I think Verizon's out to get me! Ever since we've switched to cable internet and forsaken the land line, I've been encouraging others to do the same. Now, on the weekend I get my super-duper Napster MP3 player, our cable is suddenly and mysteriously screwed up and I haven't had internet access since sometime on Saturday. A technician's coming by tomorrow to check things out. Fortunately I downloaded my 20 free songs from Napster before it crapped out so I have something to listen to on the train but I'm getting anxious to add to my collection before we hit the road to Virginia on Friday night. Elton John's Tiny Dancer is tops on the list, though Salomé thinks we have it somewhere on CD already. Guess I know what I'll be doing on Christmas day!

Caught Alvin Ailey on Saturday night at City Center and they were amazing as always. Revelations, in particular, continues to floor me every time I see it and three of the four other performances were top-notch, too. Weird thing about dance is I find the men much more fascinating than the women. The women are amazing, no question, but you kind of expect that. (Is that sexist?) The men, though, are just ridiculous specimens of human perfection and the way they move makes me jealous. I can almost understand why so many of them are gay! There was one woman, though, who really stood out because she was so tall and angular that you couldn't help but notice her. She had an odd grace that you wouldn't expect from someone her size. They're around through January 4th and I heartily recommend catching a performance.

Sunday was an impromptu session of Dungeons & Dragons as Omar was in town for the weekend and we were able to round up a couple of other people on short notice, including my slacker cousin who still claims he's getting an adventure together! I'd been working on my own throughout the week (I think I've checked out every DnD-related site on the internet!) and went into overdrive Saturday night, deciding to write something from scratch--writing until 3am when I finally passed out. Spent another three hours the next afternoon polishing it off while Omar, Ed, Oscar and Juan created their characters. [oops! would this be considered outing them? then i won't mention what race Oscar chose... ;-) ] At the same time, I was trying to learn/incorporate this great game management program I came across, DM Genie, so the process was kind of choppy early on. Once we finally got going, though, we had a good time with it, getting approx. halfway through the game, not bad considering I haven't played in years. Like not since 1986! The best thing is the amount of writing I've done for it in the past few days, exactly the boost I was hoping for. I'm going to set up another blog this week to track the progress of the game; a novelization of sorts and a great writing exercise.