Friday, December 31, 2021

Goodbye 2021

Well, another year will finally be behind us, and after today, Sealab 2021 will have officially taken place in the past.

Everyone going crazy after a year of isolation? Talk about predicting the future.

I had this whole post thought out about what I've done this year, and show off what I got for Christmas, then I saw the terrible news.

Betty White passing just 17 days before her 100th birthday was just an extra twist of the knife. She was America's Grandma! She couldn't go now! I'm glad that the Betty White Renaissance was a decade ago and we all got to tell her how much we all loved her since then. She didn't need a People Magazine spread to tell her that.

In her 90(!!) years in showbiz, she was in everything and knew everybody! She would've been a legend for just her role in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but she was also one of the best parts of The Golden Girls, Hot in Cleveland, and, well, just everything she did!

I don't need to tell you she was on The Simpsons.

This all reminds me of the great June Foray, who also died incredibly close to her 100th birthday. In both cases, I'm gonna call it "close enough." They made it to 100 in our hearts.

That's on top of losing the great John Madden earlier in the week.

If there was anyone that embodied "football," it was John Madden. Playing it, coaching it, inspiring video games about it, being a commentator on it, he did it all.

What I'll miss most is Frank Caliendo's amazing impression of him.

And with that out of the way, the monthly listicle can begin!



Christmas gifts! Not seen: Lots of gift cards, plus the Smokin Al's barbeque sauce I get every year. The big gifts were the blu ray player and the new Pokemon game. I played Pearl when gen 4 first came around fourteen years ago (it's been that long?!), so I've been itching to jump into Diamond. I haven't been able to play much of it so far, you can thank work for that, but I've been liking it so far.

I also finally entered the 21st century with a blu ray player! Just in time for physical media to die out! Now I need to get some blu rays, they're pretty cheap these days.

And you know you're celebrating Christmas in your thirties when you're excited to get socks. I really needed those socks. They're comfy.


Something else I did this month: I played some pinball! A few months back, a pinball arcade opened up in the local mall, and I finally got around to spending an hour in there.

There were some pretty old cabinets in there, and this was the oldest one I got to play. They were pretty unforgiving in terms of difficulty, but they gave you five balls per shot as opposed to the three you usually get these days.

What got me in the door in the first place was their Simpsons arcade machine! I remember playing it back in the day, but again, pretty unforgiving. It's full of elements that make no sense now, like how most of the villains were pretty generic and SMITHERS of all people was the main bad guy who had to fight to rescue Maggie.

I played as Marge, with her...trademark vacuum cleaner. But she was the long reacher of the four characters, much like Donatello on his own machines.

I was wondering how this place could stay in business...

...until I found out it wasn't. Today was the last day, and I found out too late that these great machines were going off to parts unknown. That space is gonna be pretty big for the store that's replacing it, so I hope that most of these machines find good homes if they don't stay behind.

I don't want to end this post, and this year on a bummer, so here's a picture of my cat!


Ain't she cute?

And here she is looking at the tree. We've got some good ornaments up this year.


Thanks to a bidding war on eBay, I finally have a Snow Miser ornament to go with the Heat Miser. I paid a little...too much for it, but it was worth it for a picture like this.

Happy New Year everyone! Let's make 2022 better than what came before!


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