Necrus 11, 31.

Where to begin? I extemporaneously decided to take last week off from blogging, so I have two weeks to catch on. And I don't want to ramble on ad infinatum but I do want to convey how neat the last couple weeks have been. I'll start with the weekend before last, which was pretty typical except for Sunday when my parents came to visit for an early Thanksgiving. We had a short visit of lunch, a movie, and dinner, but it still stands out as the moment in my brain separating the holday-filled start of winter from all that autumn stuff. And appropriately too, since we got our first really cold days and several bouts of snow last week.
Monday through Wednesday was pretty stressful at work, since we basically had to pack five days of consults and appointments into three days, but we sifted through chaos and everything worked out fine. Monday we had ten consults, which is encouraging given how slow the season has been lately around here.
The Thanksgiving break managed to be the best of both busy and lazy. The laziness was that I spent a lot of time playing games with the wife and trying to beat Pool of Radiance, which I could not beat as an eleven-year-old. I haven't beaten it yet, but I did destroy the vampire in Valhingen Graveyard, and a bunch of kobolds and trolls. Thursday night we went to Reinhardt's family's for Thanksgiving dinner, and I met about 20% of his family, that is, about 100 people. The next day we met up again to see Jim Henson's "Dog City," which sucked, and an episode of "The Storyteller" which was much better, followed by deep dish pizza, again with a bunch of people I didn't know. On Saturday I wound up at a Country/Western bar with a bunch of nurses and the most overpriced Old Styles and Coronas you can imagine. Sunday was a bit easier, but I went to church and watched some of "American Gangster."
Oh, yes: On Saturday I walked up to Kopi and did some spiritual hygiene there. When the place became crowded I moved down the street to Women and Children First. Basically, I put my journal in order, and gave myself grades on the 30-some going concerns right now. Among the most important: Work B-, Finances B, Chores C, Urbantasm A, Gothic Funk Nation A, Hungry Rats B+, Beowulf A, submitting writing C-. FYI, I give my efforts on this blog an A, but I give hereisnowhy.com generally a B. So I'll be doing some more work on that.
Postscript, I dropped off some of our fish tank water to be tested on the way home. Well, I didn't want to carry it all over the neighborhood in a plastic baggie, so I rinsed out a little glass whiskey flask and left the water to be tested. Abe, who owns the store, called me back to say the water was "weird." After troubleshooting for about ten minutes about the weird pH level of the water -- something that could have resulted from introducing some weird chemical or substance -- we realized that the distortion was caused by residual whiskey. So either I hadn't rinsed the bottle very well or my fish were making moonshine!

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CANOE: Squeegee duel erupts.

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You're at a gas station! You're getting mugged! The first thing you go for is a --