OMG Petz!!!111one!!

Don’t worry, I haven’t gone all l33t, that’s just an in-joke reference (from the More Awesome Than You Sims site) to the Pets expansion pack for The Sims 2. Which I got for Christmas. And which has been absorbing a large chunk of my time and attention for the last two days 🙂

Christmas was christmassy, in a calm, no family around sort of way. Just me and MrPloppy, some good food, a few presents, and lots of chocolate 🙂 Despite having (as every year) said to all three sets of parents that we didn’t want to do presents, they all sent us something. Mum’s kind of got the message, and just sent a couple of little things, but Dad sent us money as usual (it’s become a bit of a family joke that he never buys anyone a present, just gives them the money (although there’s a very good reason for that: he’s in retail and doesn’t have staff, so when’s he supposed to do his Christmas shopping?)), and although we at first thought the Outlaws had also got the message and just sent something small, on closer examination of our gifts we discovered several £20 notes tucked inside them! I should feel guilty about the fact that we only sent them a Christmas card, but we did tell them we weren’t doing presents, and we told them not to send us anything, so if they choose to ignore that, that’s not our fault!

So, having talked ourselves out of the guilt, and with our usual philosophy that gifted money shouldn’t be spent on practical stuff, the plan for today is to go to the bank and get the money the Outlaws sent us changed into dollars, then add it to the money from Dad and the voucher from the Awhinas, and hit the post-Christmas sales!

The other thing we have to do in town today is attempt to exchange a DVD. For the first time ever, MrPloppy and I managed to buy each other exactly the same gift: Series 4 of Scrubs. It’s actually amazing that we haven’t done it before, given our similar tastes in TV and movies, but this is the first time. MrPloppy opened his first, and burst out laughing and handed me another parcel of the same size… so now we have two copies. I got his from Amazon ages ago, at the same time as I was ordering some other DVDs for his birthday, so it’s way too late to return it, and he got mine from Whitcoulls, which has a no returns policy on DVDs. But he’s still got the receipt, so we’re going to take both copies in to Whitcoulls today and try and plead our case, because if we’ve got two copies it’s pretty obvious we aren’t pirates trying to copy the disk and then return it. Probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try. Oh well, if they won’t give us an exchange, we’ll probably just give the extra copy away (anyone here like Scrubs and have a Region 4 DVD player?) – actually, I might donate it as a prize for the Bookcrossing convention.