So I type up the last entry and mosey over to the kitchen for another cup of cocoa. Because nobody can ever be bothered to turn off the idiot box, I was treated to something… vile. Something revoltingly bad. Something like what would happen if a really bad Charmed knockoff (and I don’t like Charmed, just so you know) had a one-nighter with Days of Our Lives (and I don’t like… you get the idea) and they didn’t employ proper safe-sex practices.

If bored uptight middle-America housewives are getting their notions of fantasy-style storytelling by watching Passions, it’s no wonder that Pagans and Wiccans get such a bad rap in this country. Wow. I didn’t know what it was until after I’d turned off the telly in complete disgust and complained about the tripe I’d just seen to the next person to enter the break room. “Bad acting? Witchcraft? Yes, that’s Passions. It’s become a running joke, it’s so campy that people can’t help but watch.”

In that case, define me as “not people.” I couldn’t help but power off the teevee. Wow. That was bad. I need something to cleanse my mind of the whores– er, horrors I’ve seen. I think I’ll curl up with the Eddings’ “Elenium” books tonight…

So much for my grand plan to have TMTT done by the end of the weekend. The DVD-ROM drive in the “big computer” doesn’t like the second disc of the Tenchi OAV boxed set. I Love Tenchi gave me nothing but trouble from the get-go right up to the twenty-minute mark when PowerDVD crashed. I was unable to make the disc play at all after that, even with a reboot.

Plan B is to use the DVD deck in the living room, but I’ll need my laptop to type up the script… and I won’t have that until tomorrow after a long, long day at work. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to be in the mood for more typing after the big chores I have awaiting me at the office.

TMTT will be completed late next week, by the looks of things. Then next weekend I can get started on my next music video…

The Weekly Recaps. (Insert deep sigh here.) As much fun as the idea was, the execution felt like exactly that: Being executed. My trite attempts to sum up the content of a dozen other websites were more “miss” than “hit”. The minute you feel like you’re repeating yourself, it’s time to give up and move on.

This has nothing to do with the fact that I ran out of good ideas for movie references, either. (Seven was easy. Eight? Dunno.)

Put another way: Much as Argephontes discovered, doing weekly recaps is a lot of work. If you want to know what’s going on with my fellow journals and blogs, the list is there. Please read them. They are all entertaining and enlightening in their fashion, and most are better written than my humble efforts.

I’m thinking that perhaps this is part of my urge to create rather than simply spotlight the creativity of others. It’s time, dammit, and past time for me to do more of my own true art here… be it silly parody scripts or music videos or what-have-you.

After all, anybody can spend all their time linking to other peoples’ works. It doesn’t make for a very compelling reason to keep coming back when there’s nothing of yourself in your site…

“So, Karel, what’s been going on in your life lately?”

• Saturday was a nice big goof-off day, culminating in the premiere of InuYasha on Cartoon Network. Not too shabby, really, but I like most of the stuff from the creator of Ranma 1/2. I couldn’t tell you what Sunday was like, I don’t remember. It must not have been terribly interesting.
  
• Yesterday was a day of guests. Ben and John came over early in the afternoon for hours and hours of Diablo II gaming as well as a short Doom Legacy fragfest. Nothing like nostalgic gaming, right down to the “why won’t Doom effing network properly?” Brought back memories, I tell ya. A few hours after they left, the Bourgos came over. We convinced Amy (Michael needed none) to play Age of Empires instead of Diablo, since I’d already had more than my fill over the weekend. A great time was had by all. For the record, Amy and Michael won thanks to her early wonder completion and a flotilla of Michael’s Viking longboats to protect said wonder. My Korean turtle ships didn’t stand a chance, so I spent the 400 year countdown beating the living crap out of my Japanese neighbors. Yes, I’m a big wuss.
  
• The kids start school again tomorrow, so Wendi’s got them out shopping and doing other preparatory activities.
  
• Zero crashed. Hard. As I was getting ready to type up a really big Thoughts entry. (I’ve been shamefully neglecting that category since about, oh, this time last year.) Turns out that the loud whining noise coming from her tower is the sound of a hard drive on its last bearings. As I type this, data is being transferred to another computer in anticipation of replacing the hard drives in Zero and starting over again. Wheee. I wasn’t planning to do another Linux From Scratch build quite so soon, but life is often that way… unplanned situations that don’t bear waiting.
  
• On a related note, the “Current Music” feature will be missing until Zero is fully operational and trustworthy once more. Turns out that if XMMS isn’t running on Zero, the “Current Music” code stalls and prevents the loading of the rest of this site. Eep! I’ll see about coming up with some sort of better way of showing off my music collection.
  

• The two “Kagato” episodes of TMTT are posted. Huge thanks to Mari and Kylanath for suggestions and some proofreading!
  
• Benjamin stopped by the office yesterday. We had a nice long chat about some of my future plans, and how he can be involved in them if things all work out for the best. He’s supposed to stop by the house tonight for some Diablo II gaming… muahahaha!
  
• Wendi’s very proud of the fact that she’s finally “on top of” the housekeeping. The secret, it turns out, is to spend an hour every day doing it. It then becomes incredibly simple to maintain. A happy Wendi is a good thing, even better than a neat-looking house.
  
• The head-cold lingers, much like the die-hard fans after the lights have come up at the concert venue. I’m okay, but I’m not as okay as I’d like. Such is life.
  
• Once I’m done with TMTT, I have a half-formed plan to do another music video. This time I’m bucking for Journeyman status as I create a video with an actual story. At the moment I’m torn between using Genesis or Midnight Oil as the backing music.
  

So we’re drifting slowly down I-5 on our way to check out some dishwashers, okay? Traffic is bad, the sun is baking everything and everyone. (Come to think on it, that might explain this episode.) The wife and I are up front, the kids are on the back-back bench seat. The A/C is cranked.

We approach the Portland temple. Mormon, that is. “Hey, kids, it’s the temple.” No sooner are the words out of my mouth than we pull up alongside a massive tractor-trailer rig. “Oooo, it’s so big and white!” Giggles from the back seat. Silly grin from the driver. “I didn’t know it was so huge, it fills the entire view all the way up to the sky!” Laughter fills the mini-van.

Traffic shifts, and now we’re alongside the tractor instead of the trailer. “Hey, wow, now it’s PURPLE!” More delight. “I wonder what you call a purple temple. The Purple Tabernacle?”

Attempts to say “purple tabernacle” three times fast fail. To be honest, attempts to say it once fail often, and attempts to say it twice simply cause more laughter. As the laughter dies down and Alex sips water to deal with his hiccups, I jot down two words on my Kyocera so I’ll remember to write up a journal entry…

This is how I keep my family amused. The family that laughs together, stays together.