I’ve just decided that I should write all of this as though I am writing to someone who doesn’t know me or any of the people I’m talking about. Know your audience, right? (As though anyone I don’t know has stumbled across this site yet.) To that end, if I’m talking about someone for the first time in a month, I’ll give a little more background about them, effective immediately, so some of the writing may sound funny in this entry, but I’m hoping it’ll be a smoother transition in the future. I’m wondering too if I shouldn’t reverse the order of these entries- that is, have newer content at the bottom instead of the top. Maybe I’ll switch to that for next month.

Michael Mercer, my brother-in-law, and I stayed up last night playing Call of Duty, Madden and Perfect Dark. He’s got all those, Project Gotham, NBA 2K6 and Condemned. I think that’s it. I also gave him a new e-mail address, [email protected], so he could verify some Xbox Live stuff. I don’t think he’ll ever check it, so don’t bother sending anything to it.

I woke up “late” at 9:30 or so today. Karen Mercer, my mother-in-law, made pancakes. After eating I played some online Call of Duty, which was fun but there weren’t enough people on it yet to make it as good as it could have been. Michael went to see his girlfriend, Sarah Denning, and when he got back Amanda, Michael and I went out into the yard and took some pictures, then Michael and I went to ostensibly see the grandparents, Earl and Peggy Lemons. We actually went to check out the Xbox 360 on their new HDTV, which looked ridiculously nice. We mostly played Call of Duty.

We ate and the Frazelles, Karen’s sister’s family, got to the Lemons’ at 5:56, by the microwave clock. Anna, Amanda’s aunt, had told her momma it’d be about 4:00, and I predicted 6:00. I was the closest without going over, so give me the chance to win… a new car! (Sorry, that was terrible.) We were about done eating when they got there, but they’d already eaten with Barry’s parents.

We all hung out a bit. Michael got Phil, his dad, and Barry, his uncle, to try playing Call of Duty. In the meantime, Amanda and her cousin Hannah were looking at old photo albums and laughing a lot. Karen, Peggy and Anna were back there with them from time to time, and I’d go look in on the pictures sometimes too.

Amanda and I had bought a tub of cookie dough- chocolate with Reeses’ Pieces, from a girl in our neighborhood doing a fund rasier. We got the tub the other day and made a bunch of cookies for dinner. They were a pretty good hit, but Amanda later said that Hannah was wolfing down on them, and I don’t think she’s normally much of a snacker. They were good though.