Thirteen Months From Today, The Force Awakens

WORD COUNT: 23,141

Yes, I'm sure like most of the Star Wars fan base in some back corner of my mind I'm counting down the "days, months, years" to the debut of the latest installment of the space saga home to Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO, and Artoo Detoo! Perhaps the biggest concern I've heard and seen expressed is that Disney bought Lucasfilm some years ago and is distributing Star Wars under its headship, and there is skittishness about how much of the House of Mouse will infiltrate the galaxy far, far away. Heck, at this rate simply calling a popular entertainment a disney as is done in the mid-22nd future of the novel and movie Cloud Atlas (in the "An Orison of Sonmi-451" sections of the novel) is not far off, for it seems The Walt Disney Company -- that is the official name I believe -- is getting itself or at least positioning itself to be in charge of all entertainment on this planet. OR at least making it impossible for rival media groups to operate; all it will take is an event to make that happen ...

This was the weekend of the silent auctions, for Martha and I went to two of them. Saturday night's was after I got off work at Marketplace and we went on our "date night" (that's a night without the kids for us; they got to stay with my brother- and sister-in-law Allan and Lesa and their kids) to meet some of Martha's confreres at an annual Bowling Bash where in addition to serving ourselves from a taco bar we got to see the president of the Minot Bowling Association -- YES I KNOW I'M GETTING THAT TITLE WRONG -- inducted into his thirty-first consecutive term (he's served as president since he was sixteen!) so easily he's been administering as long as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor. Why these two examples came up in my head I don't know that night -- well, the second one's because I've been reading an American history text -- but we ate good and we bid on and won two travel bags.

Sunday morning we had church and a family fun activity where the kids got to assemble a Thanksgiving house with self-adhesive foam, and after Sunday school hour was done with the kids also listing what they were thankful for on a giant turkey feather, we came home and before Martha's Chamber Chorale practice there was a chili feed put on by First Lutheran church where members of various area churches put together their best. And Martha said the freewill donation was pretty much them paying for ME to go, for the rest of the family is no fan of chili (they went to Burger King) and there was a silent auction there as well and I bid ... and I won. Seven bucks for seven items, so I hope there is no cause for complaint. Last night we got in to our choice of turkeyburgers or tomato hot dish -- got introduced to hot dish when I moved here from Florida and I still can't make myself like it.

If you'll excuse me, I'm at my two-hour cutoff point.

MUST WORK ON NANO, David