Friday: KT and Sean rolled into town, and we watched the extended edition of Return of the King. It now clocks in at just over four hours long, and is an improvement over the theatrical release. In particular, the battle scenes seem to be better edited and flow better. The added scenes with Sauruman and the Mouth of Sauron are awesome, especially the Mouth.
Saturday: To celebrate KT being in town, we had a great party. Noah and Zach arrived, bringing with them the hit of the party: A George Forman lenticular talking thing. It has a photo of George Forman, and when you press a button, it moves George’s mouth while it plays a sound clip about his grill. Kat and Urn made it, as well as Dave and Rose (and Oskar!). Everyone had a good time, and by the end of the evening, there was a girl’s only game of Dead or Alive going, which was hilarious, because the women are much more supportive of each other than guys are. Several times we would hear one of the girls compliment her attacker on a particularly brutal attack.
Sunday: Breakfast at Denny’s with Sean and KT and Zach, followed by HOURS of shopping, and the purchase of my new cell phone! It’s the nearly-free phone, so it doesn’t have a lot of features, but it does have the ability to use images as the background on the menu, so until I get the cable and can download images from my computer, my phone background is of a couple martinis.
Monday: Housecleaning, followed by Dave coming over with Oskar to help us prepare for LAN Party I by setting up the projector he borrowed from school. We rearranged the living room so that one couch is facing the TV with my xbox, while the other TV is facing into the dining room with the projector behind it. We found that while the projector is quite nice and large, the resolution is automatically a bit blurrier and dimmer, and any area lighting at all destroys the picture, so we had to hang blackout curtains – which was a bit depressing, since yesterday was the first sunny day in quite awhile.
Today: LAN Party I! The first in what will hopefully become a monthly event, we’ve invited everyone over to play xbox. We’ve got Sean’s xbox and also mine, and we’ve got them system linked. We have two copies of halo 2, and Daniel is bringing over a PS2 so that people can also play Katamari Damacy and some other goofy games he’s bringing. It should be a fun night, and with any luck, in the future, we’ll be able to exand the LAN party to include everyone bringing their computers over to someone’s house to have an actual fragfest with quake and halo and halflife and other PC goodness.