My uncle, lysander_cat and his wife celebrated their wedding anniversary this weekend, and lysander_cat was kind enough to give me some money so I could afford to go down and celebrate with them. I drove down to Tucson on Saturday afternoon, listening to the first half of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and drove back Sunday evening, listening to the second half. It's the perfect length for the drive.

The party on Saturday was a lot of fun. I ended up being in the pool for something like five hours, most of which was spent playing with the under-10 set of cousins. Two of them are tall, skinny, ginger-haired twins, who in just a few more years are going to be breaking hearts left and right. roxietiel and darth_riley came and played in the pool with us as well, though darth_riley is a couple of years younger than the youngest cousin, so she just hung out on the steps with her mom, instead of getting all wet in the jumping and splashing and swimming and confusion.

The food was good... my aunt and her family made burrito fixin's, and we all pigged out. The older cousins were there, pretending to be cool and bored with the whole thing. Teenagers. What c'n you do? After finally climbing out of the pool, I hung with the g'r'ups for a while, which was nice in its own way.

Sunday, we went to see Batman Begins and I have to say that it was good, though there were some aspects of the major villain of the film that didn't get brought out, which I thought was a shame... he's always been one of my favorite bat-villains. Morgan Freeman was awesome. There was only one (realtively minor) thing they did in the movie that made me think, "that was done to sell toys."

And now I'm back in Flagstaff, enjoying the cool breezes.

I don't really have a lot to say, which seems a silly way to begin a journal entry. Really, I suppose, I'm just warning you, the reader, that this isn't going to be all that interesting or meaningful; just a collection of rambling that you can safely skip.

Saturday, I worked most of the day, as I've mentioned, and then went to the review session for my trig class -- Wednesday night is a test on graphing the trig functions, and we have to perform without calculators.

The teacher says that this is because graphing calculators make the test pointless, but he's also not letting us use calculators that don't graph, and given my problems with arithmetic, I find this... irritating.

Afterwards, I went over to Tom and Terry's house, and we went to meet Janet and her husband, Herb.

Janet is Tom and Don's (my father's) older sister... there's also an older brother, Andy, but he's not very social; I don't anticipate seeing him any time soon.

Anyway, Herb and Janet took us to El Corral, which is a steakhouse up on River Road. The service was terrible, the food was mediocre and over-priced. Fortunately, I didn't have to actually pay for it.

Janet showed pictures of her kids, Kent, Julie, and Chris. Kent is a lawyer working in London, England; Julie is a marketing executive for some firm; Chris is a fund manager for a big financial company.

Like I said, Tom and I are the other side of the family.

Anyway, she had pictures of Kent, my cousin, and his kid Austin, my second cousin. Kent had gotten old since I last saw him, twenty-ish years ago. Tom and I agreed that he looked like us... Tom, Don and I are very much of a type; Kent is another. Austin looked somewhat like I did, at that age.

Julie doesn't look like us at all. She rather takes after Herb.

Sunday, I hung out at home, mostly, doing trig homework. I did all the homework for this coming week, and studied a little bit for the upcoming test. We'll see if any of it took.

Went to sundaygames. We got our collective ass handed to us by a vampire. I couldn't convince the party to run the hell away. Only the forebearance of the DM kept us from all becoming Vampiric Spawn.

I think that, had I been running the game, I probably wouldn't've confronted the party with a Vampire... maybe with Vampiric Spawn, but not an actual vampire. But, having confronted them with it, I'd've taken it to its logical conclusion.

I have deep misgivings about the adventure we're embarking on.

Also, no offense to nicodeamos or Eldan's player, but I think in the future I'm going to try to be more careful about relying on people who can't be there on a regular basis to fill vital party roles. Every other week we're without an arcane spellcaster.

Mathesson's going to be picking up levels of specialist wizard... abjurer... but he'll never be as strong at it as a dedicated wizard or sorcerer.

Came in to work today, and started working on patches for the suns. Ugh.

Bought a laptop for the group.

The fun just never stops.

I need to remember to look at the website for my trig class... I need to download and print the class notes. I also need to do my homework tomorrow, for the coming week, as I'm going to be busy during the week.

Yesterday, I called Tom and asked if he wanted to do the movie thing. He agreed that it was a good idea, but when I showed up, he was all about the pond.

So we didn't go see a movie. Instead, we built a waterfall.

Now, don't get me wrong. Spending time with my uncle is good, and it was fun working on the pond.

But I'd've rather seen a movie.

Anyway, we worked on the pond for a while, and then Terry came home. It turns out that on the ides of March, when T&T have their anual party, I'll be in NYC.

So we went out, and Terry and I bought Tom his birthday present, the DVD player that he's been agitating for, for over a year.

We also got the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring DVD set. I showed them the extra Council of Rivendell scene -- the one that Empty Vee did. They laughed.

My aunt Janet, Tom and my father's older sister, is in town with her husband, Herb. I haven't actually seen... or talked to... Janet or Herb since my father's memorial service, a long time ago.

Tom said she'd mentioned some fancy-schmancy restaurant she wants to take us to, tonight, so I guess we're going to a fancy-schmancy restaurant. Janet is my Rich Aunt; her kids, my cousins, are lawyers and doctors and such.

We're the other part of the family.