Watched House of Flying Daggers today. I really liked it. There were a lot of really wonderful elements to it, it certainly didn't make my greatest movie of all time list, but it was extremely well done. One of my favorite fights, and I can't even say why, is the one at the beginning, in the brothel.

Tonight I begin marinading my first brisket, tomorrow, I begin cooking it right before I leave for work, then hope Chuck will maintain the fire, at a low enough temperature, to cook it just right over the course of the entire day. I hope that a couple of things make this possible:

1) Not having to open the smoke chamber and let the heated smoke out
2) Not needing to burn at a high temperature

If I'm lucky, it wont be difficult to maintain a low smouldering fire and keeping the smoke inside the main chamber at 200 degrees or just below over the course of an eight hour period. If not, other measures can be taken, and it will at least be a start. If it doesn't work, I'll at least know and I'll be able to try again. I am really hoping that my peculiar luck, when it comes to... well... everything, will step in and what comes out of the smoker will be just perfect. It has happened before, and I wonder how unreasonable it will be to expect it to happen again?

I have Pink Floyd's The Wall, and I will probably watch that tonight with the lights of and the volume cranked up after I get back from taking my old grill to my dad's house with my dad. It really got its fond farewell last week with some brilliant fajitas and stuffed jalapenos as well as some roasted potatos. I got it only a little over two years ago, and it has been a really great learning experience for me. I loved every minute of it. I really need some better bolts for connecting the firebox to the new smoker, the ones they use just feel too thin and weak for my liking, there are also one or two other things that just make me feel like my old smoker came from a supperior company. But this one is really good in a lot of respects, and I absolutely can't wait to put it to really good use. I really hope that it serves me for at least as long as my last one did, though my dad and I will be working to fix it up, and maybe, they'll both get some really good use. Maybe I'll open up a restaurant and serve real BBQ. You never know.

Now that Paper Mario is finished, I can put my heart behind playing Conker's Bad Fur Day, which is an okay game. It's really funny, which is always a boost to a game that is merely okay, and I am really looking forward to more purely because of how creative the whole gameworld is, but overall I don't LOVE playing it so much as I enjoy what I remember from moment to moment about its cut scenes.

I feel like I have a short story in me, so don't be surprised if someday soon you find yourself reading a little piece of fiction here for no apparent reason at all, it's just been knawing at me from the inside out. I just want to write without any particular goal in mind, which sounds like a good idea.

Last night I had a really weird dream that this guy was killing people, he would focus on them and the more they got his attention, the more he would try, as a spider trying to bite them, or as something else. He was very shadowy. To be sure, that was not as weird as the ending. Dreams are full of incomplete stories, as full of them as any writer's desk is full of ideas that never get a second chapter, but what made this story in my head weird was that it had a complete arc to it with an ending. The ending itself is weird, but when you consider what it's like inside of a dream, it's not THAT weird, it is in fact more strange that ther was an ending at all. An alien of the stereotypical Grey variety stepped through the door, and acused the killer of being nothing more than a senseless murderer, and then killed him. I honestly don't know exactly what to think about that. On some levels that bothers me for reasons I can't really explain. Certainly it was a kind of relief. What ceeped me out more were some of the images of him as a spider.

Spiders have always made me feel afraid in a way I could never quite explain. I certainly am not arachnaphobic, and when they are very tiny they just don't seem as scary. But, I really don't like the thought of them on me. I really dont like pictures of them up close in national geographic. And believe me, I REALLY don't like how scary they are in general or that I'm afraid of them. I've certainly never lost my cool over a spider though. I just get chills way down in my core.

I need to rewatch "The Gods Must be Crazy" and the sequels. I loved that movie. I consider it the start of my cullinary life.