Well the year 2004 is over and 2005 is now here.  2004 has been a pretty big year for me—I graduated college, got my first real job, moved to a new city, lived alone for the first time, and most importantly, got engaged to Stephanie.  Now 2005 looks to be a big year for me as well, with a wedding coming up in April followed by a week in Hawai’i. :)  Then I get to be a newlywed, which according to MTV means that cameras watch whenever you eat tuna.  Or something like that.

So other things that I’ve been up to during the Christmas break include watching the first two The Lord of the Rings movies (Special Extended Editions of course), in preparation for watching the four-hours-and-ten-minutes-long The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: Special Extended Edition.  I don’t think I’ll manage to do it in one night.

My parents decided to get me a radar detector for my birthday, as I seem to have trouble slowing my car down as evidenced by three speeding tickets in four years.  Right now I think I’m actually driving slower with it there, just because it would be really embarrassing to get a ticket immediately after getting a radar detector.

The other day Stephanie and I got engagement photos taken at Glamour Shots, and I am very ashamed to say as a heterosexual male that this is not the first time I’ve been to that place... although this time was not nearly as obnoxious as the other time I was there.  It was very weird... for starters, the lady taking the pictures was like five-foot-one and probably weighed about seventy-five pounds, and she had to keep standing on this chair to take pictures at eye level, then she’d get down and fling the chair about three feet to the side to get another angle and climb back onto it.  It looked like she was doing step aerobics or something.  Then there were some strange poses, she was like “Kip you’re going to like this one.  I want you to sit like this” and she sits on a stool-type thing facing to the side with her legs together, then she gets up and I’m like “okay” and sit down.  Then she says to Stephanie “Now you sit on his lap” and she’s like “okay” and starts to sit and the lady’s like “no, facing each other” and we’re like “...okay...”  So we do that, and she’s like “Get closer!  You aren’t close enough, get closer to each other!  You look like you’re afraid the other is going to bite!”  And I’m thinking “maybe we signed up for the wrong type of pictures... we’re going to give these to our parents here!”  As it turned out, the pictures she took like that were only of our faces.  Then we got to purchasing the pictures, and I knew what to expect.  Even though we had a coupon for a free sitting and a free 8x10, you still have to pay a bunch of money.  Technically we could have walked out with just one 8x10, but we wanted a picture to give each of our parents.  And if you want more than one picture, the cheapest you’re getting out of there for is $200.  But the way the pricing scheme is set up, you can pay $210 for two pictures, or $200 for five pictures.  Of course the first price we were quoted was something like $750 and we just kinda laughed.  If we wanted any pictures in greyscale or sepia, they charge you ten dollars to hit that button in Photoshop.  What I would have really liked them to do is let me go online and download the super-high resolution digital image that they mess with in Photoshop (considering that you can get like two foot tall prints, they must be at least five megapixel to look decent).  Of course they won’t let you do that, because they own the copyright on the pictures.  It’s probably illegal to scan the pictures and make duplicates of any of them, but I’m going to do it anyway.  Take that copyright whores!  Speaking of digital images, I got a digital camera for Christmas (like that one but just 4 megapixel) and I’ll probably add some kind of photos section to my website when I get time.  I also got a huge memory card (512 MB) so that I can take lots of pictures in Hawai’i, which can hold about 250 images at 4 megapixel.  My cousin said that the guy at Best Buy told him that the number of megapixels doesn’t really mean anything.  That’s like saying the weight of your car doesn’t affect your gas mileage.

I think I’ve written enough for now.  If you want a good look back on 2004, you should check out Maddox’s The eleven worst songs of 2004.  You may not want to do so if you are at work though...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah
    ~Bono