"The goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning."

MAKE IT STOP! Goodness gracious, I've been overloaded with work for quite a bit longer than I'd prefer. See, I do an average of five hours per week of TA duties in two different courses, but last weekend (that is to say, about a week and a half ago), I got stuck with nearly 20 hours of marking to do (though this *in theory* means that I'll have less work to do in these courses later in the term). As a result, I had to get an extension on an assignment, and everything got thrown off kilter (it doesn't help that I had only a week to prepare my second lecture for my seminar course). Since then, I've been logging exactly how many hours I put into marking so that I don't work any more than I'm supposed to.

I got together with Chris (a fourth year undergrad in two of my courses) to work on an assignment that is due tomorrow morning (the one we got an extension on), and we made little to no progress in the two hours we worked on it. On top of that, I have the regularly scheduled assignment due on Wednesday that I have only barely started working on. Oh, right, and then I've got that lecture to give on Thursday afternoon that's not done yet.

Mind you, I have had my fair share of distractions this weekend. I had Thanksgiving dinner, of course, and after that I played my second game of Power Grid with Dan, Sheena, and Trevor again. Sheena pulled off a fairly decisive win this time, and I was left once again not really knowing what I did to lose. Also, Sheena had some people over to her place for some Singstar (as two new song collections have come out recently). I got a hold of Holly, and she came with me. She knew the words to lots of the songs, which I suppose is a side effect of working at the radio station.

I've got some plans to have a party at my house at the beginning of next month. My plan is to drag another TV downstairs, and have multiple games going on: Singstar in one room, Guitar Hero in another (GH3 is released at the end of October), and Wii Sports somewhere in between. If I can find another TV and convince Grant to let me borrow his Gamecube, then I can even have some GC games going on as well (SSBM, Mario Party, etc). Someone pointed out that it would be like those "fun days" in elementary school where you get the day off to play different games set up at different stations. I'm quite looking forward to it, so hopefully there won't be too many conflicts with the date I choose.

Listening to... Muse - Knights of Cydonia
Link of the moment... Feel free to peruse the lecture notes I've prepared for my lectures.

Let's see a BIG turnout next Thursday!

Games night has been rescheduled from Tuesday nights to Thursday nights starting next week (due to Tuesday being cheap night at the local movie theater). Last Tuesday wasn't much of a games night anyways. Chris brought Mario Party 8 as he had just rented it, so a four player game of MP8 ensued (unfortunately leaving multiple people to sit and watch, something I hate doing). After that was over, Dan broke out Singstar for PS2, much to Grant's zeal. The rest of the night was nothing but loud karaoke in my basement (though I did manage to fit in a game of Hive with Adam (I finally won!) and an unfinished game of Balderdash that was quite hard to converse over).

This was quite a shame, since I really had a hankering to play Vegas Showdown which I picked up (along with Nexus Ops) at the border earlier that day. I tried to get a game tonight with the neighbours, but once again my plans fell through as they had unexpected visitors. I swear, I shouldn't even attempt to plan anything anymore, since the universe likes to spite my plans.

My mom's Mac came in the other day (did I mention she got a Mac? Cause she did). I'm in the process of migrating her files to it and organizing them in some fashion (14GB to sort through!). I already threw boot camp on it and installed XP on a partition (for all those files that I unfortunately cannot transfer over to a comparable Mac program). It's really not fun to try to sort through other peoples' messes, so I might just tell my mom to sort it out on her own time.

Super Mario Sunshine is shit. I don't like it, but dammit I'm going to beat it. I have a bad habit of being unable to control Mario while jumping, which leads to MANY frustrating attempts at the same parts of levels. Sometimes he'll want to do a wall jump when I don't want him to, or he won't when I do. Sometimes if I want to turn around and do a small hop, he'll do a crazy backflip into the endless abyss. I've never wanted to bring pain upon Mario as much as I do now.

Well, Traveler is over. Only 8 episodes long. It's a pretty good show, and it's a shame that it's not going to be renewed for a second season (especially since there are DOZENS of loose ends that I won't get to see resolved now). Chanel and I have decided that we're going to start watching Prison Break season 1 (my mom has the boxset) on Wednesday nights since Traveler is over.

Listening to... Opeth - Deliverance
Link of the moment... Quite humourous. Watch it.