Well, it’s Christmas Eve and I’m at home chilling with the family. Have a merry Christmas tomorrow, everyone. =) I may be calling some of you up and/or dropping by, so watch out!

In other news, I uploaded pics from when we took Henrique and Tu to a Brazilian restaurant:

More on my flickr.

I wrote an email to God today (well, not really, because I don’t know his email address) and it reminded me of the movie Dear God about people reading the letters people were writing to God and answering their prayers by doing good deeds for them. Anyways, that’s kinda not the point.

I don’t think I pray very well, especially out loud when other people are around. I’ve probably voiced this before, but I’ll do it again anyways. =p I’ve never really written/typed out a prayer before, but I think it really helped because I guess it helps me to think through my thoughts. In a lot of churches I’ve attended in the past, prayers are sometimes really short and sometimes like mini-sermons. I guess mine tend to be on the short side and I find it hard to come up with things to “talk about” I guess (actually, this is probably a common problem with people too, not just with God)… a lot of times, I’m like, “why do I need to tell God this as he probably already knows?” I know that’s not the point. =p

I think prayer can be very powerful and I envy people who seem to be gifted with a strong prayer life. Actually, I guess they probably weren’t “gifted” with it, but they had to work on it and I should do the same. I want a strong prayer life and I want to dialogue with Him more because He’s the only one who I can truly trust to always lead me in the right direction, whether I like it or not. It might be a little early for New Year’s resolutions, but I think that’s the top of my list for ‘07.

I know I post it a lot, but it is a prayer and it is my favorite song…

“Dear Father, I need you,
Your strength my heart to mend.
I want to fly higher,
Every new day again.

Dear God…
Increase.
Healing hands of God have mercy on our unclean souls once again.
Jesus Christ, light of the world burning bright within our hearts forever.
Freedom means love without condition,
Without a beginning or an end.
Here’s my heart, let it be forever Your’s,
Only You can make every new day seem so new.” - Five Iron Frenzy

So this past semester, my Elements was blessed with two foreign exchange students, Henrique and Tu. These guys are pretty awesome and very cheerful and I’ve very much enjoyed having them in my group to share in our discussions. They’re both headed out of Texas this week, so on Sunday, we went to a Brazilian restaurant to wish them farewell (Henrique is Brazilian, and Tu is Vietnamese — they went to a Vietnamese place before). We decided that we needed to do a Chinese place too, so yesterday, off to Din Ho we went.

We had 11 people show and decided to go with the 10-person meal, but since they had no lobster, we got to substitute four dishes instead (!!!), so we ended up with 11 dishes. Woooot. It was a pretty awesome meal and I think everyone was really super stuffed. It was fun. =)

I don’t know if this seems cheesy, and I don’t think it should, but I’m going to say it anyways… Henrique and Tu, God bless. =)

Yay! Today at work, I entered the office and our office manager greeted me with a brown box and said “this is for you.” I thought it was an LCD at first, but nope, it was my MacBook. Yay! So I spent most of the day setting it up and it’s running smoothly now. Yipeee… time to be more productive. =)

I had a larger, inferior spec’ed, HP laptop that I didn’t even bother taking home (I just left it locked at the desk)… but this MacBook is nice enough for me to carry around with me. I still think I prefer the MacBook Pro’s keyboard though, but it’s nice nonetheless.

Rumor has it a 12″ MacBook Pro might be released soon… I might be tempted… the only reason why I’d stick with the larger version is better photo editting though… so I dunno, we’ll see.

In anticipation for tomorrow’s beta release of CS3, I played around with a few pics in Photoshop again on my PC. I’ve been too lazy to transfer pics from my mac to my PC to edit pics in Photoshop with… and also been too impatient to put up with Photoshop running via Rosetta. Anyways, Oink, being the good looking dog he is, was a good subject, so I played with two of his pics.
Man, I miss Photoshop.

Photoshop CS3 beta tomorrow! YAAAAAAAAAY!!!