Only a few short days until the widespread release of The Two Towers and i’m as giddy as a school girl (ok, not really, but almost). We have our tickets to the midnight showing tomorrow night (technically Wednesday, even though the tickets say Tuesday). Hopefully they’ll let everyone wait inside like they did last year. It’s going to be cold, and possibly wet. My boss was even nice enough to tell me to take the whole day off Wednesday, instead of just coming in late. It’s nice when hard work pays off, even for things like this.

Taken is a science fiction mini-series currently running on the Sci-Fi Channel. We set TiVo to record it last week (It’s ten two-hour episodes). We’ve been watching it this weekend and only have two episodes left to see. I’m not exactly excited about much of of the Sci-Fi channels recent shows – Tremors the Series and some cheesy-looking ripoff of Fear Factor. So far, though, they’ve done a good job with this mini-series. It’s enjoyable, entertaining, and well-written, which is sometimes a difficult combonation to find on science fiction on tv/cable.

…the weekend is here! It was a long week at work and thankfully I finished everything I set out to do. The firewall I spent countless hours building and configuring is working flawlessly. Now I can relax and enjoy the weekend. Christmas is getting close, so I’m going to start my shopping today. Besides the crowds, I think the biggest reason I usually procrastinate is shopping alone. I need to find a way to trick convince my cousin Annie to go with and keep me company.

The last few days have been busy as hell for me. Since one of the many hats I wear at work includes Network Administrator, I spent the last few nights building, configuring, and installing a firewall. For the most part things went smoothly, and I’m just working out a few minor kinks in the system. The unfortunate side-effect off all this work is that my free time suffered. Monday and Friday were the only days I was able to do any writing. Hopefully now things will level out again and I can make some good progress.

I made some really nice progress today on my current story, Temperament. I managed another thousand words. Then I made the mistake of eating White Castle for lunch. Now, seven hours later I managed to hold down some Cream of Chicken soup.

If work is quiet enough to allow me to take lunch this week, I should have the first draft done. I’m anxious to get started on the next draft. I have the story nicely flushed out now, and I need to add a scene or two in the beginning and smooth out some of the inconsistencies that have found their way in. Overall I’m happy with where it’s going, and I hope that I’ll be able to have it ready for the group to critique within a few weeks.

Yet another long night at work last night. My boss upped the deadline on a project yesterday, giving me twenty-four hours to get it finished. I managed to pull it off in just over twelve hours, but I had to miss another writers group, which pisses me off. It’s one thing to miss a meeting because I was busy with contract work and couldn’t get to the readings in time. It’s another to be caught up on readings and ready to go, then have to miss because someone promised something to someone and mismanaged the schedule. If I had been given the deadline one day sooner, it wouldn’t have been an issue. As it stands, the works done and running flawlessly, I missed group, and I’m tired. I didn’t exactly win out on this one.

Yet another late night at work yesterday, pulling a nineteen hour day and still not accomplishing what I needed to. I intended to build a new firewall but was plagued with a myrid of hardware issues. I finally gave up for the night and went home to get some reset. Instead of making process, I find myself even farther behind on my schedule. I still have to finish building the firewall, but now I find out that I have one day to implement a new feature for the website, one that would usually occupy multiple programmers and a database administrator for several days. Of course, this is what happens when deadlines are made without the input of the technical staff. Sadly, I’ve witnessed this trend at most technology companies. I don’t have high hopes that it will correct itself, either. It is one of the biggest challenges I face.

With the late Thanksgiving this year, there are less days in the christmas shopping season. I don’t expect that to effect most men, who in my experience wait to the last minute no matter how much time in advance they had (myself included). Despite the hassle of fighting the crowds at the stores and hunting for the perfect gift, it’s still one of my favorite holidays. I love to see the looks on everyones face as they open their presents. To me, that is what Christmas is all about.

Winter’s breath arrived in a huff today, leaving a couple inches of snow in its wake. I was both dreading the snow and looking forward to it. Having grown up and lived in Illinois all my life, I’m used to the bitterly cold winters. There’s something exciting about the first snowfall of the season. The christmas tree is up. The house is decorated with lights. It’s pretty. But with the onset of winter comes seasonal affective disorder (SAD), aka the “winter blues”, aka seasonal depression. I first noticed its symptoms a few years ago, and it has returned without fail every year since. There are things that can be done to overcome this illness, such as exercise and increasing the amount of sunlight you receive. I’ll have to try adjusting my normally sedate lifestyle to include these steps. The difficulty I’ve found in getting more sunlight is subjecting myself to the cold. I’m not sure that the cure is worse than the condition.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite times of year. Lots of good, home-cooked food and time spent with family. This is our first Thanksgiving in the new house, which makes it even more special. A seventeen pound turkey is in the oven and filling the house with a wonderful aroma, pumpkin and pecan pies have been baked, and in a few short hours we’ll be eating until we overdose on Tryptophan

With the four day weekend, I hope to catch up on both contract work and writing. I’ve got a few pages of longhand of my current work-in-progress to transcribe and I’m anxious to get the first draft finished. I also have a review that should be published on Ars Technica sometime next week.