Chanukkah Day 2

Tonight was super awesome. We invited over a bunch of people, friends of mine, my Dad's students, and my sister's friends for Chanukkah dinner. We had really good Ravioli and Latkes (Potato Pancakes) and lots of other good food as well.

We then taught the guests how to play the Dreidel game and ate a lot of Chocolate Money as is most definitely required at this time of year. Sweeeeeeet!!

I went Boxing Day shopping today and it was nuts, I totally bought a whole bunch of junk that I didn't need and way too much Chocolate. I found the Hulk DVD for $5 so I figured it was the same price as renting it, and I heard the effects were totally sweet, so for $5 I figured I should just buy it!! Insane.

Probably some more shopping tomorrow, I like the long sleeved stripey shirts so I think I am going to try to find another sweet long sleeved stripey shirt tomorrow, cause they rock a lot.

Talking about sweet effects, I saw War of the Worlds today and maaannnn it was awesome!! That little tiny actress Dakota Fanning just might be the cutest thing ever and you can see she has a marvelous acting career ahead of her. Tom Cruise was pretty good in the movie too and he always does those crazy action movies really well. We all know how I feel about Steven Spielberg and his huge amount of awesomeness, so he made the film even more impressive. The characters were really scary and weird-looking, and I thought the houses being crushed and the cars flying around all the time looked absolutely fantastic. There were some pretty fierce explosions that sounded really good on the Dolby 5.1 system I was watching the movie on and once in a while there were some noises coming from around you so that added to the excitement... it was a really awesome movie, I knew I would like it but as usual I am blown away by the creative abilities of the people who worked on the concept art and 3D development. It was really amazing and I noticed that it appeared that they were using Maya for some of it (from the DVD extra videos, it appeared to be Maya software) so that is always incredibly exciting to see the software that I helped develop at Alias being used for such awesomely impressive creative ventures. Rock on!!!!!!!!

Here are some pictures from dinner tonight.


Table setting for dinner

Alex, and Norm's friend Victoria with her husband Paul

Alex, Mitchell, Victoria and Paul

Mmm... Latkes!!

Learning how to play the Dreidel game

Dreidel game rules

Dreidel in mid-spin

Another dreidel in mid-spin

My Dad's grad student and his winnings

Dessert

Cookies and Tea in a RenderMan Teapot container!