A Few Quick Notes 147

-Today was a pretty nice day, though the weather was more of what one might expect in fall than the middle of winter. It was a nice surprise as yesterday turned out to be quite a messy day (as frequently occurs when snow and rain are mixed at near zero temperatures).

-Again last night we had a biggish party at Thomson House. This time the reason was the beginning of a new term.

Though slow to start, the party eventually picked up and proved to be quite successful. So successful that we ended up selling out of pizza well before the kitchen was scheduled to close. Another sign of success was that tips were quite good. One of the only problems was that as there were all kinds of people there at close we weren't able to complete many of the tasks involved with closing until everyone had left, delaying our departure.

-A few nights ago I played some Settlers and had a fairly good run. Unfortunately, in my second game I built a settlement for one point instead of a road for two, something that would have given me the win. After this mistake I wasn't able to turn things around and build a settlement or a city for my tenth point.

-While in the grocery store a few nights ago, I happened to stop by the discount DVD bin. As the prices seemed incredibly low, and as I didn't really want to rush home, I decided to look through the selection and see what they had in the under $5.00 category. After several minutes of searching I found a double feature that included "Shaft: Les Nuits Rouges de Harlem" and "Les Nouveaux Exploits de Shaft." The set did not include the third and final Shaft movie, "Shaft in Africa." Fortunately, while the packaging is in French, the movies are in English.

So far I have only managed to get through the first movie (just known as "Shaft" in English). While it was watchable, I did notice that I didn't really like the way the sound was mixed. It seems that the vocal levels are quite low while the soundtrack is quite high, meaning that one has to have the sound quite high to hear the dialogue and is then blasted by the Isaac Hayes for the rest of the time (a feature that may be intentional). Maybe in a few days I will get around to watching the second movie as it is sure to be more action packed than the first one.

-For dinner tonight I plan on having a pot roast. As the piece of meat is on the large size I hope to have enough for left overs for a few days. The only problem is that I may have have included enough potatoes and carrots.