Football and American Food

This past weekend was very nice. I have a friend in town visiting, we go WAY back. We first met in 8th grade! She has since then become a world traveller - most recently teaching English in Korea and now going to Graduate School in Sheffield, England. She is here in the U.S. due to some ridiculous Visa laws that require her to interview at a British Consulate in her home country. I am the beneficiary of the ridiculous rules because I get to see her!

Friday night we just hung out, talked, watched some TV, and watched Tale of Desperaux. I thought it was an adorable movie, though it certainly did have its moments of confusion (it was clear they were condenscing a bigger story into limited time.

Saturday we took our time waking up and relaxed in the morning, then I took her down to Campus and showed her around. After that it was Five Guys for burgers (something they do not do well in Europe), football (Go OSU!!), and then some more guests came for Rock Band. It was really fun! I have not had a Rock Band party in a long time, my Rock Band drums had dust on them!!

Sunday we lounged around all morning and watched a bad sci fi movie and some football. I baked an apple pie, then some friends came over to watch Twilight. I had not watched it in a while and the upcoming new movie, New Moon, with all of its previews, made me want to see it again. It was a lot of fun! In the evening we went for Pizza (another thing that is very different here in the US than Europe) and then watched MORE football. I love football!! I also, in these three days, read my book club book - Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I really disliked it.

M0nday I had to go back to work. It is VERY slow at work for me right now, but it is a temporary problem. We have a caseload (its called "a pending") of 10 cases right now, and we have to have all of our actions reviewed. With 51 of us and the equivelent of 6 trainers, the turn around time is very long. I literally have nothing to do. I put an audiobook - Man in the Iron Mask on my MP3 player and have been listening to that while doing pointless little things like surfing WebMD and reorganzing notes. My caseload will increase in time, and the reviewer to reviewee ratio will improve once we are out of training (Nov 20th). Keeping busy should not be a problem in two or three months. For dinner we went and got BBQ (ANOTHER thing that Europe does not do well, are you sensing a theme?). It was delicious. Then we watched Charlie Wilson's War, which was quite good. I was glad that they addressed the issue of the actions having mixed results, because it would have wrecked the movie if they had pretended it all turned out hunky dorry. Who knew that a movie about American involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war would be SO FUNNY. It was nice. Then, of course, more football (go steelers!!)

Thats all for now folks!