After Christmas Weekend

Saturday, Dec. 26th

After a wonderful Christmas spent with family and friends, Heather and I decided to wake up a little late on Saturday morning. After cleaning up around the house and playing with the dogs for a little bit, we decided to watch one of the movies we got for Christmas. Here were our choices:

The Proposal, Ghost of Girlfriends Past, My Sister's Keeper, The Hangover, Terminator: Salvation, Transformers 2, and Wolverine.

Which movie do you think I chose for the family enjoyment? Hmmmmm? Well, I did what any loving husband would do. I chose to watch The Proposal with my wife so that we could reminisce on how we got engaged.

Ok, so that wasn't exactly what went down...

What really happened was that I did what any male with a 50 inch Plasma and Bose Acoustimass 10 surround sound stereo system would do. I picked Terminator: Salvation. Boy does it sound good. Maybe the best surround sound movie I've ever heard.

So about halfway through the movie, one of my close friends Brent G showed up. Brent was in town for Christmas and heading back to Nashville where he lives. I hitched a ride with him up to Nashville to go see my beloved Wildcats play on Sunday in the Music City Bowl against the Clemson Tigers. It was good to catch up with Brent as we don't see each other very often. I've been blessed to have some really great friends in my life and he is definitely one of them. He has made a point to not let distance be a factor in communication since he moved. Brent is usually good about calling once a month to get an update on the lives of the McGoo's. I must admit, I'm not the best phone talker as anyone that knows me can attest. However, the car ride up to Nashville gave us ample opportunity to catch up on life.

Once we arrived in Nashville we met up for dinner with my brother-in-law Brent K. (Since we're talking about two Brents, we'll label them as Brent G (friend) and Brent K (in-law)). We met up at a new Mexican restaurant in the Franklin area (suburb of Nashville) called "Chuys." It's a Tex-Mex type of restaurant and was very good. I really was surprised because most Mexican restaurants I go to have what seems to be the exact same food. When I say that, I mean it seems like they order their food from the same distributor because it all looks alike. "Chuys" was very different and even made my tacos the right way (sour cream in the taco and not outside) which gives them high marks in my book.

From there we headed over to the movie theater to see the movie "Avatar." If you remember from the previous blog, Brent K and I didn't get to see the movie on Christmas eve, so we were happy to watch it. We tossed around the idea of seeing "Sherlock Holmes" but Brent K had promised his wife that he would see if with her. Brent G had already seen "Avatar" and wanted to see "Sherlock Holmes", so he was really cool in sucking it up and seeing this again. Just another mark of a good friend...going to see a movie you've already seen just to spend some time with someone.

"Avatar" was everything people have said about it. It was visually stunning, as we saw the movie in 3-D. Now, I'm not one of those that has gotten into the 3-D phenomenon, but I was very impressed. I will say that my eyes got very tired about halfway through and it wasn't due to sleep. Watching 3-D really does take a toll on your eyes and there were a couple of times in the movie that I had to rub my eyes. The movie has also drawn a lot of heat in Christian circles for it's religious undertones of Pantheism, but honestly, it didn't seem any different that that of the Native American movies I've seen before such as "Dances With Wolves" or "New World." Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the movie and was glad to spend some time with the Brents.

Sunday, Dec 27th
I stayed at Brent G's house and we woke up to meet Brent K at church. Brent K and Robin attend Crosspoint Community Church in Nashville which has a younger, more progressive demographic. I have been before but I wanted to take Brent G with me so that he could see the church since he is still looking for churches in the Nashville area. Unfortunately I didn't get to see Robin as she had to work that morning but Brent K and his sister Elizabeth met us for church.

After church we headed to Logans Steakhouse where Brent K got to use one of his 10 gift cards he received for Christmas. I've never seen quite a deck of gift cards as Brent K had in his wallet (I was/am jealous). From there Brent G and I said our goodbyes and headed back to his house for some rest and relaxation with some NFL football. Now I haven't mentioned this but Sunday was the finals of my fantasy football league and yours truly was in it. I'll save the fantasy stories for another day, but I was blessed to win my league with the help of Tom Brady and a few other folks, so this day of relaxation was rather nice.

Around 5:45pm Brent G and I headed over to a sports pub to meet up with my friend Steve who was on his way back to Memphis. Steve had spent Christmas up in Northern Kentucky where his family lives and was driving through Nashville. I had convinced Steve to attend with UK game with me and then give me a ride back to Memphis...see, I told you I had good friends. So we met up with Steve and then said goodbye to Brent G and headed to the game. It was a great game to watch and the one thing that I'll take from it was that it was COLD. Freezing cold to be exact as the temp was in the mid 20's.


Steve won his fantasy league this year as well, so this is a pic of two champs


Steve "roughing it"

Unfortunately my Cats didn't win their fourth bowl in a row but it was a good game to watch. After the game we headed back to the car for the long trip to Memphis. Since the game got over rather late, I didn't get into bed until 3am Monday morning. Thank goodness that this college student was on Christmas break.

Now it's off to do honey do's. I've got quite a list of things to work on. Something tells me that one way or another you'll hear about them.