Last Saturday, Jeff and I went to Wendita’s 40th birthday party. That was fun. There were a helluva lot of people there, but I liked her idea of a “chill-out” room for people who aren’t into, well, being around people:P It was nifty; she had her garage decked out with lava lamps, hanging beads, cushions, chairs, and a bunch of glowy-type things. It was basically a bong room, minus the bong. There were ballroom dancing lessons going on above us — yes, she has a ballroom in her house — but I didn’t feel up to it. So I chilled with a handful of atheists for most of the evening.
Sunday, we listened to Mike Newdow (”the Pledge of Allegiance guy”) give a presentation at the Bellevue Library. Although he himself was well-prepared for his talk, the presentation was plagued with technical difficulties from the very beginning. He had a PowerPoint show prepared, but apparently he had assumed that a projector would be available in the room. And since it wasn’t requested, he didn’t get one. So the speech got delayed as they tried to improvise with the materials they did have, which ultimately turned into: borrowing a television from the library, hooking a videorecorder up to the TV, and then taping the laptop’s slideshow through the recorder so we could see it on the TV. Yeah, needless to say, that didn’t work well, and the guy in charge of changing the slides had no idea where the cues were (or really even how to work PowerPoint). I wish Mike would’ve just abandoned the slides altogether, because it killed a lot of time. Anyway, he gave a nice presentation about the history of America and the government (including songs that he had created), but as a result of all the technical problems, he was not able to finish his presentation properly and we only had about 5 minutes left for questions. I thought that was really a shame, ’cause I think it would have been interesting to have a longer discussion. Oh well.
Afterwards, Jeff and I went to Best Buy and bought a CD player and DDR Extreme 2 (at the request of my mother, it's her X-mas day gift to us). The CD player is awesome — now we can actually listen to our CDs somewhere other than the car (Jeff’s CD ROM drive barely works). Extreme 2 is excellent. It’s got a lot of the songs from the Japanese Extreme, so I’m pumped about that. Plus, it’s got a mission mode that seems pretty cool.