Christmas is almost here. It seems like the holidays come and go with ever-increasing rapidity as each year goes by. For instance, I feel like we were just in Michigan for last year’s holiday festivities, opening gifts, taking pictures of my parents’ dog and of the snow-covered landscape outside our back door. Being in Florida, perhaps the winter months pass more quickly because they are the most fast-paced months of the year here. There’s no snow or ice to bog us down, and the population of our fair city nearly doubles as people from all over the country come here to enjoy the more temperate climate. And after Christmas, things really pick up—we rush around at double speed as February sets in, and traffic snarls on our roads reach new heights.

Which is why I love December. It’s cooling off now, the summer heat finally disappearing permanently for another year. The snowbirds are not yet here en masse, and I have plenty of days off from work to visit my family and friends in Michigan. Yeah, it’s cold up there, but for some reason Christmas just doesn’t seem normal if you’re in a place where it’s sixty degrees and raining instead of snowing. Plus I feel no attachment to this town in Florida. Everything here feels empty and hollow, like comparing a hotel room to your bedroom. You may be staying in the world’s most luxurious resort, but in the end, that’s all it really is—a resort. Not to be cliche, but there really is no place like home.

All next week my wife and I will be in the Detroit area, enjoying the better food, better shopping and better things to do. We’ve already got some plans on where to go, but nothing big—nothing is arranged by days, and there’s no list of stuff that absolutely must happen or we’ll be upset. We plan to enjoy some home-cooked meals and some of our favorite casual restaurants, spend time with family, and just lay around reading and playing games.

I’m not even taking the Xbox this year, or a laptop computer, or any other bulky crap. (Sorry d00ds—no DOA Volleyball this year.) Last year I was nervous the people at the airport would dock me for having too many carry-ons, or too much junk, or whatever. This year I’m traveling light—just a backpack for me this time. For the traditional mindless entertainment, I’ve decided to bring along a couple CDs of arcade game ROMs and the MAME32 emulator. That stuff will run on the computers that are already up north. I wouldn’t mind wasting a few hours playing King of Fighters, Chase H.Q. or even Capcom Bowling…call me crazy, but I always get in a “vintage game” mood every year around the holidays.

My wife and I both had the same thought—last night we both said, “We should go to Buddy’s.” Buddy’s is one of the best pizza places in the Detroit area. It’s pizza like you’ve never quite had before—and certainly nothing like any pizza you can get down here. Unlike some pizza joints, where if you order anything but pizza you’re gonna be nauseous, Buddy’s has great appetizers, chicken strips, and yes, breadsticks. OH YES, those breadsticks.

The best part about this Christmas vacation, by far, is that it looks like I won’t have the spectre of work floating above me the entire time. Since my office hired somebody to take care of the shitty, thankless job of arranging advertiser index pages for a bevy of stuffy New York magazines, I can actually leave without getting into a trouble—or doing massive amounts of work while I’m away. I do have to execute a near-complete redesign of the bikini website as soon as I get back—and I’ll have about a week to do it in—but I really don’t care to think about that right now.

Tomorrow evening is the company Christmas party—joy. Yes, I did say that with sarcasm. But fortunately, all of my friends from the office will be there, so even if the festivities themselves are a drag, at least some conversation can be had. I’ll probably try not to stay too long, but since the party is at the clubhouse of the community where the CEO lives, sneaking away may not be too easy. Depends how drunk everybody gets, I guess. The best part is that it’s not too far away from my house, unlike last year when it was almost all the way downtown. Unfortunately we’ve all got to go into the office on Friday, which always seems weird to me—hold a big party on Thursday night, serve drinks, get people plastered, then…come into work on Friday? Okay…I hope the CEO likes to see people sleeping on their keyboards!

Last night I broke out my MAME ROM collection, to prepare the arcade games I wanted to take on our trip up north. What an endeavor. My collection consisted of one gigantic RAR file spanned across ten CD-ROMs. I started by copying all ten peices to the hard drive first, which nearly thermo-locked my CD-ROM drive. Then I extracted the whole whopping thing, and what did I get? A bunch of smaller ACE archives. Deleted the RARs, then extracted the ACE archives to MAME’s ROM directory. In the end I had just shy of 4,000 games. Then, since of course that wasn’t anywhere near enough, I decided to go acquire some more. Last time I downloaded a MAME update, it was for v0.63…they’re up to 0.77 now. Unfortunately I can’t find any of the ROMs I missed between 0.64 and 0.69, but I was able to cue up the approximate gigabyte of everything that came after 0.70. (I’m trying to get a functional copy of Cruisin’ World; it’s been elusive so far.) Even games like Tekken 3 seem to be emulated now, which is incredible. Don’t think a game that advanced is going to run real well on the crappy old computer up north, though—I’d better stick to the raster-based ‘80s favorites like Roadblasters and Super Sprint.

Ahh, Christmas! Gotta love it!