I have been incommunicado for weeks, due to laziness. Sorry!

A week and a half ago, I got a Toshiba Tecra M4 laptop, which converts to a tablet PC with a neat stylus and everything. My old laptop had developed many annoying little quirks and was feeling underpowered — it was about five years old — so I gave it to my sister jeaniek and bought this one as a replacement. Plus, it'll be a decent tax deduction come January, since it's primarily going to be my work machine.

Now that I have a laptop that can handle it, I've been playing Sid Meier's Pirates! (warning: site has ambient background audio) far too much. It is quite possibly the best game I've ever played. I recommend it if you like simulation/strategy/adventure games.

This past Saturday, waterbaby83 got married. mangofandango was the maid of honor, and I helped make the reception go smoothly by getting the buffet table set up and taking care of the music. Lots of photos are here. Now the happy couple is in Myrtle Beach, and I am jealous!

mangofandango and I saw Serenity on Saturday evening, and loved it. We had just finished watching the TV series (it's been showing on the Sci Fi channel, but I gave Sarah the DVD set a week or so before her birthday so we could finish it before the movie came out. What a great show! For us, this has been the summer of watching absolutely wonderful shows that got canceled far too early: Wonderfalls, Freaks and Geeks, and now Firefly.

Sunday was mangofandango's 24th birthday. Happy birthday!

After reading this post and its comments, I went out to my parents' barn (where they store lots and lots of our old stuff) and dug out The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. I had been given the book as a child and never really used it, because it seemed far too much like work, and when I was drawing I didn't want it to be work. Now I understand things better, so I'm going to give it another shot and see if I can bone up on my figure drawing skills. (I also used to have Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but it apparently got sold in one of my mom's regular garage sales. It's cheap, though, so I'll probably buy myself a new copy.)

Now, I'm going to go look up movie showtimes. We're going to see Serenity again!