{"id":627,"date":"2008-12-31T15:32:38","date_gmt":"2008-12-31T19:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=627"},"modified":"2014-12-15T00:13:35","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T05:13:35","slug":"useful-holiday-gifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=627","title":{"rendered":"Useful Holiday Gifts"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year our family thought briefly about “cancelling” Potatomas due to the stock market downturn, and also the realization that a lot of the time we feel so obligated to get something, anything<\/i> that we get a lot of useless, overpriced stuff for each other, some of which never gets used. So this year there was a big focus on getting useful things for each other. My dad gave each of us a cheque, perhaps the most useful thing to get in any situation, if not the most creative. I also got an eliminator emergency car starter<\/a> for my car. Since my car is getting old I’ve been considering getting one of these myself — I’ve never had to use my jumper cables yet, but it would be even more convenient to not have to worry about flagging down someone else to help me with a jump, to have a spare battery to do it on my own. In addition, it comes with a 110 V AC inverter, so I can use it to charge my cellphone without having to get a car adapter, or to power my laptop if needed, which is very handy when combined with MS Streets & Trips loaded on there for maps — though without a GPS I still have to be able to figure out where I am on my own (which on marked roads is not that hard). <\/p>\n

Wayfare’s family is insane at xmess, getting each other “billions” of presents, but even they had a bit of a focus on practicality this year: lots of clothes and DVDs they knew they would watch and chocolates. Wayfare’s parents got us a Wii Fit (a very tough thing to find this year!) which is a toy, but will hopefully also be practical in helping us to continue to get healthy this year.<\/p>\n

Though oddly enough her cousin got us an… iron. For ironing clothes. We both kind of tilted our heads at that, puzzled. We’ve been living out on own (singly or together) for the better part of a decade. We each came with an iron, and even then it’s not an item I use much around the house (perhaps it’s a passive-aggressive hint?). It just seems like such a strange gift to give someone: it’s at the same time a practical item, and also a completely useless one. After all, who doesn’t already have an iron that actually uses one? And it’s not like it’s a real cool or thoughtful gift, the sort of thing you just love to give even if the recipient doesn’t need it and you have to return it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year our family thought briefly about “cancelling” Potatomas due to the stock market downturn, and also the realization that a lot of the time we feel so obligated to get something, anything that we get a lot of useless, overpriced stuff for each other, some of which never gets used. So this year there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}