Happenings this Week

Well given the havok that is occuring in the lives of friends and family, I feel positively lucky. Nothing that has happened to us even compares to brain surgery or major gastrointestinal malfunction. :/ There was some potential tension re: my job, since my boss is moving to another department at the end of the month, but according to her there is no reason to believe that my contract will end any time before November when its supposed to. Hopefully all will go well.

We had an extremely busy weekend. Jennifer's mother, Joyce, was in town to celebrate her birthday. Thursday night we went to see Public Enemy which was pretty good. Jennifer and Joyce spent most of Thursday shopping at various places, including at BJ's to get a replacement microwave for the one we had that became fragged ala Half Life 2.

Friday Jennifer treated her mother to a day spa, which was quite nice for the two of them. They got massages, manicures and pedicures. While they were doing that I played Civilization IV with Greg and Jason (a friend of ours in Houston who works with Greg.) I think Civilization is the ultimate Ant Farm game, but its still fun to me. Friday night we went to the Shakespear Tavern and saw the Mystery of Irma Vepp, which was quite skillfully done. It was a little antiquated, but the humor was still relatively good and we definitely enjoyed it.

Saturday we spent most of the day with Mom, Skip and Grandma. We watched Bolt, ate dinner and then walked half way to downtown to see the fireworks. We had brought some items, grandma provided a fruit tart, and Skip's assembly of sandwich components was excellent. Though the roast beef had come fresh from the farmer's market and with the juices etc, one could understand how it makes vegetarians unpleased.

Sunday we had a much more relaxed time. We spent most of the time lounging around the house. I played some Civ IV, and read some. I finished the latest Feist book I was reading, Rides a Dread Legion in fairly short order. The evening was fairly quiet as we watched yet another episode of the extremely safe and inane arthurian hackjob that is Merlin. It is fun, but they've Smallvilled Camelot to the point that the original story is best left at the door. Just pretend that it only vaguely resembles hundreds of years of story telling (which it does) and you'll be more or less fine. Occasionally it can be frustrating as Merlin acts like a complete and total idiot, but his heart is in the right place, even if his brain isn't. We liked Supernatural a lot better and I'm sorry we haven't been watching it up until now. Its quite good. I originally thought it was Fred and Fred take action in live action Scooby Doo but it isn't that at all.
I think the pitch line I read on their wikipedia page "Luke Skywalker and Hansolo drive a cadilac from Route 66 and drive all over the country fighting monsters" is pretty accurate.

Later this week, we saw Charlie Bartlet. Jennifer is extremely busy with crunch time at work, so last night I finished two more episodes in my podcast for Red Anvil. On the whole, things are going quite well for us and we are grateful for what we have while we have it.