A Well Kept Man

Feel free to skip to the next paragraph if you don't care about what Alli was doing in Brussels (think of this as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure post)........Anyway, it was a conference for nerdy financial people who specialize in pricing and pricing-related information and services (for example, let's say you work for a company that hypothetically sells medical devices, now imagine you are in charge of trying to figure out how much to charge for said medical devices in various foreign countries...let's say European countries to make this more interesting.  Now let us suppose you need a vendor to provide you with a software tool to make these decisions easier for you.  Are you still with me?  Now imagine you all decide to meet (you and the vendors) in one place at one time....that's what I'm talking about).  

So this was a conference where Alli was bound to come home with some gift or door prize to pay her way back into my graces.  Usually it's an exciting three-ring binder or laptop bag (why does every conference seem to give away laptop bags...we must have at least a cool dozen, eventually the laptop bag manufacturers will go out of business solely due to the volume of bags on the market.  We have one computer; do we need twelve bags for it?  Sure it's fashionable for your laptop to have a different bag each day, but I am fairly certain laptops don't make fun of each other for wearing the same clothes every day).

Now that I have sufficiently made a two-sentence blog into a couple paragraphs, you are probably dying to know what she brought back to our secret Swiss bunker/apartment.

That's right, a Nintendo Wii (European edition).  Even though I was very excited about the lovely gift, we wound up selling it on the underground expat market.  We mostly sold it due to the fact that it wouldn't work in the U.S. and we weren't about to sink a bunch of money buying video games and such for something we can only use if we live over here for the next however many years...We haven't decided yet what to do with the money, but we'll probably wind up splitting it 50/50 (seems fair to me...she got to go to Brussels, I had to survive on gummy bears and Coke until she came back to cook for me) and buying Christmas presents for each other that we can actually get some use out of in the greater seven continent area (like underwear, socks, and chocolate).