As many of you no doubt know, today was the opening day of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Somehow, someway one of my friends managed to snag some tickets for us. We showed up at the theatre (like my super-dooper British spelling?) an hour early, and proceeded to wait in a very long line, all the while praying that the theatre was bigger than we assumed.

It was. And we ended up with awesome seats!

Now, let me just say, I've been looking forward to this movie for quite some time. HPIV is my favorite book in the series. This book really built on the serious-themes of HPIII, and it's where the series really started taking off, in my opinion. Add all that to the fact that you finally get some romantic tension and some crazy action/adventure, and you've got yourself a winner. Well, with all that going for it, the movie really capitalized. I was pretty concerned with how they were going to manage to pack the entire novel into one 2.5hr movie, but they did. There were places where I felt the movie took too big of a jump, leaving me feeling a little disjointed, but overall it worked well--and I probably would not have noticed the jumps so much if I was not so familiar with the book.

So, with that, my next movie adventure will be the new Pride and Prejudice. Many of my fellow P&P fans are skeptical, but I, for one, am excited to have a movie version that's under 5 hours long. :)

Okay. This is something that I might be able to imagine in Oklahoma (though it certainly never happened to me there), but in New Jersey? Ridiculous!

Yes. That is exactly what it looks like. I was on my way to church the other day, and there, in the middle of the road...cows. I had to stop to let an entire herd of cattle cross the road. To let an entire herd of cattle cross the road. It was a surreal experience to say the least.

In other news, my friend Traci has successfully install Ubuntu Linux 5.10 on her computer. Needless to say, I'm bursting with pride and joy. :) I ran across an interesting article on Newsforge the other day about seeing what people who received free linux install CDs did with them after 60 days. The success rate was a bit disappointing, but the article had some good thoughts as to why that was the case and what possibly we can do to change it.

In one last bit of news...Elixir. I have not forgotten about it, and I am in the middle of working on the next chapter as we speak. The story is getting ready to take a turn, so the writing has been difficult lately (combined with the required 5hrs/day to study for Japanese, read Barth, write sermons, &c...), but I will get something up as soon as it is written and has passed my "quality control."