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!