I've been working on 35% of my grade yesterday and today (and tonight and tomorrow, when it's due). I took a break to play with Jacob for a few minutes, and when I was telling him that I had to go back to work on my report, he said that it was dumb. I told him that I can't wait until I'm all done with school and he said:

"because then we can start having a boat?"

To which I said, "Sounds good to me."

We had our first Thanksgiving dinner tonight. Julia, Jason, Aliona, Glen, and my mom were here to enjoy it. We'll have a second one on Sunday with Chris, Ali, Hunter, Grace and my mom. Julia's crew has been here since Wednesday, and my mom since Monday. It's been a lot of fun seeing everyone, but I've also been trying to make up for lost hours from last week when I went to the super computing conference.

Since it's Thanksgiving: I'm thankful that we've been able to see everyone.

I spent the day making about 20 minutes of video demoing some software for a presentation. NOT FUN. But I'll tell you what is, buying two pies and two things of ice cream for the price of one of the items individually. Speaking of which, I should eat some ice cream and go to bed.

This last weekend I took part in a programming competition. A programming competition is where geeks get together to try and solve some problems as fast a possible, the team that solves the most problems (or if there is a tie on the number of problems solved, the fastest team) wins. This was the big one, run by the ACM and sponsored by IBM.

As an example of one of the problems, our program was to take in seven numbers and calculate the lowest(ignoring any decimals) number that could not be generated by taking the seven numbers and adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing the set of numbers together (so if the numbers were 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, one number you could generate would be 1 + 7 - 2 * 6 / 3 + 4 * 5).

Another problem involved taking in a large tick-tac-toe board and deciding where to play so that our opponent could win (all of the problems were star wars based, and this was c3po playing chewabacca, in which case c3po wants to make sure that chewabacca wins on the next round so that he doesn't pull his arms off).

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, my team mates were a lot smarter than I so we ended up 25th out of 77th (but if we would have been able to make one of our programs run little faster (it was giving the right answer, but exceeding the time limit) we would have been 15th (and going to China for the finals)).

Today we met with our new Bishop, he is pretty relaxed and seems really nice. While we were in his office, he gave Ethan a couple of cars to play with and Jacob a play phone. Jacob was chatting on it and for a while the other person on the phone was Jesus. When we were getting ready to go, the Bishop shook Jacob's hand and asked him who he was talking to on the phone, he said Jesus and the Bishop said, "oh are you going to talk to Jesus tonight when you say your prayers?" To which I said, as if telling Jacob but loud enough for all to hear, "can you say, Bishop, we only pray to Heavenly Father, you're teaching false doctrine."

Ok, so reading over this it doesn't sound very funny, but with the joking around we were doing before this, it was (and maybe still is to Rachel and I) pretty funny.

When Rachel picked me up from school this evening, Jacob said, "can we pick up a pizza." We usually eat pizza a couple of times a week (when Rachel was sick from being pregnant, I took over the cooking, and its kinda stuck). We mostly eat frozen pizzas because they're cheaper, but about once a month we pick one up.

Anyway, Jacob never eats it. If we threaten him with bed or eating his pizza, he'll take a small bite, but he has to think that we're serious. So I asked him why he wanted to pick up a pizza and he just said that he wanted pizza. So I asked him why he wanted to watch a pizza (yes, watch a pizza) so bad and he said that he really wanted pizza. We usually eat pizza for our date night while we watch a movie. So we, got home, threw a pizza in. When we sat down to eat (we always eat in our living room) Jacob asked what movie we were watching and Ethan started saying he wanted to watch Spider man (which shocked us as he always says cars).

I almost gave in as we just got our first netflix today, but as I've got a meeting in 9 hours, reason finally prevailed (is it bad that our kids are going to bed at midnight? and that I can still hear them running around right now [at 12:30]?).

On Friday we went to the church's "harvest fest" in which we ate a lot of chili (there was a men's cook-off), played some games, and trunker-treated. It was a lot of fun, and kind of a saying good-bye for us (last Sunday was the primary program, so we started going to our new ward today).

On Saturday we went tricker-treating around the apartment complex and then to Steve's (my boss) annual Halloween party. There we a few places that really decorated at the complex, one had a flashing light with a mannequin on a large pumpkin. The boys got within 15 feet and stopped. They kept saying, it's too scary, and I kept telling them, I bet they have a lot of candy. Eventually they decided that it wasn't worth it, so we started on to the next door and the people opened the door (they must have been able to hear us), and told the boys that it was safe to come and get some candy, which they timidly did.