And speaking of that high school reunion…

Kinda fun, kinda uneventful. No one was fat. (Seriously. No one. We may have had the worst school spirit of any Waterville High class in, well, probably at least seven years, but we're fit!)

But 30 Rock just did an episode about, yes, Liz's high school reunion. It's the funniest episode of the season, so far:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/47439/30-rock-reunion

...as National Review's The Corner pointed out (it's okay--as long as the topic has nothing to do with politics, they're at least semi-acccurate)--30 Rock is better *without* guest stars, though they made excellent use of Oprah. It may just be that their characters are so good, and bounce off one another so well, that another character disrupting those velocities simply doesn't work--or that the audience subconsciously resents the velocity disruption.

Anyway, go watch 30 Rock.

Waterville, Maine/Steam Heat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0szHqIXQ2R8

Home again, home again. But then it's not really my home--Encino is home. Waterville is "back." As in, "I'm going back for a few days." The tree in my ex-front yard is gone, a victim of its own potential to fall on our house during a storm. Actually, both trees in my front yard are gone--the one not next to my (ex-)driveway, but still close to the house was apparently generating mold on the house.

And our entire radiator system is gone...our furnace finally succumbed. So this is the sequence of events:
1) There is no heat in the house.
2) It is discovered the furnace, which usually generates steam heat and passes it throughout the house via radiators, is not working.
3) My dad discovers the (partial) source of the problem--the boiler has no water and the furnace has automatically shut off, as it is supposed to.
4) Boiler is refilled.
5) Boiler quickly loses all its water.
6) A heating engineer is called, and discovers the boiler is cracked. Suggestion: get a replacement boiler.
7) Our house is old (built 1939), and it is discovered that that type of boiler isn't made anymore, so my parents need to get a new furnace of the same type.
8) Our house is old (built 1939), and it is discovered that that type of furnace isn't made anymore, so my parents need to get a new furnace of a different type.
9) Our house is old (built 1939), and it is discovered that any furnace of a different type would necessitate upgrades to our chimney liner and oil tank.
10) Our house is old (built 1939), and there aren't any new chimney liners, so we would have to get a new chimney...

...at which point my parents decided it made more sense to get a new, non-steam-heat type of heating system.

So my parents had to get a new heating system for the house, taking out all the radiators and adding baseboards in selected areas, which was expensive. This was *after* the stock market meltdown, mind you.

So my room is slightly colder than usual, because the radiators in the less-used rooms (mine & my sister's) were not replaced with baseboard, they were replaced with nothing, which is slightly cheaper. (never fear; I have been provided with a space heater and electric blanket.)

Like I said, things change.

But anyway: I went to my tenth anniversary high school reunion (I'll post about it here, but you can get the full report on facebook); I've also been to the Railroad Square and seen three good, if flawed, movies,
and, writing-wise, since "Starring Laura Silver" was approved for web series production, I have finished scripts for 10 episodes of the planned 14; I'm also working on my teaching philosophy in preparation for applying work on teaching jobs, and following the excellent advice of Blake Synder, I am at long last retooling my screenplay The Bacon-Weaving Axis. Goal to finish: January 31st. StrangeOffice is again on hold, halted at page 202 (of 270); I'll tackle the Mad Men spec in Feburary/early March and try to finish this draft of StrangeOffice by mid-April, before I turn 29. I have to say, one of the plusses of having a novel you *know* has issues is that you end up really looking forward to the rewrites. But I can't, I have to finish it first...
I'll keep you posted.