It's midnight on Thanksgiving. Do you know where your left-overs are?

After a time-consuming and highly energetic two weeks at the office, I really enjoyed getting on the road to head for my parent's house. My brother Mike was already there, on a short break after classes and before final exams. He still has the Bar exam to worry about too, so this will be his moment to vacation before really getting into the mix.

Of all the days in a year for an oven to stop working, I couldn't think of a worse time than Thanksgiving morning. This appliance had a mind of its own this year, and I think it was waiting for just the right moment to crash horribly. With a basted turkey in its pan, the oven displayed that it was at 350, but there was no heat coming out. Mom drove over to my Aunt and Uncle's place...

...cold turkey :: rimshot ::

We went by to pick up the finished (now fully-cooked) bird and brought it back to our house. During that time, the high winds had knocked a tree branch into a power line somewhere and quickly surged the power to the house. Somehow, that spiked our oven into high gear once again, and all was well. My parents refer to the oven as they would a family dog who has bitten a child- it may look friendly now, but it's burned us before, and it'll likely burn us again. The Kenmore catalog came out. Its days are numbered.

Nana and Papa came over along with my Uncle's family. There was no kids table this year. Good food and stories were enjoyed and it was a good time. The big topic this year (and I'm sure I'll regret mentioning this later when search engines spider this site tonight) was the derivation of how "fags" became nicknames for cigarettes in England. I have a cool tool on my BlackBerry that I use when I have weird questions like that. There are humans on the other side, who research the question, and email you the reply. Normally, it's within a few minutes. and, in this case, 2 minutes later, we were all enlightened on the origin of Fags.

I went through some old family photos last night and was taken back in time. I was looking for the next big LEGO project, as I can easily forsee work taking over my life. In an effort to reclaim it for myself, I want a distraction- a fun reason to come home every evening. I didn't find anything that jumped out, and the advice I got from both my Dad and my brother Mike was to wait. If it doesn't immediately make me think "YES! I have to do this" then it probably isn't the right image.

(the cool part about a LEGO mosaic is that if it sucks, or if i get bored with it, I can completely remove it and put another image in its place...and that's FUN to do!)

I set up the family Christmas tree today- It was a grueling experience not because the tree was a complete pain-in-the-ass to assemble, but because I endured it while "Master and Commander" was on HBO. Ugh. I've seen better film on teeth. The tree got up in a few hours, mainly because I tried to find other things to do instead of getting tangled. Fake trees are okay, but they shed an awful lot. I guess real trees do too. I dunno. I haven't seen one in a long, long time.

Friday was a leisurely day at home with the family, and I got up at 4:30am to escort my brother down Rt. 95. We both left - of course my trip was a lot shorter. He arrived in florida much later that night.

My goal was to get a quick nap, and start cleaning my apartment before the distractions of a normal day started getting to me. Didn't work. I fell asleep on my couch and completely wasted the daylight. Tom and I went and talked about the upcoming seminars at work over some spaghetti, and we spent a few hours at Best Buy drooling at 60-inch DLP widescreen TVs. I stayed at the office about 3 hours after that, catching up.

Sunday was my time for myself, so I spent it...elsewhere. I went over to Mike and Lauren's and helped Mike make some serious progress on the attic. I handled the electrical work and got a lot accomplished. I was pretty psyched when it all worked as predicted. The whole attic is almost wired. he made progress on insulation and assembling more frame work for the cabinets.

I came back to work Sunday night.

Monday was a day off for us, but I was in at 9. I took my time coming in because I knew it would be a long night. Boy, I had no freakin' clue. It was midnight by the time I left the office. We outsourced a project to Paul, which I was happy to do. It is a win-win: We get a good job done quickly and he gets money for his trouble.

I established a no-sleeping-on-the-bed thing, thinking that it would get me motivated to clean the apartment, a much needed activity. but, because of the recent hours at work, I've had no time/interest in cleaning. So, I've been on the couch for several nights. You know what? it's not such a bad thing. The sun's in my face when it's time to wake up.

Umm. It's December. Where in the HELL did December come from?