Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I'm used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I'm actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven't played the game since college, and I don't remember being any good at ( Read more... )

Parked on 3rd floor at mall for lunch, had to hunt far afield for a table. Do that many people really have today off?

Took a half-day on Wednesday, then went home and took a nap. Went over to help my parents set up for their New Year's Eve party, planning to come home later & watch LA Confidential, and ended up staying. Watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and the "auditions" for the Evil League of Evil submitted by fans. Some were good. Some were...not ( Read more... )

Somehow managed to get through last-minute Christmas shopping. I'd like to thank the following people for helping: Starbuck, Kelly, Peet, and the Bean sisters (Coffee and Lost). Read and reviewed the final issue of The Flash (the third time it's been canceled for a relaunch in as many years) while alenxa baked cookies, and on to a "relaxing" evening ( Read more... )

My brother and his fiancée drove down from San Francisco to visit last weekend, and we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them at my parents' house. And playing Munchkin. Which was fun, except for the interminable turns when someone needed to discard a bunch of cards and, because most of us were new at the game, agonized over which ( Read more... )

1. I've been going through old comic books looking for Hostess ads from the late 1970s.  They had these one-page stories where a hero would run into a really lame villain, and be able to stop them by distracting them with Twinkies, or fruit pies, or cupcakes.  Some of them are total crack, and there's a web archive with snarky commentary.  I got ( Read more... )

Finally got out to do serious Christmas shopping today. Hit a couple of individual stores at the beginning & end of the day, but the bulk of it was taken up by a 3-mall tour:

The Village (formerly known as the Mall of Orange). Not too bad. Parked quickly, though not terribly near the mall. Crowds weren't too bad, even in the food court where alenxa ( Read more... )

Ended up missing my company's Christmas party this year because we had tickets to see Tori Amos at the Grove on Saturday. Good concert, but our feet were pretty much dead by the end of the standing show. Sometime I'll have to post the experience of trying to eat at El Torito Grill beforehand ( Read more... )

Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG ( Read more... )

Last night we got the biggest Halloween crowd we've had in years. Which isn't saying much, since it was only around a dozen kids, but I think there were a couple of big groups that collided, because about 6 or 7 of them showed up at the same time. alenxa redid her Sylar Victim makeup, and scared some of the kids. (One actually asked, "Does that hurt ( Read more... )