Today is Christmas tree decorating time. It's been standing naked in the living room for a few days, so it's time to make it look all pretty.

Next week we're taking a short trip to see the in-laws for some Christmas feasting, but fear not, we'll be staying on top of things regardless of how much turkey and eggnog cheesecake we eat.

Not sure what the New Year's plans are, but they will involve more eating and drinking for sure, quickly followed by some running to shed the extra weight we gained over the holidays. Why do we bother?

Doing all those chores over the weekend has worn us out, so we're due for a good night's sleep.

Adam is going to go see his advance premiere of TRON: Legacy tonight, so I'll be interested to hear what he thinks of it since he is quite a big fan of the franchise. The critical reviews of the movie have been somewhat on the negative side, even though we thoroughly enjoyed it.

I was a little bit surprised to read today that TRON: Legacy uses more advanced 3-D filming equipment than Avatar. It really wasn't noticeable at all, and I still think that Avatar is leaps and bounds ahead of any other 3-D movie we've seen since.

The video game, on the other hand, well ... that's not even in the same stratosphere. We'll have reviews for the game and movie later this week.

Couch-wise, we watched Fringe and The Sing-Off, which is quite entertaining despite being a capella singing.

The weekend is over too quickly again! Why does this always happen? It's the weirdest thing.

I started fiddling around with my new gaming PC and have come to the conclusion that this is going to be harder than I'd anticipated. I was just going to upgrade the graphics card and swap out hard drives, but in order to do that, I'm going to need to also swap out power supplies, RAM, and who knows what else. Yup, there will be lots of cursing done before this project is over.

We planted our spring flower bulbs, went to our first Christmas party, and watched Zombie Strippers (the name piqued interest, but man, what a horrendously bad flick) and a few episodes of The Amazing Race.

The 2010 VGAs had quite a few interesting announcements being made: Forza 4, Insane, Protoype 2, SSX: Deadly Descents and TES V. Very cool. Some of it's quite a few years out, but at least it gives us something to look forward to. Wonder what happened with the promised Gears Of War announcement. It was canceled at the last minute by Microsoft, so that must not have made CliffyB happy since he wasn't able to steal the show and all.

We got most of our chores done, and there are a few more to do tomorrow, but we also need to attend our first Christmas gathering and make some cupcakes in preparation. Should be fun.

We watched Bones, Burn Notice, Hell's Kitchen, Psych, and for tomorrow we have a few more things on the DVR, Get Him to the Greek or The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Our first, and most important, chore of the weekend has been taken care of: the Christmas tree.

I've always been a sucker for Christmas, and I insist on having a real tree in the house. We brought out the decorations from the basement, so tomorrow we'll dress it up and make it look all pretty-like.

We also started wrapping some of the presents for our out-of-country relatives, and we'll be shipping them out tomorrow, so everything should be on time for the holidays ....

Probably no time to go to the movies, but if we end up there, we might see The Fighter,. It's supposed to be a stellar performance from Christian Bale, and Marky Mark is always fun to watch.

We just got back from the "TRON: Legacy" movie screening for a bunch of press and notable people (producer was there, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, etc). Of course, the main thing was the movie, which is being released 25 years after the original, and it did not disappoint. From the sweet visual effects and awesome sounds to the story, Daftpunk tracks and intense light disc battles, there was never a dull moment. We saw the movie in 3-D, but I wasn't quite as impressed as by Avatar. Since it's set in a digital world, I had expected more. Overall, it was top-notch ....

We have a full agenda for the weekend: setting up my new PC, planting flowers, attending a Christmas party and, of course, watching shows on the DVR. Busy, busy!

The road work in front of our house has been completed, but it is still raining cats and dogs, and it's expected to continue until the weekend. Sigh, it's such a drag ....

This weekend, I'm finally going to get my new gaming rig up and running. I have to switch out some hard drives with the old system and then use the old setup as a workstation. It's not too difficult, but I've been putting it off all week.

Once I've done that, I'm going to check out Eve Online. Some of my gang/clan/guild members have been asking to give it a try, so we can all hang out together. We've been splintered around various games ever since the Vogster debacle, so it'll be good to team up again with people who you can trust and, most importantly, know how to play as a team.

The computer probing continued today, and while progress was made, not everything got resolved.  A friend's computer started having .NET issues a few days ago, giving an error upon booting, but also not letting any .NET updates being installed. I think we are closing in on resolving the issue, but it really makes you wonder. If Microsoft has a dedicated phone number for this particular issue and various tools to clean up installation issues, why hasn't this been addressed with a Windows update?

So far this week, not too many interesting games shipped to stores. There's been a bunch of DLCs, but apart from a straggler here or there, I think most of the holiday titles are in stores.

On a different note, we watched Bones, Castle, Fringe and The Sing-Off.

Don't you just hate it when you are trying to help somebody by fixing their computer and after hours of tinkering, trying things, rebooting, downloading tools, and more rebooting, you have to admit defeat without getting a thing fixed? Epic fail! At least I did not make things worse..

What was supposed to be a quiet evening in front of the TV turned out to be a bust. Just like the roadwork outside, nothing got done. After blocking off all parking spots on both sides of the street, they decided to let us know in the evening that they would start tomorrow instead.

At least I have Get Him to the Greek to look forward to ....

The weekend is over and done with again, so it's back to the grind.

Even though the weather sucked, yesterday was a fun day. Due to the constant raining, we did not get to plant any of our bulbs for our spring flowers, but we got to play The Smurfs' Village (iPod) and Stronghold Kingdoms, and we watched The Walking Dead, Burn Notice, a few episodes of Hell's Kitchen and NCIS.

We might be housebound this week. There's some major construction work that's being done to our street, so we'll find out tomorrow AM if we can leave the place at all.

Yesterday was tiring: shopping with the ladies, walking into shop after shop at the outlet mall, and carrying bags. It was fun, but tiring. We spent so much time out and about that by the time we got back home, the grocery store had closed, so we had to order pizza for dinner.

Today will be less intensive as we plan on doing a whole lot of nothing, apart from some errands and laundry. It leaves plenty of time to watch some shows on the DVR and continue our streak from last night, when we checked out Repo Men and an episode of Hell's Kitchen.

A special shout-out goes to Adam, as today is his birthday. He's officially old now. If you're not having fun today, it's not our fault either!

The new quad core is in the house! I'll be setting it up later today and then take it for a test drive. Got a few friends bugging me to try out Eve Online, which I haven't played since 2002 when it was still in beta, so this should be interesting.

We don't really have any big plans for this weekend. Some chores around the house, some shopping, errands and lots of DVR watching before things get out of hand again. Last night, we caught up on the latest Human Target and Chuck, which had lots of "Die Hard" references.

Where my turkey leftovers at!?

Today is the day! Time for a new gaming PC. After looking around for the past few weeks, checking various places on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I've got my eye on a Quad Core system. The only decision now is where to buy it, but that shouldn't be too hard of a nut to crack.

So seems like our Heroes of Newerth 2.0 preview coverage from yesterday caused a bit of a stir among the community. A lot comparisons to League Of Legends were tossed around, and a lot of people are upset about the changes, but equally as many fans are excited about them.

Not much time to watch TV, but we checked the latest Psych, which was great with all the Twin Peaks references.

We got to play some Epic Mickey today, and I was surprised at how good it looks — for a Wii game, anyhow. Most Wii games aren't exactly known for their top-notch graphical quality, which they make up for in fun and playability, but Disney seems to have gotten this one right. On the flip side, the camera angle is a bit frustrating, and not sure if it's an isolated case, but it might not be very well suited for people who get motion sick.

Watched the season finale of Sons Of Anarchy, and it was a true butt-clencher with a surprise ending. Very good stuff!

Switched a bit from Stronghold: Kingdoms to Vindictus as Nexon launched a content update adding new quests, armor, weapons and an entirely new location.

Mid-week already, and there are still plenty of turkey leftovers to be had. For the curious, we had apple-poblano whole roast turkey, and it was very delicious, especially the sauce made from the drippings. Damn, now I'm hungry again...

Another batch of games shipped to stores yesterday, and to be honest, the one I'm mostly interested in is Epic Mickey. Unfortunately, Disney seems to have forgotten to pack in the special brush pen that would've made it truly epic!

Not much time for TV watching last night, but there's always room to squeeze in Stargate Universe, which of course ended in a cliffhanger for the mid-season finale.

Wow, that was a rather quiet news day yesterday. There wasn't much happening at all. I'm afraid that we're going to be seeing more of those from here on out, as most companies are pushing out their holiday titles, and not much new stuff will be coming until next year.

While most normal businesses have their holidays over the summer, the video game industry usually shuts down over the holidays. Maybe the Video Game Awards will bring some excitement next month ....

As expected, we didn't do a whole lot yesterday. The in-laws left way early in the morning since they have a long drive ahead of them to get home. We went back to bed and inevitably woke up in the early afternoon. We skipped our usual errands, and after cleaning up the place a little,  we saw Faster (with Dwayne Johnson AKA The Rock), which was an OK movie at best with a somewhat hasty ending (and a few plot holes).

After some leftover ribs, we tossed a few logs in the fireplace, plopped ourselves on the couch and watched The Good Wife and Human Target.

Our condolences to the friends and family of Leslie Nielsen (84), known for Airplane! and the Naked Gun series; he died this weekend from complications from pneumonia while trying to fight a staph infection.

Yesterday was filled with a whole lot of doing nothing. We ate some more, took a nap, and played Fable III, Vindictus, Stronghold Kingdoms and Enslaved.

The in-laws are leaving in the morning, so they had to squeeze in a bunch of shopping really quick. Luckily, I was spared from the experience.

Nothing on the agenda for later today, apart from some errands, maybe tidying up the place, watching Faster and undoubtedly catching up on stuff that the DVR recorded over the past few days.

So far, Black Friday has resulted in zero super deals, or at least in anything that we needed or wanted to buy. It's rather disappointing, but we still have today, tomorrow and, if all else fails, Cyber Monday to find a new PC.

After stuffing ourselves with turkey on Thursday, we did some more gorging last night with some awesome BBQ ribs, coleslaw, corn casserole and salad. We'll have to go on a week-long diet starting next week, unless we plan on looking like the Goodyear blimp.

The in-laws are leaving tomorrow, so maybe we'll get a chance to relax and see a movie. I'd like to check out Skyline but haven't heard too many good things about it, so maybe we'll check out Faster.

We're all stuffed with turkey and locked and loaded to pass out, but Black Friday starts in a few hours and the in-laws want to check out a few stores. While there's no way I'm going to be standing in line with the masses, I'll be scoping out a few places for a new gaming computer. I saw a few decently priced quad cores a few weeks back, so hopefully I can snag one at a discount.

In between feasting on the poor oversized bird and eating eggnog cheesecake, we watched some No Ordinary Family and Blue Bloods.