Got the last chapter turned in today and whooped my brother-in-law at Halo and Dead or Alive :). Glad to have everything turned in, but I'm just waiting for the other ball to drop and a whole ton of stuff back to fix (hoping not :). The editors told me to enjoy my Thanksgiving while they slave away, so I'm gonna ;).

hehehe... saw my new book title on Amazon.com today. But it didn't have the authors listed yet so I can't tell you what it is. My fingers are itching though... :)

Kris and I decided to have our first Thanksgiving dinner at our place, and wouldncha know... something had to go wrong. We were halfway through cooking the turkey when the oven, you guessed it, quit working. Luckily we had already cooked the pie, but the turkey was only halfway done and we hadn't cooked the stuffing yet.

After pulling the oven away from the wall (carefully, the turkey was still inside) we unplugged, replugged, kicked, screamed and cursed to the Thanksgiving gods to try and get the damn thing to work. Well, nothing doing...

So what's a Texas boy to do when the turkey's not done? Find the only hot thing in the place... the barbecue. So we fired up the grill and threw the 12 pound turkey on there. Got some water with herbs in it down there and made a fire. Great... now put the lid on... nope... won't fit. The turkey was too large for the barbecue grill. So back to good old Reynold's wrap. We put foil over the top and hoped the turkey didn't get too hot/dry/fried/burnt. After two hours of continuous checking and burnt fingers pulling the foil on and off, it was finally done.

And miracle of miracles it was tasty. One of our friends (Brent) never had a good piece of turkey in his life he told us. Always dry and yucky. We've redeemed his faith in the bird, and he now claims that we have an official "recipe" and will be required to do the same thing again next year. Hopefully without the frustration (and a larger grill).

Epilogue: To add insult to injury, we turned the oven on this morning... and it worked... bastards...

Got my final chapter turned in on Thursday (a day early even) and turned in my first review chapter today. Just gotta review three more (and hope they accept them) and I'm done and onto other projects.

Kris got me the extended DVD edition of Lord of the Rings, and that's some damn good stuff. They've gone back and added more than 30 minutes of new content to the movie. Now they didn't just drop the stuff in there, they actually went back and completely produced them. They rewrote the musical score for the film to tie them in, finished the visual and aural effects, the whole bit. The new scenes really add a lot of additional character development (who would have guessed Gimlee was really a softy ;).