December 4, 2000

One year ago: I get depressed about my journal. Yeah, I'm over it now. I think the shopping helped.

God, I'm so behind. Okay, the weekend after Thanksgiving consisted of Jim and I spending time with his sister Mary, her partner Chris (he's a man, but they're not married, and they've had two kids together and been together like 20 years so it seems a little silly to call him her boyfriend. I don't know why I get hung up on semantics) and their two kids Steven and Andrea. We went over to Jim's parents' house and ate turkey sandwiches. Jim brought the PS2 over and the kids played SSX. They don't have a video gaming console, but Steven has apparently played a little over at a friend's house, and he picked it up really quickly. Jim's mom didn't like the game because she thought it would teach the kids that they can ski recklessly with no consequences. It's a snowboarding game, but even if you crash, you don't die or anything. You just start over in the middle of the track. She didn't make them stop playing or anything. Andrea tried to play, but she had a little trouble grasping the concept of the track and what it was for. She preferred to go off the course, exploring. So every one of her runs took about three times as long as normal.

That picture is Jim and the kids playing on the PS2. Then, after the kids went to bed, we watched Dark City, which Jim has on DVD. Mary kept saying she had never seen it, but after watching the beginning, she thought she had. Chris didn't think they had. Finally about halfway through, he remembered that they had watched it. It was...interesting. Roger Ebert does a commentary track, and I'd like to listen to it with that on sometime. I think I would get more out of the movie that way. The next day, we all went over to Jim's brother's house. It's kind of a small house for the amount of people we had in it, so we didn't stay too long. It's a nice house though. They bought it really cheap and practically gutted and rebuilt it.

This picture is Jim's brother Tom (making a goofy face) and his nephew Steven. Isn't he a cutie with the missing front teeth? Tom and Jim kind of have the same haircut. It's the DIY with clippers style. That night, Mary and Chris and the kids came over to see our apartment, and of course there was more PS2 playing. Jim and I cleaned the apartment top to bottom earlier in November when Glark and Wing Chun were coming to visit, and we've managed to keep the place looking decent. This is a nice change for us! Usually I'm too embarrassed of the state of our apartment to have spur of the moment visitors. But we've made a concerted effort to stay on top of things and it seems to be working out thus far. Although the rugs could use a good vacuuming, but that's par for the course when you own two cats.

Andrea is fascinated with both my digital camera and our cats. I printed out some pictures for her to take home -- that one of Tom and Steven, and the one below of Andrea standing on a toy truck. They print out really well if you use the glossy photo paper, I think.

Mary and Chris and the kids left to go back to Boston the next morning. I decided that it was time to put up the Christmas decorations. I relocated some of my snowglobes to our now empty bookcases. When we cleaned the place, we finally sorted through our books and boxed up the ones we no longer want or need. We ended up with nine boxes! Jim has been taking each box into work and telling people to take them. If they want to give him money, they can, but if they want to take them for free, that's fine too. Some of them are hardcover books that I might have read once, so it's a pretty good deal. I generally take pretty good care of my books. One of Jim's co-workers refused to believe that I had read some of the books because they were in such good condition. Anyway, we haven't made a ton of money, but enough to make it worthwhile. Frankly, just getting rid of the books in one fell swoop is enough for me.

So I put up the Christmas decorations. I'm not happy with my little tree. I'm happy with the tree, but not how it's decorated. I went to the craft store to see if I could come up with anything, but all of the ornaments there were way too big for my tiny tree. I did see some miniature ornaments at the mall, so I'll probably brave the crowds sometime this week.

Since then, I have gotten my haircut and eyebrows waxed again, gotten the oil changed in the car, straightened out an issue at my credit union, had a McDonald's eggnog milkshake, and spent too much time online but not enough updating this journal. So now you are all caught up.

Oh yeah, the class I am teaching started. I promise that you don't want to hear about how the bookstore ordered the wrong book (even though I gave them the ISBN), but suffice to say I was really mad last week. Other than that, things seem to be going well with both sections. They call me Professor Reed! How funny is that? I'll be sure to give you more news on that issue this month.