Okay, so if you know me, you know that sometimes I really enjoy trashy TV. So tonight while I was eating dinner, I was watching One Tree Hill, which is about as trashy as you can get. One of the characters was moping about his pseudo-girlfriend sleeping with another guy, and while he moped, he painted a red door black :-). I really hope this was a deliberate reference by the authors, cause if it was I have gotta give them serious kudos. However, considering the target audience is 14 year old girls, I wonder how many members of the audience got it.

Second thing for tonight, is this article in Rolling Stone. It's coverage and background to the trial relating to the death of Biggie Smalls (The Notorious B.I.G). Kind of hard to believe that this happened over 8 years ago, and still hasn't been resolved.

Third, The Not-So-Secret Life of Aeon Flux. It's very possible this movie is going to be very very bad.

I have two things to talk about tonight, but I think I shall seperate them into two different articles.

First we have thanksgiving. This year was my first year celebrating this particular holiday. For those not in America (and have never been) let me fill you in. As far as I can tell, this is a day of celebrating family and friends. You all get together, eat, drink, and be merry. It seems to be a bit of a competition for who can have the largest party though. All week I have heard people trying to out do each other on the number of people they have attending thier particular 'gathering'. Myself, comming from a small family, was not quiet prepared for how full-on a large family gather can be.

A family, who is a friend of a friend of keith's, took us in for thanksgiving. All up there was probably about 20 of us for dinner. This may not be a large gathering compared to some of the others I heard of, but to me, it was huge.

The drive over was pretty cool. It was the other side of the sound from seattle, so we needed to take a ferry accross the sound, then drive around the olympic mountain range. Some very nice scenery out that way.

The dish of choice is turkey (apparently they don't have turkey at christmas, WTF ?). Ours was smoked, and it was FANTASTIC. I am a huge turkey fan, and this one was pretty damn good. There was also ham, and a number of other side dishes.

Apart from eating, we also played a lot of cards. I learnt a few new variations of poker (chicago, baseball, 2 - 22, 8 - 28, no-peaking & others), and also learnt to play cribbage.

Also found out, that if you fold down the back seat in a mazda 3, inflate an airbed, its actually kinda comfortable to sleep there.

Some photo's from the trip can be found here.

Team moral event today. First off was a pot-luck lunch. I took ANZAC biscuts. Kinda fitting I thought, considering it was rememberance day. Didn't try any of the food, as I wasn't hungry at the time.

After that, we headed off Go-Kart racing... me + driving = hell yeah. First couple of races didn't go too well. I was a bit off the pace (about 0.75s behind the leaders). Final qualifying race I did manage to break the magic 20s barrier though. Which was good enough to put me into the final.

The final was race for placing instead of for lap time (so no passing flags, we needed to pass ourselves). So I was third of the grid, I blew the first hairpin, thankfully the car behind me nudged me back into the correct direction, so I kept my placing.

I managed to get the fastest lap times consistantly, however I just couldn't find a place to get a clean pass (so I settled for nudging the car in front of me, repeatedly). So third across the line. Pretty happy with that. My style was crap though, Richard would have had a fit (and then beaten us all severly).

Stupidly I forgot to bring my camera to work today. So no pictures to post. There is one group photo that was taken and should be emailed to us. I will post that if I ever see it.

Thats all for now, gonna write about the health club when I get some time, and don't feel like sleeping.

So I went for my first trail skate today. For those who don't know, keith and I have been taking skating lessons. It's something I have always thought about doing, and keith mentioned he wanted to learn, so we signed up for classes. We go to class saturday and sunday mornings, and we are learning basic movement, stopping and turning (later we will learn backwards skating, other turns, etc).

The classes went really well this weekend, so I was feeling confident enough afterwards to drive down to Greenlake and try skating the path around the lake. I found out that trail skating, is very very different to skating on the rink. There are people and dogs to avoid. Plus there is leaves, twigs and other debry on the trail to contend with. Thankfully I managed to stay on my feet. There was only one point where I needed to head for the grass. This was when I was heading down hill, the trail was covered with wet leaves, and my breaks just wouldn't stick.

I am really starting to enjoy the skating, unfortunatly it is going to be wet for the next six months, so I probably won't get to skate outside again for a while (at least when it does fine up, I should be a lot better skater).

Trying to figure out a way to keep in touch with the folks in australia. VOIP looks like the best/cheapest solution. Skype is the cheapest solution, but it is a propreity protocol. A true SIP solution like Gizmo looks cool, but it's about 2c a minute more expensive. I really want to be able to connect a phone to the network, so I don't have to sit at the PC to talk to people. This would indicate a pure SIP solution is the best idea.

Bought a cheap mic/headphone combo at best buy so I can test both Skype and Gizmo. However with this peice of crap shuttle PC that I bought (and I am seriously regretting), I cannot seem to get both the mic and headphone working at the same time. Downloading some new drivers at the moment, and hopefully that should fix the problem.

Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness
And cleanliness is godliness, and god is empty just like me


Listening to the pumpkins... that is all.