Hey there! I've got a little time before going again, so let me try to sum up the Christmas experience before moving on to more recent events.

Started by going to Maine for a few days. It was like Thanksgiving, but moreso. How, do you ask?

More shopping. Sarah's mom is just getting over surgery (she's fine, thanks), and didn't have a chance to go shopping for presents until late. So we had a little day trip to Bangor, hit the mall, Wal Mart, Borders, you name it. We even managed to wrap up our shopping, getting those last bits that always seem to elude you until the 23rd or so.

More food. I think I've mentioned in the past the role food plays in Sarah's family. Vacations are made or broken on food, and holiday celebrations aren't successful without good food. We had that in spades, considering that Sarah's mom can't cook for fewer than 15 people (it's her job as well, so it's a nice mating of the personal and professional). We had ham and capon (a castrato rooster), plenty of sides, the whole thing.

But what put things over the top food-wise were two British additions. One was chocolate. And not the stuff you get here. Let's just say I have a new found admiration for the products of the Cadbury's company. Unlike American filled chocolates, which tend to include fillings like quince, maple, and okra, they stick to the basics: chocolate, caramel, and nuts. There are some fruit fillings, but they're few and far between (and usually things that make sense, like strawberry).

The other Leftpondian addition is the sausage roll. Very basic idea: sausage meat in a roll, either of puff pastry or (what we had) a biscuit-type covering. I'm not sure how these haven't caught on here, given that it combines meat and bread in a tasty and portable way. If they can serve walleye on a stick at the Minnesota state fair, sausage rolls have a niche here, certainly.

More allergic reaction to cats. We spent more time at home while in Maine. No day trips, and the weather was kind of gross (it poured Christmas eve). That meant spending more time in the house with Sarah's sister's cat. I'm fine with their family cat, who spends a lot of time outdoors and when indoors pretty much confines himself to one spot on the floor. It's the other cat, the young, spastic cat, that gives me problems. I think I took twice as much Benadryl this time for a similar length of stay. Which took care of the problem, but made me a litle dopey. And the cat clawed a shirt of mine! I was not sorry to see the cat go.

After Maine we headed to my sister's in New Hampshire for the day after, where we ate more ham (I think I had more pig-related food that week than in the previous year) and watched six kids open about 30 presents in 34 seconds. No reading the tag, barely even time to register what the gift was in most cases. Just rip, pass along, and rip again. It's a little disconcerting, and it makes me wonder why I don't just buy them all generic games or something. They'd get as much notice as what we did buy in most cases.

If I learned anything at all this holiday season, it's that if you ask for specific items for Christmas, you're bound to get them. My decade long run of "nothing" or "clothes or something" came to a screeching halt this year. Top gifts include the full run of The Prisoner and the first season of The Simpsons on DVD, and two things I didn't ask for: a George Foreman grill (family size!) and a framed copy of where my family name comes from and our coat of arms. Very cool, a gift that Sarah started to compile when we were at Epcot in September.

We're about ready to use one of the gifts I got Sarah, so more later!

I just read that Nabisco, in honor of the 100th birtday of Barnum's Animal Crackers, is adding a new animal. You get four to choose from: walrus, cobra, koala, and penguin.

If you want to judge for yourself and vote, go to www.nabiscoworld.com now. As you might imagine, I have an opinion on this that I'll expound upon presently.

Looking at the cookies, I immediately decided against the koala and the cobra. My feeling about animal crackers is that they should be the shape of the animal, not just a cookie with the animal design on it. Neither of these pass the test, though I do think a cobra would be cool if it could be made into a stand alone cracker.

The walrus is, quite honestly, an indistinguishable blob. It could be a manatee, or a slug, or a Barbapapa.

So I cast my vote for the penguin. This will not surprise some of you, as I do have a fondness for penguins. They're my favorite part of the New England Aquarium, and when we were at Sea World this past September, the penguins were the only thing that I wanted to see among the standard exhibits (and, I have to say, the penguin house at Sea World is pretty lame). There's also Opus, the loveable mensch of a penguin from Bloom County, a cartoon fave of mine, even if he looks more like a puffin.

Most of these "we're adding something new" votes tend to rub me the wrong way. It's like a consumer version of cousin Oliver or Scrappy Doo, trying to reinvigorate interest in a product through flash rather than a reinvention involving anything of substance.

Consider the M&M "election" that led to the blue candy. There was no need to change colors. M&Ms are popular, never seemed to waver really, making such a change an obvious marketing ploy for kids, who seem attracted to any food incorporating blue (note all the raspberry flavored things colored blue). You'll notice that the option to not change any color, leaving tan in its rightful place, was never mentioned in the ad. You only heard about it when you called, and who would call intending to vote for a new color only to then change their mind? I called and called, but my one man jihad against a new color of M&M was doomed to failure.

Similar votes for a new Monopoly player token and new Crayola crayon shades were less annoying for some reason. Maybe I just found the process there less disagreeable. In looking at it, the money bag token was an added one, not replacing the traditional tokens (even the more pedestrian ones, like the iron or wheelbarrow). The Crayola vote mostly dealt with naming new shades, though they did solicit names for 8 colors in 1993. They "inducted" the old shades into the hall of fame. The likes of raw umber, yellow green, and maize made way for vivid tangerine, dandelion, and jungle green. Not as annoying as the new shades Crayola named themselves in 1998: brink pink, fuzzy wuzzy brown, banana mania, carribean green. Ack!

At least the idiot who named those got back on his/her feet coming up with the name Verizon.

Living near (and for many years, in) a city of such historical significance as Boston, I have a fairly woeful track record for actually visiting the places that make it so. When I worked in Boston and commuted from home, I walked by many of them but never really visited. From what I can tell from talking to other people who live in or near such places they're in the same boat.

I did make a positive effort to correct this the Monday after my 5th high school reunion. This very topic came up when I was talking to a couple of former classmates (neither of whom live in the area anymore), and we decided to get some of this history stuff under our belts. Nothing as formal as walking the Freedom Trail, just hit the city and see what happens.

And what happened, as you might expect from a group of guys in their early 20s, was as much an investigation of downtown watering holes as it was a trip into America's past. We did go to Old Ironsides, the State House, Fanieul Hall, and walked by many of the other famous places. But we also stopped at the Bull and Finch. And at Dockside. And at one or two other places somewhere between North and Back Bay stations. Wasn't as bad as the famed Fourth of July pub crawl (which crawled in the literal sense, and come to think of it wasn't that famed at all), but much of the post meridian portion of the touring was inspired (if not fueled) by not a small portion of beer.

Which led to its own problems. We wouldn't have stopped at the State House except that they were offering free tours. The tours are apparently given by high school kids who get some sort of credit (or an in with a hack to write a glowing college recommendation or something) for giving them. I feel sorry for the two women who had to take us around Charles Bullfinch's finest creation, mostly because we were probably not "respectful" enough, especially for a tour that actually took us to the House and Senate floors (in retrospect, that was very cool).

But what really brought this topic to mind today was last Sunday's recreation of the Boston Tea Party. My friend Denise, being of historical bent and having special interest in the Tea Party, invited a number of us to the recreation. So it was that we gathered at the Old South Meeting House for the "debate" about what to do with the tea sitting on British ships in the harbor.

A local group of colonial-era recreationists played the major roles. They were actually quite fun, into their roles without the forced gravitas that the Civil War recreationists often take. We were encouraged to participate by booing, hissing, and yelling "No taxes!" at certain points. This caused my friend/boss Laura to note that it was "like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without the garter."

We also had a character card in one of our programs, which included a name and some text that we could read as part of the debate. As it was a damn dirty Tory character, most of us refused on principle. The one Tory in the group refused on the grounds of not wanting to speak in public. As it was, most of the character cards were read by kids, which seemed fitting.

After the debate, there's usually a procession down to the Tea Party ship, where chests are tossed into the harbor. However, the ship and museum had a little fire this year, so there was no procession. Instead, a fife and drum corps played some tunes outside by the Irish Famine memorial across the street. I know, most folks call it the potato famine. You can still call it that if you want. I don't care.

We followed this bit of history with another Boston tradition: Italian food. Waled over the North End, had a nice meal at a restaurant whose name I can't remember (never can, it seems). Service was slow, but nothing near the abysmal waitstaff we had at Vinny Testa's for the college bowl semester ending social. Desser at Cafe Vittorio, one of the sites of my first date with Sarah, a fact that, when raised, led to a cross examination that was only missing a bare bulb and buckshot-filled length of garden hose.

Anyway, should you not be doing anything next December 16, mosey on down to the Old South Meeting House. Admission is only a buck, which is a small price to pay. Unless you also get one of the tri-cornered hats they were selling, which were cool if too small for my cranium.

Test again, as the page is apparenly being replaced at this point with my directory information.

It's been about a week or so since I moved this over to Yahoo-GeoCities, and I have to say so far so good. Easy to set up, was able to FTP with some ease, and I even got the archives thing fixed for those of you who haven't been able to read my collective wisdom since day one (though the latter was more me and the Blogger help files than Y-GC).

I do not like the pop-up ad. It is less annoying than the damned wireless spy camera ones, or the casino ones (with apologies to the DeVeaus). None top the porn pop-ups, which propogate at a speed somewhere between Ebola and light. I've even seen a few times where the ad comes up with some sort of error message, making the window very small. On the other hand, I've also been greeted by large pictures of Lance Bass and Sulley, the big blue hairy thing from Monsters, Inc.. I could do without that. [When I went to check to make sure this posted, the first ad I got was the Sulley one. The second one was Chris Kattan as Corky Romano, which in retrospect is about a billion times worse. -MJC]

But the pros and cons do lean towards me staying here for a while. I may do what Matt Bruce did with his blog, and put up a home page over it so you don't necessarily get the ad on the blog page. I do seem to gets ads on both the main and archive page, so that may not work, but it could be worth a shot.

I am addicted to Oregon Trail.

Let me explain.

Last weekend, we were out Christmas shopping, and Sarah spotted the newest version of this game, and we bought it as a present to ourselves. Or, perhaps more correctly, for Sarah (we thought) as she had played the game during her childhood and had enjoyed it.

Oregon Trail, for those of you who either grew up before its popularity or later, when Parappa the Rapper passes for educational, is a game where you manifest your own destiny by hitting the trail and moving west to the burgeoning lands of Oregon or California. Along the way you fight disease, injury, wagon tipping (the damn things fall over a lot), starvation, etc.

I wasn't thinking that I'd get too into the game, but got hooked fairly quickly. I'm a fan of simulation games anyways, even ones that are targeted for my nieces and nephews, apparently.

I guess there are two things that make me like this game. The first is the way you can make each trip very different by changing your origin and destination, the month and year you start, your former occupation, number of people you're taking with you, and so on. My first few games were pretty straightforward, with a character whose starting bankroll and past experience made trail life relatively easy.

I challenged myself yesterday by starting out earlier (when there are fewer trading posts and forts along the way), heading to Oregon City (which you have to get to by rafting, using what in this day in age is a fairly comical looking video game interface), and having formerly be a pastor, which gave me little money and no practical experience.

My first time out I did get to do one thing repeatedly that a pastor has experience in: officiate at funerals. Lost one kid to cholera, and my wife and other kid to scurvy when we got stuck in the mountains over winter. I died from scurvy not much later. I was hoping for a Donner Party sort of moment, but I suppose facing 9 year olds with the spectre of cannibalism may not be the educational milestone The Leaning Company is shooting for.

Ever ready to face the challenge again, I tried the same trip a second time but tried to learn from my mistakes. I got three quarters of my family to Oregon City (one kid died of some sort of injury, damned if I can remember what now), in rough shape and with nothing but salt-cured fish to eat (though we could have killed an ox for food if needed; I've had to do that before).

My next challenge will be to either (a) make the trip as a teacher, who is at the very bottom of the pay/experience scale, or (b) start trying to lead wagon trains. Not sure if I'm ready for that yet. Hate to be the idiot who take a train bound for Oregon to the Sacramento River valley.

I've asked for The Sims for Christmas, so perhaps I'll be able to report how I torture various people there sometime soon.

Yesterday was the annual Babson student affairs divsion holiday lunch and Yankee swap. For those of you not familiar with the Yankee swap, it goes like this: you have a bunch of people bring presents. Everyone who brought a present draws a number. You pick in order, with the ability to either keep your gift or swap it with the gift of someone who went before you. The person who picks first then gets to choose from all the gifts.

My gift was OK, a mix of chocolate type things in a fairly nice holiday bag (snowy harbor scene with a lighthouse and all that; at least one person commented on the bag specifically, so props to Sarah for picking it out). There were 65 numbers. I chose 15. If you followed the way this is done, you realize that this is a crappy number. Given that two of the single digit numbers weren't taken, 15 became even that much more crappy.

I went up with the intention of not taking what was obviously alcohol (a swap fave) or a gag present. Last year, about 10 to 12 people got together and all gave the same gift: the Big Mouth Billy Bass. From what I've heard it was a well executed gag, with some of the fish repackaged, and at least one conspirator taking a Bass to deflect suspicion as to what office was behind the prank.

Needless to say, such skullduggery was warned off this year. That didn't stop some people; my office mate Brian bought a Rotato (a Popeil-style product) but squired scratch tickets in the bottom of the box. Two fish did make re-appearances; I get the sense that at least one Billy Bass will appear at each of these things until everyone who got one no longer works at Babson.

Anyway, I went up and started to look around, and got yelled at for peeking (which I wasn't!), so I just grabbed a box close at hand. It wasn't until I was taking the ribbon off that it dawned on me that I'd probably picked alcohol. I was wondering what I'd get stuck with as I finished unwrapping what turned out to be a bottle of Bailey's.

My thoughts were answered fairly soon, as an office mate of mine traded the snowman kitchen towels he pulled for the Bailey's. He wound up losing the bottle, too, but held on to it for quite some time. There was another bottle of Bailey's that traded hands at least twice. There were 3 bottles of wine that managed to stay with the people who picked them originally, which cheeses me off as I'd actually drink the wine (not a liquor fan per se, though Bailey's would probably be fine).

I tend to have crappy luck at things like this. At the last college bowl secret Santa/Yankee swap/whatever it was I participated in, I got a bag of Body Shop soaps that was intended for a malodorous teammate who didn't show. I suppose that actually worked out in the long run, as I didn't have to buy soap again until April. They weren't bad soaps, come to think of it.

OK, that worked out much better than I remembered (for me; the rest of the team still had to deal with the fumes that teammate put off). And as I think of it, I don't think I even participated in the only Yankee swap held during my tenure at the New England School of Law library.

Not that it wasn't memorable. A set of magnetic poetry got swapped something like six times, especially noteworthy given that there couldn't have been more than 20 people in the swap. That and, well, the library folks were all great to work with, but not the most festive people. I know, reserved librarians, who'd have thought?

My Boy Scout troop also did a present swap (no trading, at least not officially), which generally was dropping in candy to get someone else's candy. The Life Saver "gift books" were always popular. I had one friend do the "big box, small gift" gag by putting a couple of pens in a TV box, and filling the box with shredded paper or styrofoam peanuts or something. Showing that some things never change, one of the Billy Basses that returned yesterday was in just such a manner (the director of my office wound up with that one, proving that revenge is indeed a dish best served cold).

My other loss yesterday came from not getting to take the pointsettia centerpiece home as the most recent hire at my table. That honor went to the new Catholic priest on campus, who started in September. Can't argue against clergy, and I can't even say I wanted the plant that badly.

On a positive note, the food was really good. We also got a gift basket that netted me a $10 Blockbuster card and some candy. So it wasn't a total bust yesterday.

Test two!

Test entry!

Today would have been my sister Cathy's 34th birthday.

Cathy passed away in 1987, two days before I graduated from high school. As you can imagine, that brings up its own set of issues, which I'll leave aside for the time being.

We had, I suppose, a typical brother-sister relationship for brothers and sisters who are close in age (she was born in 1967, and I toddled along in August '69). For much of my childhood she was my default playmate, the one person who, if around and not busy with one of her friends, could be recruited into doing whatever was on tap. In most cases this wound up being either board games or doing something outside.

Funny thing about the board games is that I beat her in just about everything, but Cathy could whip me in backgammon and chess. And I think I even taught her how to play chess so I'd have someone to play against! I think she was better at planning ahead, taking in moves and connecting them to things that could happen later in the game. I never quite applied that much thought to backgammon (and even if I do now, I tend to lose), and never could with chess.

The outdoor stuff tended to be more fun, and usually involved some brush with authority or life in peril situation. Such as sledding down a neighborhood hill whose run ended abruptly against the wall of a garage. Or going over to Gordon College's ice rink to skate, where she would eventually start playing hockey with a group of guys who were too smitten (and too macho) to stop her from scoring goals. Or any variety of trips over to the town Highway Department truck yard, where we climbed hills of sand, tried to sneak into the barns, and generally cause trouble.

Not surprisingly, things drifted a bit when we got older and into high school. Different friends, interests, and so forth. It's hard to define what happened. Our relationship was as much one of convenience as it was familial, and I suppose we let go of our earlier closeness not so much out of disinterest for the other person as for greater interest in everything else.

Cathy had this humorous, if not just a little dangerous, taste for life. Consider the birthday where she and her friends decided to joyride in my other sister's car. Did I mention this was before Cathy could get her licence? There was also the time her best friend let her drive her car, and Cathy managed to hit a McDonalds' drive thru window in such a way that it was torn from the building. To this day, I have no idea how she did this (and in an AMC Gremlin, no less!).

There was also "The Bucket," an old Fluff jar (one of the big ones) that Cathy and her friends would fill with whatever concoction of alcohol and mixer they had (rum and Coke being the most favored), and bury in the sand at the beach. Less obvious than the kids pounding beers in the parking lot, but more obvious than they thought. Which was a trademark of most of what Cathy did in high school - a glimmer of thought and innovation, but not with enough follow-through not to get busted.

She did manage to pull two things off in one day, though. Her senior year, the senior week "Toga Day" fell on the same day as the election for Student Government Day (or something like that) where a couple of kids per high school go to Boston and pretend that they're the government, from the governor on down. I was running, as were about 6 other people.

Cathy and her friend volunteered to take her homeroom's ballots to the office. Showing the sort of on the spot political moxie that made Richard Daley such an institution, they erased all the votes they could for one of their classmates and switched the votes to me. I came in second, getting to go as an alternate. I didn't find out until much later this had gone on, saving me the need to come up with an excuse to withdraw.

(In an unrelated note, the guy who they took votes away from is now married to a woman who, truth be told. I had a long, unrequited thing for. All water under the bridge, I suppose, but that's karma for you).

Oh, the toga part. Cathy made her's out of an electric blanket. She swore up and down it was just a gag, but she had neatly hidden the controls in one of the folds. That may have been the one day she never complained about being cold.

There are a number of reasons why this day is a hard one for me. I hope the anecdotes I've shared here give some sense of the person my sister was, and the meaning she had in my life. That she was removed from my life with no notice plays a big part in this. Cathy died from a viral infection in her lungs, one that spread rapidly. We had little idea she was sick, never mind with something that would have the end result it did. It's hard to reconcile that my last day with her was spent showing her my yearbook (which ticked her off given her boyfriend's entry) for about 5 minutes and making a joke when she got up to get some water. Of course, how was I to know, but it's hard not to see things in the light of what actually happened.

It's also hard given the effect Cathy's death had on my parents. You always hear the line about nothing being worse than a parent burying a child, but don't understand the truth behind it until you see it take place up close. I was at an age where I realized my parents were human, and had their failings, but the powerlessness this whole thing created was stupefying. Neither of them really ever got over it; it took years for my father to get to the point where you could mention her name in his presence.

But I suppose the hardest thing is thinking about what's been missed. Not having her come for visits when I was at BU. Not seeing her work her interest in literature and kids into something she'd probably have been great at. Not getting a chance to see her with a family of her own, and the entertainment that would come from her getting to deal with the same problems she caused for our folks. The list could run for pages.

When this day rolls around every year, I do what I can to think of the good things. Memories, even of times that didn't go so smoothly, are better than dwelling on things that I can't change. This works, to a point, and there was even one year, bogged down as I was in law school finals, that I was able to chase such thoughts away (even if it really was trading one set of problems for another). But I can never quite get rid of that feeling of sorrow.

My doctor talked to me a couple of months after Cathy died, and said that the hole in my heart where Cathy was would close a little each year. It wouldn't heal, but it would get tiny. He was, by and large, right. But today is that one day where the hole, a pinprick now, deepens. And I have a sense that Decemeber 11 will always be that way.

Had the good fortune to get away this past weekend to Chattanooga, Tennessee for a quiz bowl thing there (for those of you who are reading who may not know me- and what are the odds of that?- one of my main hobbies is quiz bowl, sort of a team-based Jeopardy type thing, to give it a really simple explanation).

Flew out of Providence, though the airport is actually in Warwick (one of the many airports that pretend to be somewhere else; I suppose flying in to Windsor Locks CT, Covington KY, and Romulus, MI isn't as informative than flying into Hartford, Cincinnati, and Detroit, either way it's a bad vacation). Anyway, T. F. Green is everything Logan isn't: ample parking, easy to get to and leave from, generally clean and well maintained, and relatively safe.

Took Southwest to Nashville, Southwest Airlines being the "official" airline of the team I play on as three of us have relatively easy access to it (doesn't fly into Philly for our friend Chris, unfortunately). I like Southwest well enough, inasmuch as they're more or less the same as the other airlines, but with less pretense. I can see where some folks feel that's forced, but I don't mind the occasional flight attendant busting out in song over the p.a.

This was the first trip with multiple significant others, as on occasion a wife or girlfriend has made the trip (either to play or to see each other while working in different states). At one point all the wives and girlfriends were going to make the trip, but for various reasons (September 11 related and otherwise) it didn't work. Which was too bad, as the four of them could have played on their own team.

A historical note about my team and its names. Many years ago, at a tournament in Philly, Greg was hanging out with some folks when they stumbled across a list of gag porn movie titles in a weekly paper. One of the titles was A Gerbil Runs Through It, a take off of the fly fishing/homo-erotic brothers in conflict movie with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. That led to thinking of other movie titles you could do this with, and voila!

Names we've used inclue How Stella Got Her Gerbil Back, Riding in Cars with Gerbils, Il Gerbino, The English Gerbil, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Gerbil. There are others, but who can remember?

Tournament itself was fun, finished fourth (behind a team we'd beaten who had a better overall record) after losing a shootout semifinal... just as we did last year. On the positive side, we forced the shootout, rather than being forced into it. Perhaps next year we'll get into one and win it.

We've never gotten to do much sightseeing when we've gone to Chattanooga, but the one stop we did make was quality. A couple years ago we took in the gift shop of the Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum. Yes, it is just what it sounds like. We'd have had to pay to go in, but as we could see a fair portion of it from the gift shop area, we just bought some stuff and left (I still have my T shirt, one of the few that seemed to survive all my moving). We've not been to the aquarium (the largest fresh water one in the state/US/continent/world, can't remember which), the mall (largest in TN), the Creative Discovery Museum, Lookout Mountain and Rock City, or BellSouth Park, home to the Chattanooga Lookouts minor league baseball team (we have walked around the outside of historic Engel Stadium, the Lookouts' old home that's now a national historic site). At some point we're going to have to go early so we can take a day.

For that matter, we never seem to get much sightseeing done on any of these trips. I don't think we're missing much in Detroit (though we've managed a game at Comerica Park, seeing a Tigers-Twins game in 2000), but I'd like to have time to look around DC again. A future trip to DePauw University in Indiana will highlight a side trip to Notre Dame to take in a hockey game. In some sense it'll also be a family pilgrimage, given my dad's passion for Notre Dame football. We won't discuss how ND blew me off twice when I requested applications for undergrad and law school.

We did hit some "cultural" areas of Tennessee, including Davy Crockett's Smokehouse, which was like Cracker Barrel crossed with a honky tonk. Peanut shells on the floor, down home food, and faux coonskin caps for sale (I passed, considering it probably wouldn't fit). We also made our usual stop at Stuckey's, which is like Woolworth's crossed with a general store crossed with QVC. Small building with pumps out front, lunch counter, and a bunch of semi-worthless crap. If you're looking for a figurine of a bear wearing boxer shorts putting on a bathrobe, stop here. You can get Southern cusine (Moon Pies, Goo Goo Clusters, pecan rolls) on the cheap. Oddly, for a place that sells Moon Pies, they don't sell RC Cola.

Thinking more about the tournament, I managed to get honorable mentions for both my preliminary K-Tell Hell score (K-Tell Hell is kind of like Name that Tune, but using the actual songs) and my individual scoring for the tournament, where I finished 11th (though we think that's off based on our own stat keeping, and that I actually made the top 10, which would annoy me more except that it means I managed to avoid being saddled with one more piece of crap that I'd have to drag back here). My mention for the latter achievement also noted I was the highest scoring player at the tournament that does not wear glasses. Not that I don't need them; I'm sure most of you have seen me in my full body squint when sitting at a computer or trying to read something that's posted on a wall.

So, for all my trouble, the one prize I did take home was an incrediby ugly Jar Jar Binks mug, which will go well with the somewhat less hideous Jar Jar Binks lip balm dispenser I got last year. I feel that my eye for trashworthy prizes is somewhat vindicated given that both the Dr. Laura game and the Monopoly dot.com edition were given away, and I'd had both on my list of prizes for the regional last month (Dr. Laura was given away, the Monopoly was still too expensive).

Notable on the flight back was that Nashville's airport hires, in at least some capacity, Argenbright Inc., the same folks who brought you the Maginot Line-like security at Logan. That Shawn and Chris were stopped and had have their shoes x-rayed (without wearing them, of course) suggests that they're being more circumspect.

However, that they didn't even bother to look in the case of the buzzer system I was carrying on made me worry. The system is a self-contained briefcase which, when broken down for travel, has all sorts of wires inside. There also may be a battery (there's a switch for one, I think, unless I was looking at someone else's made by the same company), so consider that some artful work with Semtex could have nasty implications. NOT THAT I AM ADVOCATING SUCH A COURSE OF ACTION. I just think they could have at least opened the case and prodded a little, like they did in Providence.

Anyway, a fun trip overall, not least of which came from not having anyone complain about my snoring.