As you can tell from the illustration I am back in the dreaded A-Town for the thanksgiving holiday. I am (wrongly) considered rather infamous here. (The reason why is left as an exercise for students of Google-fu)

I missed Castor's Wraith game on Sunday. I was disappointed about that, but the database project was finished on Monday fully six hours ahead of schedule. Which was a great relief. I didn't have much time to enjoy it though. I goofed off a bit and then crashed Monday night.

On Tuesday I got up early and went over to Arxan with all of my employment paperwork. Actually I got up much too early (given the sleep deprivation that I was suffering from) so I returned home and caught a three hour nap. At the urging of Terry I had planned to have a very small "Dan has a job" celebration that evening. Ironically Terry and several others had to bail out. None the less Lehmann, Sara with no 'h', and I went to Olive Garden and made the best of it. It was a lot of fun. From there I climbed back up to my office and spent the entire night working on a major change to Professor Xie's project.

Today I awoke after three hours sleep and spent the majority of the day debugging the code I wrote the night before. I was very pleased that I was able to produce a seriously functional program at the meeting this afternoon. After that I went to my office and cleaned up a few things discovered at the meeting. Then I printed my Christmas list. Yeah, I know it seems juvenile, but you have to understand that my family DEMANDS a Christmas list over thanksgiving and failure to produce one is cause for serious griping.

As I left Lafayette this evening the first snow of the year was just beginning to accumulate. Travel was very slow. The combination of (1) people figuring out how to drive on snow again and (2) a great number of people traveling long distances was a recipe for disaster. I took state roads all the way here knowing that taking the interstate under these circumstances was tantamount to gambling with my life. I had to stop and help not one, but two people who had slid off the road and into ditches filled with very cold water. I hit A-Town rather late, but I still had time to hang out with the family this evening. Tomorrow: A long needed head shaving and Turkey with what Ms Lane would call "the Fam".