The day before Thanksgiving, Brad and Emilie invited us over for a fish barbeque, quite possibly the last one of the year. We went over armed with some Alaskan pollock and a wonderful recipe. Brad barbequed a nice huge salmon fillet for themselves, but desecrated it with Bullseye BBQ sauce. Oh, the humanity!

I just finished another awesome audio book, "Merrick" by Anne Rice. This book was even better than the rest of her books, because it's a crossover book between her two main storylines (the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches books). A few days ago at work I did 7 HQS inspections in one day. I think that's a personal record for me.

For Thanksgiving, Misti, Becca, and I went over to my folks place, as did Neal and Megan, too (Ginger wasn't able to make it because Paul was being released from long-term care and returning home - Yeah!) We enjoyed the usual turkey, potatoes, fruit salad, etc. Afterward, we watched "A Knight's Tale" (starring Heath Ledger), a hilarious film about medieval jousting. In tribute to the film, I wanted to include here a short poem by Geoffrey Chaucer:

"Ther seen men who kan juste and who kan ryde. 

Ther shyveren shaftes upon sheeldes thikke; 

He feeleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke; 

Up spryngen speres twenty foot on highte; 

Out goon the swerdes as the silver brighte; 

The helmes they tohewen and toshrede; 

Out brest the blood with stierne stremes rede; 

With myghty maces the bones they tobreste. 

He thurgh the thikkeste of the throng gan threste; 

Ther stomblen steedes stronge, and doun gooth al; 

He rolleth under foot as dooth a bal; 

He foyneth on his feet with his tronchoun, 

And he hym hurtleth with hors adoun; 

He thurgh the body is hurt and sither take, 

Maugree his heed, and broght unto the stake."

Today, I did a little maintainence on the site (on the Neopets page and the blog [obviously], but mainly in our family history). I received a message from Alan Smith (not the Allan Smith I initially thought it was), and he led me to a wealth of online information about the settlers of Grouse Creek, Utah - on which are biographies of the Kimbers (Misti's great-great-great-great grandparents). Very cool.

Today we braved the mall crowds and tried a little Christmas shopping, but only met with partial success (still more to be done). Try as I might, my score on Playsite (speed Monopoly is such an awesome game) always hovers in the 1,220-1,240 range. My goal is to break the 1,300 mark, but that might take some doing.

Some recent movies we've seen include "Spiderman" (with Willem Dafoe and Tobey Maguire), "The Scorpion King" (with Michael Clarke Duncan and 'The Rock'), and "The Sum of all Fears" (with Morgan Freeman and Ben Affleck). I forgot to mention in my last post that we used the 'Fandango' online ticket purchasing service for the first time a couple of weeks ago (when we went to see "Harry Potter II" at the cinema). It's great because you don't have to stand in line when you get there, you just walk right in! Very nice.

I was completely impressed by the fact that the IMAX edition of 'Star Wars, Episode II' is expected to consist of approximately 7 TB (terabytes - one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes) of data, and would fill around 13,000 DVDs!

Well, I recently passed the 2,300 mark on Seti. In an ironic twist, Brad is back in our group's Top 10, because Astroboy (the one who pushed Brad out in the first place) ended up quitting the team. Also, Yeechang Lee, a long-time participant in our group (and somewhat of a famous LDS web celebrity), quit the group at some point in the recent past.

We went to Sears a few days ago and had our annual Christmas portrait taken. Here's a low-quality preview from the SearsPortrait.com website (they let you preview them online):



Well, I recently had another birthday, and got a fabulous Baskin-Robbin's ice cream cake. I didn't age at all this year, however, mainly because I thought I was 33 this whole past year, but when I stopped and did the math, I actually was really only 32. Thus, when my birthday arrived, I became 33 (again). Pretty good, huh?

Misti and Becca treated me to some really cool movies for my birthday. We went and saw "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" the day after the opening day, and it was really awesome. The spiders were creepy, but this movie has more 'teeth' than the first one. Lucius Malfoy (Draco's dad) is really good in this movie (i.e., Jason Issacs, the guy who plays him, is really excellent).

I also got "Star Wars, Episode II - Attack of the Clones" on DVD. I had forgotten how long this movie really is! I really like it, though. It's my favorite so far, although I already know that Episode III is going to be the best one out of all six.

Becky says "olive" now, as well as "cat", "guh" (for dog), "muh" for cow (moo), and a few other choice words. David left for the MTC a couple of weeks ago, and we've been trying to catch a glimpse of him on the MTC webcam, but haven't yet been successful. My folks got a letter from him today, and he's doing well and his Espa�ol is coming along nicely.

We babysat Sarah a couple days ago whilst Marci, Brett, and Rachel went to also go see Harry Potter II. We went to Comstock Park, and the kids had fun running around and playing on the playground equipment.

Becca's first paper cut happened yesterday, and she was sad. The funny part, however, was watching her afterward fighting with the band-aid. It was really irritating to her to have something stuck on her finger that she couldn't get off.

I have joined yet another distributed computing project, Distributed Folding. Their DOS command-line client works really fast, which is nice because it lets you climb up the ratings fairly quickly.

I wonder how many Americans bite the inside of their cheek? I know quite a few people that do for various reasons, including stress, worry, or anxiety. I do, too, but I'm not really sure why I do. Hmmmm. I'll have to see what I can dig up on the web regarding the subject.

Recently watched Nicolas Cage and T�a Leoni in "The Family Man", and Karen Allen in "The Basket". For Halloween, I dressed up as a bumblebee, Becky and Bonny both dressed up as ladybugs, and Misti dressed up as me (greased back hair, my work shirt, and a pillow for a belly).



Recently finished another audio book, "Nightshade" by John Saul. This was definitely a creepy book, even for a murder mystery. Very suspenseful. Recently passed both the 2000 and 2100 workunit marks with Seti@home. You might also notice that Brad is no longer in the top 10 of our group. He'll be hard pressed to reclaim his position.

Well, I finally lost more than 10 pounds on my Herbalife diet (I have now lost exactly 11 lbs). I didn't want to talk about it until I had lost at least 10 lbs, because I figured that anything less than that would be temporary or too little to matter. It's going slowly for me, but I'm getting there. My goal is to lose 25 pounds total, so I've only got 14 more to go. Nearly halfway there.   =)

I attended the 13th Annual Nevada Humanities Awards last Wednesday at Bartley Ranch, put on by the Nevada Humanities Committee. We are related to Earl, Beverly, and Steven James Crum, recipients of the 2002 awards. Other recipients included William Jacobsen and Warren d'Azevedo. After the ceremony, I was fortunate to meet some more members of my extended family, Katrina ('Kitty') and her husband, Naomi's daughter and son-in-law.



David's family 'farewell party' was Friday night, and he was set apart yesterday morning by President Earl. He enters the MTC on Wednesday. (I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the MTC now has a webcam.) Today during Stake Conference, Becky and David were named by name as Pres. Earl recounted yesterday's uplifting experience, much to our surprise.   =)

In an ironic twist (considering my earlier post on why digital compression sucks), Dave gave me a Sony MZ-R500PC Recording MD (Minidisc) Walkman.