I've never been huge on Christmas, and I'm not really sure why. As I've mentioned before, my mother treated me as an adult at an early age and one of the "upsides" to that - at least I felt - was that when it came time for Christmas she basically gave me a "budget" and allowed me to pick out what I wanted. It meant that there weren't any surprises - well that's not true, she'd get me a couple of surprise gifts - but mostly I knew what I was getting which made me happy. My siblings always got more, but I got *what I wanted*.
As I grew older I got a job and bought the things that I wanted, which really outside of some video games and/or computer hardware wasn't really all that much. When I got married to M and we had our daughter P, Christmas somehow became a competition between my nephew and P. Well really my mother and sister versus M, which agitated me to no end and which further soured me on Christmas as I guess I'm naive, but that's not what I felt it should be about. I finally put a stop to that on our end, though they continued to try and "win" - whatever that meant.
I personally hadn't changed much, I still pretty much had what I wanted - M had gotten me a projection TV at some point and we bought a nice Bose Acoustimass 15 surround sound - this was about the time DVD's were getting big so it was a nice setup. But beyond that I got to the point that I didn't need/want anything for the holidays. Over time as I separated from M and ended up with my wife J, that didn't change and really still hasn't. I always get things for P and J, and usually something for M, but I really don't want anything myself.
This year I made two exceptions though and for the first time in a long time I was able to buy these things and not have any buyers remorse. The first purchase was online on Thanksgiving. Best Buy ran the LG Tone+ bluetooth headsets on sale for $40 (they list them at $70). I know they are a year old model, and truthfully I've never been a headset person. On top of it, I don't use my phone to listen to much audio, the only real audio I listen to away from the computer is usually when I'm walking and that's on an iPod Shuffle which doesn't have native bluetooth. However, the various models of these LG headsets were spoken of very highly in a couple of Google groups I'm in and they were on sale, so I ordered three - one for me, one for J, and one for M - which made them another $5 a piece cheaper for buying three.
Suffice it to say I love them. I've been using them around the house when I cook since J often calls on her way home from work and I can talk to her hands-free now. I've also been using them for my walks. I miss the iPod, but I can stream ESPN radio on my phone - both live and podcasts, and I guess I need to get around to loading Pandora or some other streaming since T-Mobile exempts many music services. I guess I should write a full review on them at some point, but to keep it short here I cannot recommend them enough.
The other purchase was a bit more foolish - a 50in 4k Vizio TV to replace the older 42in LCD one in J and I's bedroom. We didn't need it, and honestly part of me questions if I should have spent the money, but to be honest it is very nice. There isn't a lot of 4k content out there - some on Netflix, some on Amazon (I guess I need to join their Prime), and some online stuff. But even the regular HD stuff looks so nice. Now part of it is that we went from a 720p to this TV, although it's not just that as the 73in in the living room and the 65in in the game room are 1080p and this picture does look better than those as well. I can only think that as 4k content becomes more prevalent we'll be even happier with it. The fact that it's a Smart TV helps too - I had various ways to do things on the older TV (A Logitech Revue box, a Chromecast, and so on), but it's nice to have it native. If I had a complaint it's because the Vizio sound bar we have in our room is a year too old to be controlled via the TV, but even that is a trivial gripe.
I think at this point I'm back to not really wanting anything for myself (SRS being an exception <G>), but it was nice to pick up a couple of "toys" for myself for a change.
- M
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