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We turned up the refrigerator last night after discovering it was a few degrees below the expected temperature. Today the turkey was fine. Sara did the hard part, turkey and gravy, and I did the side dishes. It all came out pretty well.

The turkey was still icy, so we decided to put it off till Friday, and have popcorn and pumpkin pie for dinner tonight. We watched Godard's "Weekend" with dinner. It would be a great movie to show at something like a critical mass event--I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie with quite so many crashed cars.

When I saw "Koi... Mil Gaya" at the library, I thought to myself: *that* is the one thing the last Bollywood movie I saw didn't have--a friendly blue alien. So based on this inescapable logic, I brought it home. That was a mistake. There wasn't even anything flambouyantly bad enough to make good Smithies material, so it was just wasted time.

We also went through the Lord of the Rings movies recently. I'm not a big fan of the last movie, but there are a lot of things that are well done. I like the scene that mixes Faramir's ride to Osgiliath with Pippin singing.

We attempted to persuade a few people to help us eat our turkey but, predictably enough, everyone already had thanksgiving plans. Next year maybe we'll plan ahead....

I've been playing too much Wesnoth, but in the last few days I got to a section that looked like it would be long and tedious, and I haven't been playing as much since.

After going back and forth a while we finally decided we'd try the traditional turkey dinner this year, so today was the day to go to the grocery store and pick up the turkey and all the extras.

I did some work at the library in the morning and arrived a little late for juggling. As a result I was energetic when others were about ready for the sitting-down-and-deciding-where-to-eat stage.
Noé and I had a good time coming up with weird tricks. Or maybe I had a good time trying stupid things, and Noé had fun laughing at me.

Fred, Deanna, Sara, and I split a couple surprisingly tasty dishes at China Gate, then went our separate ways.

It's all a blur. One of my more interesting distractions at work has been git, and I got to fool with it a bit more. I've been depending on a complicated set of shell and perl scripts to maintain my kernel patches, based on Andrew Morton's patch scripts, but I decided to try out the git-based patch-management tool stgit. Since both Trond and Chuck were using it, and Chuck has been doing a fair amount of development on it, I figured it'd be good to use the same thing. And I was curious.

It's a neat tool. I'm not convinced it really takes the right approach, but it looks more than sufficient for my purposes.

Friday night Sara and I met at Silvio's again. The movie, "Branded to Kill", was another one where I just watched the images and didn't try to understand who was doing what to whom. So I suppose I can hardly blame it for not making sense. But that's what I want it to do anyway.

We went to see a free WCBN-sponsored concert by Frank Pahl's toy band "Little Bang Theory" at the art museum. It was great. At the time I kept thinking it reminded me of Yann Tiersen's music, but when I went home and put on my one Yann Tiersen CD it seemed much less interesting than what I'd just heard.

After juggling we talked the jugglers into going to Silvio's again. I thought my food was OK but not that interesting. Sara got something she really liked--more of a pizza crust with salad on top than an actual pizza--so now she's a big fan.

We hung out there long enough that Silvio came out and gave us some desert and remarked on our having showed up twice in a row.

Afterwards we discovered that Dave was doing a show with his improv group that night in Ypsilanti. So we arranged to go.

The show was fairly well attended, and it was fun to see Dave on stage--he's good at it. I didn't find it terrifically funny, though. I guess I have a limited tolerance for these improv games even when they're done extremely well. They tend to degenerate into silly nonsequitors. I don't feel like anyone gets the chance to come up with really interesting stuff.

Dean recommended a new organic pizza place opened by his friend, Silvio's. So today Sara and I met there before the Japanese movie. It was plain food, but good. The pizza crust was especially tasty. Peter and his daughter was there. He was exasperated with my talk on Thursday, but didn't have any specifics.

The movie, "Farewell to the Ark", was pretty surreal. I didn't worry about understanding it or following the plot, and just sat back and watched the succession of strange scenes. I enjoyed it that way.

As part of CITI's move to the School of Information, we're all reapplying for our current titles. The stakes aren't particularly high, in theory--it's not as though we're competing with anyone for our jobs--but it annoys me anyway. I suppose it's good for me somehow.

So Thursday was my big day, with a talk at noon surrounded by a day of meetings with SI faculty.

I only got that date Thursday, and between jet lag and my desire not to work Saturday, that didn't leave me with much preparation time.

Marius and Niels were also in town, so I had dinner with them and other folks Wednesday night at the ABC, though I did skip the book group meeting on Tuesday. (It was for a book I'd read before--American Gods--but not one I was that interested in, and I wasn't going to have time to reread it anyway.)

I thought the talk went reasonably well, considering, but it was hard to tell what I was really supposed to be doing. I didn't feel like I made a particularly good impression, and I wasn't really thinking well on my feet throughout the day. But some of the faculty were interesting, so it was fun to talk to people.

The process of becoming something more like a "real" faculty member in the new department is going to be frightening, I think. We'll see.