I was forced to keep my activities low-key for the first week or so of the break due to a mysterious foot injury, and I have since then been forced to maintain the low-keyness of this break since by the potent one-two punch of a nasty head cold and fiercely sub-zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures (Bad Luck Multiplier: X2!).

So what have I been doing? Well for one I have been watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica on DVD, although it has made me paranoid that people I know may actually be Cylons. I especially like how the Cylon model #6 is apparently programmed to seduce anyone and anything in sight. I was thinking about it and if a seductress robot tried to seduce me in real life, I would obviously go along with it if I though she was human, and I'm pretty sure I would still go along with it even if I knew she wasn't. Yeah, I would definitely be willing to have sex with a humanoid robot. Also, how come all the female cyclons get sweet human on robot action but not the men? How come the male cylons never get with human women? It sort of reminds me of my predicament where I am unable to get with human women. I've begun to suspect that I might be one of those cylons that is programmed to think it is human. And do the humanoid cylons ever have sex with each other? My current theory is that thinking thoughts like these all day is what has kept me from achieving some sort of professional success in my l‪ife.

For Christmas I got some of those Randall Munroe "Actual Size" stickers. I need to find scale models of large Civil projects to stick them on. You know, like if they put up a scale model of a downtown building project to show the public what it will look like, slap an "Actual Size" sticker on it. "This is exactly what the building will look like. No, EXACTLY. You're looking at it right now. We will also be specifically breeding people smaller to create a race of tiny humans to inhabit our tiny building." Another good place for one of those stickers would be the big picture of the Channel 2 news team at the Anchorage airport. Welcome to Anchorage, Alaska, the city with a local news team that is 50 feet tall.

The other entertainment has been watching HDTV. I was skeptical at first, but now completely appreciate the difference between HD and not HD. It's mainly good for watching sports; the improvement in clarity of picture is HUGE when watching a football game, but I really don't appreciate the improved picture quality when they zoom in for close-ups of people's faces. Watching the Colts and Chargers line up in High Definition is good, but being able to count the pores on Tony Dungy's face? Not as good.

Sports broadcasting has mercifully few shots of people's faces, though, and I have to honestly say that HD has ruined watching the news for me. It makes me think that everybody in news is ugly. On a regular TV I think nothing of it but then on an HD tv it's like, Whoa Brian Williams has seen better days. Another odd thing about the HD is that it makes half the news anchors look like they're about to cry: it makes their eyes appear very moist. The other night I was reasonably sure that Lester Holt was on the verge of breaking down sobbing in the middle of the broadcast, which I thought was odd, but then I noticed later that Jason Moore and Kevin Wells had the same look.

We came up with lots of bad ideas for entertainment when it's 30 below outside. One idea was to play games of Sorry with a $5 buy-in. Another idea was to play Monopoly with real money, or the hedge fund manager variant--play with somebody else's real money. Scrabble: The Drinking Game was suggested but not played. We didn't formalized the rules but I'm pretty sure you have to take a shot when an opponent gets a triple word score. College Football: The Drinking Game and Firefly: The Drinking Game were also suggested but not played.

Lots of time was spent playing and arguing over such quiz games as, "Know your NCAA Conferences," (How the hell am I supposed to know that Florida Atlantic is in the Sun Belt?!) "Know your NCAA mascots," (Cornell is the only university that has a mascot the same as a type of Wrigley's gum, other than the Harvard Doublemint and the Princeton Juicy Fruit, of course) "Know your New York City Boroughs," (Staten Island is one of the five?! You're shittin' me!) "Know your College Football Bowl games," (Who played in the Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl?! There's no way that was a real bowl! It was? And Vanderbilt won? Huh...) and "Know your Styx songs" (I love this one! Turn it up!).