The customary late-November three-day work week followed by turkey gorging and general lethargy was cut short for me. Why, you ask? Well, i had to pack up everything i own (and more significantly, everything Veronica owns) and move it about ten miles down the El Camino to our brand new house off Woodside. V's cousin Naomi helped us get the packing started the previous weekend, but it wasn't until after a nice relaxing Thanksgiving Thursday with my auntie, sister, and parents in Fremont that our moving activities kicked into high gear. I spent all day Friday packing up kitchen apparatus, and that evening we collected the final keys from the sellers, who'd been renting the house back from us for a month since escrow closed. We took a preliminary load in our rental truck that night, and then hit the hay in anticipation of the real move. That Saturday, Naomi and Geoff again came down from the city to help out, while Gabriel and Sonya made the long trip up from LA for the ordeal. Michael also drove over from Oakland to heave our crap around. Our seven person moving crew made two trips that day, concluding with some dancing at Leisure in the city. God knows where we found the energy for that. On Sunday our group was trimmed to Geoff, Naomi, Veronica, and i, but with the addition of my parents and sister Hilary we made another two trips and brought the job to ~98% completion.

Come Monday morning i was thoroughly worked, but managed to attend 8am radiobiology faculty meeting. I skipped out of work early to move the last few loads and give our old house a quick cleaning to maximize our security deposit returns. My parents came again, to pick up our old entertainment center which Hilary had expressed an interest in. With the aid of my dad's truck, we got rid of the accumulated trash at our old house. V painted over a lavender highlight she and her mom had done on a builtin shelving unit, and i slept on the floor. Tuesday i put in a full day at Stanford, and made one last trip to San Mateo to finish the paintjob and grab the last armful of stuff. Mission accomplished.

Well, more or less. Now our attention turns to the numerous boxes strewn about every room of our new house, let alone the garage. On the plus side, the new place is very cool and i'm excited to be living there.

We didn't get a chance to rest until Friday night though, as we had to keep getting up early for work, meanwhile having dinner in Berkeley with Michael on Wednesday and unpacking in all our other spare time. To momentarily resume my whining from a few weeks ago, i need a few weeks off to zone out.

This past weekend should've been a parade of laziness, but it was pretty busy as well. After spending the night Friday, Geoff and Naomi had breakfast with us on Saturday. They then skipped back home to SF while we met up with my coworker Becky and her husband Louie for dinner at the wonderful Kingfish in San Mateo, followed by a showing of Ray down in San Mateo. Great, great film. Jamie Foxx completely deserves an Oscar nomination for his channeling of Ray Charles. The story is very well told as well. On Sunday Naomi and Geoff again travelled down the peninsula, this time so Geoff could help me reverse the swing of the French doors on our bedroom. It turned out to be a bigger task than we bargained for, as both the doors and the doorjam are old and bowed. After four hours of work and still not getting the doors to close completely, we resolved to take off the door frame next weekend and start with a fresh base board, as opposed to continually modifying the existing one.

For better or for worse, Geoff and i have also discovered the wonder of online multiplayer Halo 2 on Xbox Live. After having our cable, phone, and internet installed on Tuesday and reconstructing our entertainment center, computer, and network, i was motivated to hook up my old non-super but Live-enabled Xbox on Friday night. Geoff and i immediately jumped into a Halo 2 optimatch ... oh, the joy. As with Splinter Cell 2: Pandora Tomorrow, i still get tooled regularly, but with Halo 2 the process is much more fun. That is, i never feel like i'm the newbie getting abused because i still make my share of kills. In fact, i won my first slayer match last night. Geoff and i are taking as much pleasure in blathering non-sequiturs at the assorted adolescents on Xbox Live. The sound of confusion on the other end when you're chanting "papa gigio" in a falsetto is priceless.

And all the while, Chelsea has marched on. According to Manure head blowhard Alex Ferguson, at some point Chelsea will suffer a dip in form that we "won't have the experience to deal with". Whatever. Lamenting lost Arjen Robben, Fergie? Your piss poor midfield could use him. He's played brilliantly in his first six matches at Stamford Bridge, carving up opposing defences with unbelievable pace and control. Didier Drogba came back as a substitute on Saturday and scored one and set up another in another four goal victory, this time over Newcastle. Frank Lampard is back to his imperious self, and Damien Duff has forged a compelling partnership with Robben. Meanwhile our defense has allowed a league best total of six goals, anchored by our brilliant new keeper Petr Cech and the steadfast John Terry, William Gallas, and Ricardo Carvalho. The whole team has established an impressive bond, and now sits five points clear of the Arse at the top of the Premiership. By no measure have we wrapped things up, but you couldn't ask for anything better a third of the way through the season.

By the way, i think it royally sucks that Cal has been screwed out of a place in the Rose Bowl thanks to a handful of computers and a meaningless ranking algorithm. No offense to Texas, a fine program in their own right, but it's hard to accept why Cal, ranked fourth in the country through most of the second half of the season, dropped to fifth in the BCS on the last week of the rankings for no apparent reason. College football adopted a computer ranking system to decide the national champion in order to preserve the time-honored bowl series. Well, the BCS continues to steamroll the entire affair. The Rose Bowl was traditionally the matchup of the Pac 10 and Big 10 champions. So the BCS sticks in ... Texas. Hrm. Over an equally-qualified Cal. Insanity.