I guess the holiday season is here again, and there’s not a dang thing I can do about it.  Suffer through it and wait for Spring.  We are doing Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, which promises to be an adventure.  Not sure what we’re going to do with all the beasties while we try to eat though;  that has me a bit concerned.  I can already envision the cat jumping up on the table and helping himself to some gravy, and the dogs drooling all over everyone’s feet.  Sigh.  I am planning to grill the turkey on a Weber, and that should be an interesting feat in itself.  The directions on the website sound deceptively simple… color me skeptical.  I put the odds on food poisoning at about 50%.  (Don’t worry though, there is a good chinese place down the street that I’ve got lined up for a backup plan.)

Not a bad weekend overall.  Friday we met all the young ‘uns (and Todd) down at George Brett’s on the Plaza for some appetizers.  After dinner they all went to a movie, while the old folks bailed for home.  I spent the rest of the evening tweaking my new home firewall policy, as I felt I hadn’t spent quite enough time working on firewalls all week.  Good grief I am a friggin’ LOSER!!!  I now have a dedicated PC in the basement running Fedora FC5 that does nothing but manage the firewall, because I’m too cheap to spend the $50 on the Windows version.  Rather sad and ridiculous now that I think about it.  (It’s a pretty darn cool firewall though, I must admit…)

Saturday we spent the majority of the day at Nebraska Furniture Mart.  Oh, the horror.  We had planned on going, but I wasn’t aware they were doing some kind of pre-Thanksgiving sale.  It was nightmarish to be sure.  As soon as we saw the line to get in the parking lot we bailed out for lunch to gather our wits.  We had a very tasty lunch at the Yard House to soothe our nerves a bit, then dove into the fray.  Our main goal was a surround sound system for the TV room downstairs.  We had our sights set on a Sony system because it was the only one I’d seen with a good wireless option for the rear speakers.  I don’t really like Sony stuff though, for no particular reason, so I wasn’t overly excited about it.  We ended up with a Samsung system instead, which looks pretty nice.  Unfortunately I can’t hook it up because I don’t have the evil HDMI cable yet.  NFM wanted $99 for a 3′ cable; I found a 6′ one on mwave for 9 bucks but I have to wait for them to ship it of course.  Now, granted it doesn’t have a lifetime warranty like the $99 one, so if it mysteriously goes bad I can replace it nine more times.  After that purchase, me made the poor decision to stroll upstairs and look at bedroom sets.  Three hours and a credit-limit-extension later, we left with a new set up for our bedroom.  I’m actually pretty pumped about it… we finally will be getting the king-size bed we’ve wanted for fifteen years.  Not to mention, an actual dresser to put our clothes in, so we don’t have to just stack them on the spare bed anymore.  Odd things make me happy in my old age.  All that shopping wore us out, so we went home and rested a bit, then headed up north with Ed and Kim to have dinner at Ronda’s house.  (Donette’s sister.)  She fixed a grilled chicken dinner that would have fed at least 15 people.  Not wanting to waste any of it, I ate enough for about 7 people and then we hung out and watched college football for the rest of the evening.

Sunday was the same ol’ same ol’.  I guess Donette did have to run back out NFM and pick up our stereo, but I graciously declined that trip.  It turned out to be a bad decision on my part, as I ended up spending a few hours cleaning up a little accident that Gabe had, involving about half of the first floor of our house.  I’m sure everyone would get much joy from the sordid details, but I’m still a little queasy about the whole situation and don’t think I’m quite ready to talk about it yet.  Shudder.  Just take my word for it;  the time he puked in the TV room pales in comparison.  After that, I headed down to the Brooksider to watch the football games and let the house air out a bit.  I’m trying not to get overly pumped and jinx myself, but my Fantasy Football team is just kicking butt.  I would not be surprised if I end up with more in high-score payouts than whoever wins the first place gets.  I’ll get another notch this week unless some kicker tonight makes like 10 field goals over 40 yards… things are looking good at this point.