Well it’s Turkey Day. I’m off to Home Team Grill in a couple hours to help serve Thanksgiving meals to the elderly and less fortunate with church, then to the family dinner at my cousins’ house. I just wanted to take a few moments to say what I’m thankful for.

First and foremost, I give the utmost thanks to God for all he’s done in my life in the past year. He has blessed me with so much, taken care of all my needs, and helped me change myself for the better in many ways. He has also provided a way for me to use my talents and skills to help others reach Him through my church with the Impact Arts multimedia ministry. Through the church, I’ve also made some great friends such as Anthony and Tori.

I’m also really thankful for my family. People may come and go, but they’re the one constant that’s always there no matter what. I love them very much.

I’m very thankful for my best friend, Jen. She’s always there to talk to about anything, always keeps me entertained with her crazy stories, and is just an overall wonderful person to be around. Sometimes when nothing’s gone right all day I’ll hang out with her, if only for a few minutes, and my whole day is turned around. She has a way of doing that, and I love her a lot.

There are also so many other things I’m thankful for, but these are the top ones. I hope you’ll take some time today to really reflect and thank God for his blessings in your life. Enjoy your time with family and friends, and eat lots of good food!

P.S. - I’m thankful for all my faithful blog readers, too! 

I know it’s Wednesday and I usually do the Song Of The Week on Mondays. I’ve been really busy painting my room and doing other stuff I’ve needed to for a while. Sorry for not keeping up with posting. I’ll be back on track in a couple days.

Anyway, I like pretty much all kinds of music, especially some of the older stuff. Here’s a really good 80s track I heard on XM this week. It’s called “Midnight Blue,” and it’s by Lou Gramm, lead singer from the band Foreigner. Good stuff. Check it out.

So 2008 is still nearly a month and a half away, but I have a lot of short and long term goals that I’m going to start taking the initiative to achieve even before next year. Here are my big two right now: 

Find a new job: I wasn’t able to get renewed at the Attorney General’s Office because of budget constraints and my last day is November 30th.

Finish cleaning out my room and start painting it so I can get new furniture: I have junk in boxes still from as far back as middle school. It’s ridiculous. I’ve pretty much cleaned everything out, now I need to paint. After that, I’m getting all new furniture from IKEA. I’m still sleeping in the same hard-as-a-rock twin size bed I’ve had since I was six or seven. And if I move out sometime soon, I’ll have new stuff to take with me.

I’ve got a lot of other changes and improvements I want to make in my life, but doing these two will really get the ball rolling on the rest of the stuff. 

Thanksgiving is a week away from today, and while next week I’ll share with everyone some of the things I’m thankful for, today I want to share with you what I’m looking forward to- the food! I’ll leave it to Little Richard to sum it up in this classic Geico commercial:

So I stopped at Wawa on Staples Mill Road Sunday night to get some gas and one of their really good chocolate chip muffins on the way home from VCU. As I stood there pumping gas, I noticed this awful pulsating, high-frequency tone that sounded like it was coming from the gas pumps. I had been listening to my iPod in the library while I studied for a good few hours, so I thought maybe my ears were ringing from prolonged music-listening. So I went inside to get my muffin, and when I came back, I heard it again. I looked around, and sure enough, there were two small white transmitters (pictured) emitting the tone, mounted to the underside of the metal roof over the gas pumps.

What are the purpose of these, you ask? Well a couple of years ago, the owner of a small retail store in the United Kingdom got tired of teenagers loitering around his shop and causing trouble. He realized that people’s ability to hear extremely high-pitched sounds decreases with age, and patented a device that emits an irritating sound that most people over the age of 25 or 30 can’t hear.

Apparently this technology has come “across the pond” as they say, and has landed at the neighborhood Wawa. I’ll be the first to tell you it works. It was so irritating that I don’t think I’ll be back to buy gas there unless I’m trailing in on fumes with no other gas stations in sight. That particular Wawa doesn’t really seem to be a hangout spot like some others I’ve seen, so I don’t really understand the need. The only thing I think they’re accomplishing is losing the business of legitimate, paying customers such as myself.

The relentless cat and mouse game between adults and youth goes on, though. Teenagers have hijacked the tone, turning the sound into a ringtone that can be used to be alerted to phone calls and text messages while in school. Teachers, usually over the age of 23 or 30, can’t hear the tone. Pure genius. I knew of several people who frequently used this tone in high school last year. Ready to take the “are you old” test? here’s the tone. See if you can hear it! Click here.

I just went to view my cell phone bill online at AT&T. Turns out I used 1,360 text messages last month, incoming and outgoing. Holy cow! I really didn’t realize just how much I text. Fortunately, I saw this coming to some extent and upped my monthly allotment from 250 to unlimited. It’s a good thing, because at $0.15 per message, I’d be looking at an extra $200 this month just for texting.

Well, it’s a little after midnight, but it’s officially Monday. Time for the Song Of The Week! Bon Jovi has been around for decades, and still manages to produce some great songs. His latest single, “Lost Highway,” is one of my favorites right now. 

I went to see P2 tonight with Tori. I haven’t seen a good thriller lately. I knew it would be suspenseful, but this movie had me clinching my fists and on the edge of my seat the entire time.

The whole thing starts out in a New York City office building. The main character, Angela, is working late on Christmas Eve and ventures down to her car alone, in the parking deck underground on level P2. When her car won’t start, she seeks the assistance of the security guard, Tom, who seems friendly enough at first. After pretending to try to jumpstart her car, he locks the door to the building exit without her knowledge as she waits for a cab. When she goes back down to the parking lot, he drugs her and puts together a Christmas meal for the two of them in the security office while she’s unconscious.

The movie gets gruesome when Tom takes a man who hit on Angela after drinking at the office Christmas party and duct tapes him to an office chair, then proceeds to ram him into the concrete wall with his car, in an effort to “help” her, as he says throughout the movie. There are a lot of other gruesome scenes after that, but it was a really well-made movie. I won’t completely give away the entire plot. If you’re looking for some good suspense, check this movie out.

Overall rating:

This is amazing. Twenty years ago, a 1GB hard drive was almost as big as today’s desktop computer towers are, in the picture on the left. Now, 1GB is a standard storage capacity in the tiny SD card pictured to the right of it.

I went to see The Police in concert last night at John Paul Jones Arena at UVA in Charlottesville last night with Melissa. I have no other way to describe it than to say it should have been a pretty bad night because of how lost we got and something else that happened on the road (happened again- if you know me well you’ll enough know exactly what it is). Chances are I’ll tell you if I talk to you on a regular basis, but I’m just not gonna post it for the world to see. But it actually turned out to be an awesome night.

Anyway, the concert was amazing. Twenty years after releasing their last album, The Police sounded even better than ever. Sting is a great performer, but the whole band had a great stage presence. We were pretty high up, but I think we still had decent seats. That’s about the only non-blurry picture (to the left) I managed to snap on my iPhone.

They say half the fun of doing anything is how you get there, and I can attest to that. I haven’t had that much fun since probably this summer, and that was just in the car. We were singing our favorite mid-90s alternative rock songs at the top of our lungs all the way back. It was great. Maybe we were just hyped up on our coffee/hot chocolate, but I had the most awesome time, and all with someone who I’ve only so much as casually talked to in class before last night. We’ve got a lot in common. I think I’ve found a great friend.