Monday Morning Rambling...

Well, it's another Monday morning. Thanksgiving is over, Black Friday has come and gone, and now we're just happily barreling down the calendar until Christmas. Amusingly enough, my son picked up a 'wish list' ad flyer from Wal-Mart somewhere, and has proceeded to cut out the pictures of toys from it in order to send a wishlist to his much loved grandparents.

Now, one would imagine a child doing this. It's what children do. It's why those flyers are produced in the first place.

The thing is, most kids pick and choose which pictures to cut out.

Not my son though, he's proceeded to cut out every toy for boys in the flyer.

Oh well.

And thinking of Christmas, I'm actually excited for my son this year. It's a little known fact, but I do actually plan ahead. In truthfulness, I've been planning for this Christmas for nigh upon two years now. After all, it was nearly two years ago when I picked up the first Transformer which my son will be opening on that morning a month or so from now. Basically, for the past 2 years, I've been slowly picking up transformers when they go on clearance, all on the slim (but perfectly justifiable, and ultimately justified, hope) that he'd like transformers for this particular Christmas. Yet, all these Transformers were older models, we had nothing from the new movie for him.

At least until this Saturday, when we stopped at a place called Hudson's. We managed to get the brand-new Optimus Prime for like $25, which anyone who goes to the toy department knows, is about a $15 savings.

Speaking of Saturday, we also stopped at the Book Shelf, which is the used bookstore closest to our house. While there, I finally managed to find myself a copy of Ringworld. As I was doing a happy dance over that, I walked up to the juvenile section where my son was digging through a bin of books, deciding on which one he wanted. When I looked up, I noticed three hardcover Harry Potter novels, two of which I didn't own. So, I also picked up Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix for $10 each.

By the way, the book my son picked up was The Bernstein Bears go to the Moon. Solid SF for the pre-school set!

Oh well, enough of my commercial musings from this weekend, and onto more solid SF stuff. Which, since this is Christmas time, I am seriously lacking in. We're mid-season for the anime series, and there's not any SF/F movies out at the moment. Well, I guess Beowulf could be considered a fantasy movie, but I just don't have the energy to go see it, and Hitman is based on a video game, but that's even harder to work up the energy for. After all, they turned Doom into a movie.

At least I have my reading.

Anyways, a few final things, one of the blogs I read on a consistent basis (The Anime Blog) is running a few contests.

• First is a contest for a Karas pocket watch.
• Second is a contest with a bunch of different mangas.

Both of these have the same deadline:

Deadline is numerical: 60 unique comments (minimum). The winner will be randomly drawn when 60 comments have been posted.