Work has been very busy (several weeks working on a project that was only supposed to take a couple of days) lately. Hopefully things will calm down soon (at least to a more manageable level, although in some ways I do quite enjoy being entirely focused on solving one interesting problem).

My parents came to town a couple of weekends ago to visit and see the new house and help me celebrate my birthday. It was fun seeing them and getting to show off the house and our neighborhood (we went for a walk down by the river, lots of cool fall colors, went over to Lock & Dam #1 and watched a barge go through, then over to Minnehaha Falls and lunch at Sea Salt).

I've been playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed a lot lately. It's pretty much exactly what I wanted out of a Star Wars video game, you get to run around as a Sith warrior hacking and slashing your way through various Star Wars planets. I played KotoR back when it came out but never really got into it since I was really looking for more of an action game than an RPG with weird combat. I made my way through to both endings, definitely chose better the first time. I still have two locked costume slots, not sure what I have to do to unlock those.

I've also been enjoying the iPod connection kit that monstersocks gave me for my birthday. It will charge an iPod and hook up to the line-in in my Prius. It also has a remote you can hook to the steering wheel making it much safer to skip tracks and it pauses the iPod when you park. The only downside I've noticed so far is that if I leave the iPod hooked up to it when I'm parked overnight the iPod battery is dead in the morning so I have to wait for it to wake back up. I've seen that problem before when we were traveling once and I had an iPod charger that was incompatible with monstersocks' iPod and it ended up draining the battery overnight instead of charging it. I haven't tried it with another iPod to see if the problem is specific to my nano or not. Still very nice overall.

Wrapping up birthday present talk I had one of the Bacon Chocolate Bars I got from kalmn for dessert last night. Those are really, really good.

In other news, it looks like we have achieved costume readiness for this weekend and even came up with costume plan #2 for the following weekend which is progressing nicely.