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Hit the Ground RunningYou know when you've been dogging it when you write only four entries in your journal in a month. But! I have an excuse: I went on vacation. Nothing really unusual; Debbi and I went back to visit our families in Massachusetts. Still, splitting time between my Mom, my Dad, and Debbi's sisters (where we had Thanksgiving dinner) sure did make the vacation go by quickly! As a result I just treated this as a chance to take some time off from the rest of my life. Unlike some previous vacations, I didn't write any journal entries while I was away, though I did once update my LiveJournal. I'd met Debbi's sister Janine before, as she visited last year around the time of the terrorist hijackings, but I hadn't met her sister Dianne or Dianne's husband or children before. They have a nice house in the country (or maybe it's the suburbs; hard to tell, sometimes, where one ends and the other begins), and their daughters are 1 and 3. They're pretty cute, not to mention precocious. Emily, their older girl, carries herself as an adult in some ways, while Rachel would high-five people and say "More, pwease!" Debbi adores her nieces. Apparently Dianne and Shawn had gotten advance notice (from Debbi's Dad, I think) that I was supposed to be "quiet", which of course turned out to be pretty comical. We all got along, though. Although since they were preparing for dinner (or recovering from it) during most of my stay (a couple of days) they did manage to avoid my obsessive-compulsive ability to talk about any subject for perhaps too long. (You see, we're all in a fantasy football league together...)
 My trip was otherwise pretty laid-back. I did some shopping. We got a light snowfall. I did some pruning in my Mom's yard. I got together with my friend Bruce again. Bruce and I went to see the 1968 film of Mel Brooks' The Producers, which was - as expected - very silly. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder play a Broadway musical producer and an accountant who hatch a scheme to bilk investors of their money by producing the worst show possible, "Springtime for Hitler". Wilder gets hysterical, Mostel chews all the scenery in sight, their director (Christopher Hewett) is a drag queen, and their star - L.S.D. (Dick Shawn) - is a southern hippie. After the film we spent our requisite evening eating and chewing the fat. (We also somehow managed to put away a pitcher of beer between us. I didn't know I had it in me!) A great evening as always. I also went with Dad and Debbi to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which I haven't been to for years, maybe a decade. Debbi pronounced it a "very boy museum". Of course, it's filly with old fossils, a Coelocanth caught in the 60s (not alive, of course), and a wide variety of stuffed animals (at least, I assumed that they're stuffed; maybe they were models). Plus some more modern skeletons, and the famous glass flowers (which aren't what you think, rather than being works of art, they're studies of various plants done in glass). This didn't quite cure my Stephen Jay Gould-based interest in seeing fossilized stuff, but it will hold me for a little while. I wonder if there are any museums around the Bay Area (other than the California Academy of Sciences) with fossils on display? Oh, and I read three books (see sidebar).
Since we got back Monday evening it's been pretty busy. I had to deal with the ninnies at the Mountain View Post Office, who again delivered my held mail to my doorstep (where anyone could just walk off with it) rather than having it at the post office for me to pick up, like I requested. And a steady list of stuff to do for work (and trying to dodge the virus which is making the rounds of the department). Then there was Ultimate on Thursday, which went well other than the ground being rock-solid and the grass wet. I managed to avoid any bad spills until my very last play, when I skinned my knee but good (didn't bruise or break anything, thank goodness) and also cut my finger and bruised my hand. Sheesh! Apparently we're in for rain tomorrow, which should moisten up the field nicely. Assuming it doesn't rain so much that we can't even play... This weekend Debbi and I went out looking for Christmas stuff. We bought a tree and put it up today. We bought some rope lights to string around my patio (though I'm trying to figure out how best to anchor them, since I'm reluctant to put screws into the fence; nails, maybe). And we ran some other errands, such as a stop off for me to buy some bicycle gloves. I'm getting kind of stressed out about Christmas, though, since I haven't yet done any shopping. So that's a big priority for me this week and next weekend. Meanwhile, I also need to start exercising again, not to mention writing journal entries a little more regularly. So now that I'm sort-of caught up, I'll try to be a little more diligent this week...
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