30!

Hello everyone - I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. Our family celebration was wonderful. We had 4 generations present and (I think) 25 people. My brother-in-law cooked a great turkey. There are pictures here and video here and here. It was great to see so many of my family members; some of these people I hadn't seen since my grandfather's funeral 3 years ago. It was also nice to be able to celebrate my birthday (30 this year!) with family, something I hadn't been able to do when I was out in Los Angeles. Someone came to this page and left me an anonymous birthday greeting. Thank you, whoever you are!

My friend Katherine from UCLA got me a lovely birthday present. It's one of those alarm clocks you see advertised in the SkyMall catalog on airplanes. It has several really cool features. 30 minutes before your alarm time, it slowly lights up (simulating sunrise) and instead of an annoying alarm, it starts to play a pre-selected nature sound. Also, the light feature warms aromatherapy beads so you can wake up to your chosen scent. For good measure, there is also an annoying alarm at the end of the wake-up cycle, which is good for me. I'm still playing around with it and checking out all of the features.

I haven't started any new books lately, but I'm continuing to enjoy my netflix subscription. I recently watched "A Door in the Floor", which was very good. Movies based on John Irving's book are usually very good, even though I don't like reading his novels. This week I also enjoyed "The World's Fastest Indian", based on a true story about a man from New Zealand who travels to America to test his souped-up motorcycle on the salt flats. It starred Anthony Hopkins, but I don't remember hearing anything about it when it was first released. Netflix kept recommending it to me though, and they usually pick good movies for me. I'm always eager to hear book and movie recommendations from other people.

I wish there was more to say, but there really isn't much going on here in Gainesville these days. I'm struggling to get some work done after being out of town so much. The weather has been warm here for most of the week; I even had my air conditioner on a few times. However, tooday is rainy and gray. Perfect weather for a nice long nap!