The weekend started with Steve (rootbeer1) taking his shell scripting final at City College. I dropped him off about 8:30AM Saturday morning, then went to the Touchless Car Wash on Divisidero, the best wash in the city. The Matrix got pretty cruddy from last weekend’s trip to LA—I stupidly parked it under a shedding tree, and left it there all weekend. But after 15 minutes at Touchless, it looked like new. I picked up Steve at 10:30 or so and we went to Costco and Safeway to replenish our groceries (and check out the new DVDs). Naps in the afternoon, then David and Andrea came over for Steve’s homemade pizza and to watch the extended version of The Two Towers. Great stuff—can’t wait to see The Return of the King this coming weekend.

Sunday we spent the morning watching the first three installments of Angels in America on TiVo while doing Xmas cards. Then off to Davies Hall, where we met Gregg to attend the annual holiday concert performed by the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. They were great, and this year Peter and the Wolf was narrated by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books that we like. He did a wonderful job, giving the story his characteristic gloomy and miserable tone.

Home for a bit, then off to watch the remaining three segments of Angels at armaroundyou’s house, which is quite close to ours. His house seemes quite familiar to us, as Chris shares our interest in mid-century Modern design. Also present were chriskomater, arkanjil, and barak -- an entirely LiveJournal-ly group. We watched the show, then had a lovely ham and chicken dinner, followed by Buche de Noel for dessert. Great bunch of guys—we hope to do that more often, and we’d love to host. Steve and I were especially interested in Big Chris’s spectacular home theater system, which we’d like to emulate at our house at some point.