Christmas is a time of joy and giving.It is also a time of receiving and showing off what you got.Here is my show-off page :)
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Christmas has come and gone.We are now winding down 2018 as we quickly approach the New Year.During this time of reflection, I am taking this time to review the blessings I have received.And given that this is a review of Christmas, where better to start than the presents I received this year :)

My wife tells me how hard I am to find and buy gifts for. I suppose she is right, in that most things I want are either out of the price range, or just not available. I have everything I need, of course, which is a blessing in itself; but as for wants - there are very few that are reasonably priced as a gift.Still, I did get a few things this year and I am grateful for each.

The “big” gift this year was an accident.I have been discussing getting a brand logo for myself for some time.Something I can put on my website, make stickers out of, whatever - something that is synonymous with me.I am no artist, but I tried several different logos over time and failed each time.Then I found what looked to be a deal by a bunch of graphic artists and website designers and decided to get it (after discussing it with my wife).Over many iterations, it came about -

alt text:  Steeladept Logo

As you can tell, I altered it slightly for these notes and posts, but the full logo is fully copyright protected and everything. Please note, the www.steeladept.com is not active yet.I haven’t decided what to make the home page, since these are the “notes”. But it is registered and will work once I place content there.

Anyway, getting back to the topic, this was still not a gift at this point. My wife was trying to find something specific (she still will not tell me what because she wants to give it to me for another event - birthday maybe), but she was unsuccessful.Given the cost of the logo was significantly higher than first thought (I didn’t think about registration costs for copyright protection, which was part of the deal, but not part of the advertised price); I told her “Just make this my big gift - an early Christmas present”.And so it is.

The other gift I received is 2 SSD hard drives to replace my aged and maybe going bad SSD in my main PC.I had 128GB SSD in there and ran out of space, so getting 2 256GB SSD’s was, indeed, a welcome present.Over the next week or so, I will be migrating and backing up data in preparation of the transfer, then actually have space, again, for all sorts of stuff!

alt text:  Samsung SSD

Finally, from my wife’s parents, we got a weekend getaway at one of the area indoor water parks called Splash Lagoon. Not sure if we have specific dates planned already, that is my wife’s department (she loves to plan things!); but we will definitely put that to good use sometime this year. The best gift of all, however, was a day where my kids actually didn’t fight each other at all. If you have kids who are near the same age, you already know what I mean. I have two girls, pre-teens, so you can just imagine what the fights are like. Having them acting like sisters who actually like each other was the biggest blessing and gift they could give me.And to be honest, I don’t think they even realize they did so.