1:01 PM
If I employed my typical blow-by-blow narrative style to cover the events of the last three days, you'd get bored and my fingers would hurt. So allow me to sum up the high points (apologies for spelling errors in advance; I'm too tired to edit right now.)

Thanksgiving:
Good food. Thanksgiving is also the only day of the year when I sit and watch a football game on television, and this year's matchup (the Packers versus Detroit) had both the Wisconsin angle and good humor value--the only way the hole the Lions are in could be any funnier is if they actually won (personally, I'm hoping they just decide to secure a place in the record books with an 0-10 season.) We usually go to my mom's side of the family for Turkey Day, and it's been interesting to watch them mellow over the years from a noisy crowd that would go through four cases of beer to a group debating whether to open a third bottle of wine.

Friday:
Went to visit my sister at work; she's an assistant manager at a suburban Target store, and it was fun to hassle her on the busiest shopping day of the year. I also took advantage of her ten percent discount to pick up my second PS2 game, SSX Tricky; I've been having a good time playing it at work, and it'll be a nice multiplayer game to have around when friends visit.

That night I got to hang out with Jeff Nowak, my good buddy since the days I worked up at Tomahawk. We had dinner, then went back to my folks' place and messed around on the PS2 for a while as we waited for web pages to load across my dad's hideously slow Net connection. I showed him this page, SA, and a few other pages, so we might be seeing more of him online soon.

Saturday:
Okay, I only watch one football game on television, and there's only one I care to see in person--the only one all year that I care who wins: the annual Gopher-Badger football game. Both of my parents are U of M grads, and my sister and I both went to UW schools, so this is how we play out our intergenerational rivalry. For the last five years, things have gone Wisconsin's way, but Saturday....well, follow the link for the details. Suffice it to say that we lost. Oh well--I guess the Badgers have to give up the Paul Bunyan Axe once in a while so that we get the pleasure of winning it back the next year...

There. Football commitments out of the way until next year. Now resuming normal levels of geekitude.

Saturday night, despite an encroaching illness, I went over and hung out with one of my best friends, Brian Schomburg. We grew up next door to each other, wrote Sketch! together, and I'd love to see him come down and work at Humanhead (which could be a possibility); but he does have a pretty kickass job with Fantasy Flight Games, so I understand his hesitance. We talked about that for a little while, had some dinner, went over and saw FFG's new digs (already packed to bursting with LOTR boardgame stuff), and poked around on the web, watching trailers for Episode II and for City of Heroes. Then we went back to his place, where I showed him some of the stuff I'd been screwing around with for Monkeyfan Records and he showed me a completed prototype for Boozeland, a board game he and some other guys had come up with while working out at West End Games. Brian said he was hoping to make some poster-sized playable copies of the board; I'll be first in line, 'cause it's damn hilarious--think the Tick as drunken serial killer.

Sunday:
Blasted two hours south to see my grandparents in Albert Lea, MN, then back to my folks' place. (For those keeping track, total time on the road since Tuesday 7AM, 21 hours--almost one day in five. Yow.) I was still feeling a little sick, so I spent the evening on the couch collapsed and taking advantage of my parents' cable TV. I had hoped to just lay there until I fell unconcious and then drive down Monday, but the ten o'clock news threatened snow by morning rush hour. So I quick packed my bags, took a shower to wake up, and left the Twin Cities at ten-thirty. Just as I was leaving, Jon gave me a call on my cel phone, and I talked to him a couple times until my battery died. (That's what that was when I got cut off, Jon--not a horrible car wreck or anything. Just so you know.)

Traffic is slow on the interstate after midnight, and I now have a new theory for while I hate late-night interstate driving: IUL. But I need to go do some work, so I'll let you guess what that might stand for until I get around to posting again.

Hope everyone else had a good weekend. Now get those noses back on the grindstone. (Ouch.)

By the way: no snow yet, either here or in the Twin Cities. Damn meteorologists.

Edit: There is now, however, snow at the Mitchell Corn Palace. Thanks to Lampshade for the link.