driven Life".

We had christmas pudding for dessert. We doused it with brandy and lit the baby on fire. You gotta love food that burns. We also had french brioche in the shape of loaves, which was fattening and divine, for appetizers, and I made braised chard with garlic from a recipe that was in the San Francisco Chronicle. I love chard! The recipe is definitely a keeper.

Okay, one last post. It's freezing here! I wake up every morning and my car is covered with white stuff. It's not snow, but the dew is frozen and white on my car.

I just bought a new parka from LL Bean that is wind proof, and I am very grateful for it with this freezing weather. The parka is warm, maybe too warm, but that's fine with me. The parka also has thinsulate in the body which is nice.

I decided to get rid of books I'm reading on the left side bar. It's too hard to keep up with because I read a book a week. This year however has been a bad year for reading. I thought I would increase the number of books I read this year, but I didn't.

My movie watching has also been abysmal. I hardly went to the movies this year, and now that I use Netflix insetad of Blockbuster I don't rent as many movies either. With Blockbuster I was forced to watch my movies in a week. With Netflix, my movies sit around for months on end before I watch them. There is no urgency at all for me with Netflix.

I have to decide if I should go back to Blockbuster only because I did like the serendipity of going to the store and seeing what was available. I ended up discovering many good movies this way. Netflix is good for renting movies that are hard to find, especially the classic old movies. But that's about it.

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.