It's always the Thanksgiving drive that causes the most headaches. The drive back today was fine (I took the 94-29-47 route suggested by the Politician, which seems to be quite a bit faster than my usual 94-29-51-10 route) but the drive to Minnesota on Wednesday took forever.

I got an oil change before I left, but there was a bit of a sulfur smell everytime I stopped or slowed down. I told Celine — a sophomore who needed a ride to her dad's place in Minneapolis — what Jubb had told me that someone had told him: the smell was caused by the brake system, but wasn't harmful.

The battery finally died a few hours into the trip. I'd known that my battery was sketchy, but it hadn't given me any trouble for a week or two so I hadn't bothered to get it replaced. The whole car reeked from the sulfuric acid at that point, and when the mechanic (I fortuitously stalled at a gas station that abutted a service station) opened the hood I noticed that the battery was steaming.

He sold me a gently-used battery for $20 and we were on our otherwise-uneventful way.

Back in Brainerd, I foolishly turned down Graham's invitation to Zorba's and stayed at home with my family. I actually spent most of the night reading After Many A Summer Dies The Swan, a spotty book by Aldous Huxley.

I liked it, but I would have liked it much more — and it would have been a more effective satire, if that's what Huxley was going for — if the character known as Propter hadn't been there. With encouragement from convenient naif named Pete Boone, the Propter-Object expounds on a variety of topics, serving as a obvious conduit for Huxley's own opinions and beliefs. Luckily there're plenty of scenes without Propter, and the other characters are great.

Matt killed another flying squirrel that night. Apparently our house is infested with them; they come in through the attic and find their way into the rest of the building. What I don't understand is where they came from originally. None of us has ever seen one in the yard.

In fact, I'd only seen them in zoos until Matt plugged one he found stuck in a sticky trap Wednesday night. There's an unspoken consensus that the pests would just find their way back in if we let them go outside.

That's five so far. A sixth remains at large.

Thanksgiving dinner was fine. We always have ours at my uncle's farm, after the men (sans Our Bold Hero) have finished their annual pheasant hunt. No birds this year. After dinner I ended playing and winning a huge Polish Penuckle game with my brothers and two of my cousins. We went up to ten and back, which took forever.

Quiet night on Thursday; Graham and Manney had gone back home already. On Friday, Josh and I visited Adam, my only friend who was still in town at that point. We ended up playing Halo 2 until the wee hours of the night.

More reading on Saturday. I discovered a bunch of copy-editor's blogs: A Capital Idea, Blogslot, and Verbal Energy being the best. Language Log and Evolving English, two more lexigraphically-oriented blogs, also proved interesting.

I especially liked the concept of "dwimming." Inspirational.

And I finished After Many A Summer with mixed feelings. Finally, I settled down to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I didn't enjoy quite as much the second time around, but still found unexpectedly moving. See it.

Of course I got back to find that everyone wanted to see just that particular film. The three of us watched Garden State instead while Jonas built a CD rack in the other room. That was just a "decent" movie. Well-composed and often interesting, if perhaps lacking in focus and relevance. Like a book by Delillo. I'd recommend both, once.

After the movie: many horrible conversations. Some crossing of the line and — as you'd expect at Lawrence — a good deal of toeing it. Somehow it's good to be back.