LOTR dilemma, parties

Today is Chris Conway's birthday! Less than two weeks until Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers premieres! I'm far more excited about this than I was about Harry Potter, as much as I enjoyed the latter. Right now I'm torn about whether to see the midnight showing (midnight of Dec. 17th), or see it on the first official day on Dec. 18th. The main problem: I'm a morning person, not a night person. If I see the midnight showing, I'll probably be walking into the theatre after spending six hours in line, most of which will probably be spent outside in the cold!). My brain usually shuts off around 10 or 11 pm. The second LOTR movie will likely be near three hours long. In my half-frozen, half-asleep brain state, how much of the movie will I really be able to appreciate? On the other hand, how will I be able to stand NOT seeing the first showing? 'Tis the season for Christmas/holiday parties. Jeff and I have been invited to about ten so far, jointly and separately. Some of you may have already guessed this, but I'm not a fan of huge "mix and mingle" holiday parties where I don't know most of the attendees and will probably not meet most of them again. For one thing, I despise smalltalk. But the main reason is that since losing various family members, the Christmas season has always been a bittersweet time for me. My tendency is to want to withdraw from big social gatherings, and stick with close friends and family. But back to the original reason I brought up this topic... A couple of the invitations we've received have come through Evite, an online invitation service. Pretty cool! It assumes that all invitees are on e-mail, of course, but then most of my friends and family are. You can choose invitation styles, track responses, automatically provide maps to your venue, send reminders, etc. My only complaint is that the invitations reach me with broken graphic images, and I have to scroll down to look for an actual text link to take me to any sort of useful info on the site (e.g. what the invitation's for, the date, etc.) since I can read the graphics. I suspect this is more to do with how I've set up my e-mail program than with Evite. Links/News: One year ago, I wrote about childhood foods. Blatherpic: a drawing I made in Fractal Painter. Three years ago, Jeff, Doug and I had an officewarming party. Four years ago, I went to see the Rheostatics with David Goulden. Five years ago, my dad was robbed. Today's Blatherpics: Waiting For Frodo updated. Jeff goes gaming most Friday nights at our friends' place (Vartan and Hrach). The bottom three photos show just a few of the games that they play.