I recently celebrated my birthday and though I love the cake and ice cream, I dread the gift opening. You see, I make the point of creating a list of what I would like for my birthday, but sometimes people just don’t follow it and they get me something else instead.

If my aunt deviates from the "plan" I don’t mind because she is very good at coming up with very good ideas. But, if anyone else does not get what is on the list, I typically find that I will get something that is either inappropriate or that I will hate.

Unfortunately for me, this happened this year when my brother decided to make up his own mind as to what I should get for my birthday. Instead of the best coffee maker and best coffee pot that I had asked for, he bought me some cheap "garage sale special" that who knows where he bought it from.

I thought he could’ve handled buying one of the best coffee makers on my list, but instead he bought me exactly what I didn’t want for my birthday.

All I can say is that I love taking pictures.  Everything from a frosty morning, to a rainbow after a thundershower gets me excited - I love to capture nature in all its’ glory.

But, the one thing that has been a big stumbling block for me is justifying the costs to my wife.  She doesn’t understand why I always need the latest and greatest equipment and how I can’t use my five year old camera.  She just thinks that it is a big waste of money, and told me that if I wanted to spend anymore of it, I would have to come up with it myself.

So, I have been looking at joining some of the stock photography websites out there to see if I could cash in on the stock photo craze.

I found a couple of sites that sold their stock photos royalty free and allowed people like myself to submit my photos to be included in their site.  So, I have submitted some photos and I will have to wait and see if I am accepted into the program.

I just hope that things go well and I can quickly make the money that I need to buy a new camera - this year old one just about doesn’t cut it anymore.

I have been an avid player of World of Warcraft for sometime now and I feel that I can tackle almost any challenge.  In fact, I would almost say that it has become almost too easy - if you have the right equipment and skills, the game really becomes almost too easy.

In fact, that issue was discussed recently on a wow pvp blog that I read.  I guess that I am not the only person that feels the same way.  So, I have been looking into other options to fulfill my need of having a challenging roleplaying experience.

I came across a post about wow vs live action roleplaying and they have a good point.  Wow really just requires having the right items and mashing the right buttons to win, whereas live action roleplaying requires a little more ingenuity.

I’ll have to see if there is some live action roleplaying groups in the area - I really want to try it out.

Sometimes it amazes me how you can explain something to someone and though you are expecting one outcome, it ends up being completely different than what you thought it would be.

I recently experienced a great example of this when I asked my wife to go buy mens cufflinks for me at a store downtown.  Though I really didn’t buy a lot of cufflinks, the store was having a sale on vintage cufflinks and there were a couple of them that I had my heart set on.

But, during the hours of the sale I had to be at work, so I sent my wife instead.  I gave her explicit instructions of which ones that I was looking for, confirmed that she understood what I had said, and put my faith in her that she would come back home with my cufflinks in hand.

When I got home from work and rushed to open the box the cufflinks that she had bought me, I couldn’t keep the anticipation and excitement inside.  As I opened the box and peered inside it I realized that there is something very wrong.

Inside the box there were photo cufflinks.  What made it even worse was that it just wasn’t any old photo, but I would be wearing pictures of Mr. Bean on each arm.  I stood there in shock and horror looking at what my wife bought me.

I couldn’t help but hear laughter coming from the other side of the room and I realized that my wife had played a big joke on me.  She handed over the cufflinks that I originally wanted and then she wiped away the tears from all the laughing off of her face.

Man, I love my wife.

Since we purchased our first home this year, there have been many things that we have needed to learn.  Some of these things we have taken for granted such as changing the furnace filter, or considering how landscaping designs can affect your yard.

This has meant that we have done a lot of reading in terms of learning how to take care of our new home.  I even received a book on landscaping design ideas from my wife for my birthday.  At the time, I thought that it wasn’t a good gift, but after reading the book, my thoughts on it changed.

In fact, I am currently reading the section on plant selection and right now I am learning about lantana care.  As it turns out, we have some in our yard and it is a good idea to know how to take care of them.

After I am done the book, my wife and I will sit down and plan out the layout of the yard.  Though we won’t have time to take care of it this year, we will be ready for spring next year.

When I was packing to go to Europe, I was wondering if my Zune car charger would work over there. I knew that I could not survive for two whole months without my music and it was important for me to be able to take it with me.

I did not want to take my Zune dock cable, as I was trying to pack as little as possible. I was going to be backpacking for three weeks and I did not want to be hauling it around with me. I didn’t want anything bigger than my clothes and my hairbrush.

My mom surprised me with a new Zune travel charger before I left. She said that it would work there and that it was one thing she could do for me before I left. She is the greatest mom ever, as she knew how important it was for me and I was going to miss her.

When I was buying my first car, I decided to call the auto insurance company that my dad uses to get a car insurance quote. I was sure that my rates were going to be high, as I was a fairly new driver. I had a great driving record, which helped a lot, but I did not have the years of experience that a good rate warrants.

I was quite surprised at the good rate that I was quoted, as I expected to pay a whole lot more than that. My dad told me that he was also surprised and said that I should definitely go for it. I filled out all the paperwork and was more than happy to put my new license plates on my older car.

I was always told that auto insurance Ontario was ridiculously priced, but I was glad that those people were wrong. At seventeen years old, I don’t have a lot of money, so it was good that I found something that I could afford.

Ever since I was nine years old, I have had to wear glasses.  I guess it wasn’t unexpected that I would have to considering that both my parents have them, but I never really liked wearing them.  Glasses also made me a social outcast of sorts - I was the only one in the class that had to wear them.

Now years later, my love for glasses has never blossomed - I hate them with a passion.  So, I decided that since there is a clinic in town that offers LASIK eye surgery, I might as well give it a try.  It would be so nice to be free from my glasses once and for all.

But, I wanted to know what I was looking at before I took the steps to have the surgery.  I had heard that the LASIK cost was really high, though according to the websites I did get a chance to look at, it really wasn’t that bad.

I am particularly interested to see if the clinic here in town offers wavefront LASIK as supposedly it is supposed to improve night vision - something that I really haven’t had for years.

Though it looks very promising, I still need to do some more research before I take the plunge - I don’t want to make a bad investment.

Between work and having kids, I don’t get a lot of time to sit down and play video games.  In most cases, my son wants to play with me too, but most of the games I have are just not appropriate for his five year old mind.

But when I saw Lego Star Wars 2 at the store, I knew that it would be a perfect game for us to play.  You see, according to the reviews that I had read, I knew that it would be perfect for his five year old mind.

What I didn’t take into account was that it was harder than I thought.  Part of it was due to the reaction time of my son (being five, he wasn’t the most coordinated player), and we got stuck on a couple of missions.

So, we used some Lego Star Wars 2 cheats that we found online to make the game a little easier.  We had a great time and I think that we will make it a regular father and son time.

When my husband and I decided that it was time to purchase our first home, it was a really exciting experience for us. We took our time and looked through several houses before making a final decision on the one that would best suit our family.

As we had never been through the process before, we did not know what to expect. We were pleasantly surprised to walk into our home on the day that we took possession to find a gourmet gift basket and a beautiful plant, as gifts from the realtor.

It was a lot of fun decorating out home the way we wanted to, knowing that we could paint the walls whatever color we chose to and that every decision about the house was completely up to us.

We eventually had to upgrade to a larger house and I did feel sad to leave the very first place that we were ever able to call home.