And we're back. As you may have noticed, the entire Gerbil family was incommunicado for a few days. Turns out that the servers that host us got caught up in some sort of power outage in south Florida and didn't get back on-line until today.

Not that I've had a great deal going on. The weekend was marked by a couple trips to the mall for odds and ends and taking in The Village, which was pretty good (though I kind of anticipated the ending, which I usually don't do with movies like this). On the preview front, saw one for The Aviator, with Leo DeCaprio playing a young Howard Hughes (sadly, Leo will not be playing the collecting-urine-in-jars Hughes). Also one for The Incredibles, a Pixar offering about a family of superheroes. Been to the movies enough that the rest of the previews were ones I'd seen before... I think. In the back of my head there was one other new one, but I've forgotten what it may have been.

Sunday night I had a continuation of a "you can't go home again" moment. When I was growing up, we (my mom and some subset of the kids) would go shopping in north Beverly quite a bit. Needless to say, it's quite different now. The supermarket moved over to where the regional discount chain store used to be, a Staples is moving in where the supermarket used to be, and the Papa Gino's, which I can't even count how many times I ate at or got pizza from, is closed. God help us if it becomes a Starbucks.