Presents to keep me busy

It was a swell Christmas this year.  We had great food and the cats didn't object too strongly to being randomly pelted with wrapping paper.  I think they were too stoned from their catnip mice to even notice.

I've got a few things to keep me busy this year, including:

• Books (1,918 pages total):
• The Mote in God's Eye (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle)
• Lucifer's Hammer (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle)
• Little Brother (Cory Doctrow)
• The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
• New York Then and Now (Marcia Reiss)
• A lovely marble trivet (with an Irish blessing)
  
• A luggage scale (great for minimizing fees)
• Rosetta Stone Japanese Level 1 (in case I can make that trip to Japan work this year)
• Pentax DA Fish-eye 10-17mm F3.5-4.5 ED (IF) lens (great for wide angle views and cool fisheye effects)

I did not receive the cat for Christmas (though sometimes I think my mother wouldn't mind shipping her off to Seattle).  And I didn't even pose her.  But Crash just can't seem to miss an opportunity to show off.

Here she is demonstrating the effects of my new lens.

I used the built-in flash on the Pentax K10d for this picture.  Your supposed to use external flash due to the extremely wide field of view with this lens.  At 10mm the built in flash turns into more of a spot light, but I like how it looks.

Looks like I'm going to be busy learning stuff, practicing stuff, reading stuff, weighing stuff, and putting down hot stuff.  It's going to be a fun year.

How was your holiday?