That’s what the guy who ran trivia last night would have called it. Yep, “lengthful.” As in “I’m going to pause lengthfully to wait for your answer.” Huh? It was the sort of thing where you couldn’t tell whether he just didn’t know it’s not a word or he thought it was a funny joke. Either way, it was, like the whole night, somewhat inscrutable and cringe-worthy. Trivia night is, at its heart, a series of questions and answers and if you’ve got that, it should be enough, but every time our regular host is gone, it becomes very clear just how important his presence, his demeanor, and his delivery are to the experience. Apparently he’s no longer allowed to warn us when he won’t be there the next week, because then no one shows up. And when last night’s host asked a question about what he called “the Very Distinguished Flying Cross,” I pretty much wished we hadn’t shown up. Despite his wrecked pronunciations and desperate game show host manner, we had a solid night, and surged ahead near the end but ended up coming in second after another team made a pretty remarkable double-down on last round of ten true/false questions. Next time…

The wait I was referring to was for the total media convergence that is, as of today, upon us: TiVo finally hooked up Series 3 HD box owners with the ability to get shows off of TiVo onto a computer and to send shows on the computer to the TiVo this week. After some muddling around with conversion software and firewalls, I finally figured it out this morning, and got the “Simpsons” season premiere that we forgot to TiVo back to the TV from my iMac, where I’d downloaded it. Nice. It looks remarkably good, though we’re still having some sound issues. All this, with no wires… Pretty crazy.

According to the Master Plan, we start packing this weekend, and we’ve got movers scheduled for two weeks from Friday. It’s going to be a busy few weeks between here and Thanksgiving, but we ought to be mostly moved in before we head to Portland for Thanksgiving weekend.