It's been a nice, quiet holiday break for Cougar Ridge, but it's time for the real world to intrude again. Instead of visions of sugarplums, kids in town woke up this morning from dreams of schoolbooks and homework, hopefully preparing them for their first day back at school.

Holiday decorations are coming down, as are after-Christmas sales signs. No one knows what the future will bring, but it's early enough that most people seem to be keeping up their hopes that this year will be a better one for themselves, and for the town.

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The Royale is getting back to nature . . . or something like it, anyway.

M, W, F, Su: Instinct 6:00, 9:50; Hot Pursuit 8:10
T, Th, Sa: Hot Pursuit 6:00, 10:10; Instinct, 7:50
F, Sa: John Carpenter's The Thing midnight
Sa, Su: Madagascar (2005) 1:00, 2:40, 4:15

Annex: M — Su: Mighty Joe Young (1949) 8:00, 10:00; open microphone 2:00 — 5:00 Su.

Angelica Coulter, Lyndon Greene, and Megan Nichols have not posted since Entry 26. They need to post by the end of Entry 28 (next Sunday) to remain in the game.

G³

I mean that, by the way.

Before bringing the game back, I want to know how people want to handle our unplanned hiatus. Ingrid and Angelica, at the very least, were potentially experiencing some pretty serious effects of the Wendy Goldman plot.

We could:

1. Pick it up now in December, and treat everything that's happened in the meantime as past business.

2. Do some mini-weeks to get caught up. For example (assuming I'm ready to go by Sunday), next week we could do Entry 26 (November 30 — December 6, 2009) for Sunday and Monday, Entry 27 on Tuesday and Wednesday, Entry 28 on Thursday and Friday, and Entry 29 on Saturday and Sunday. That, I think, would get us caught up. We could spread it out a little more, too, although we wouldn't get caught up quite so quickly (unless I can get something up by tomorrow night, which is possible).

3. Some other wonderful idea you have.

Let me know what you think. There aren't very many people in the game, so everyone's opinion really is important.

We got the CD we needed this morning. Finally. With no notice from Microsoft that it was on the way, regardless of the thing on the original invoice that said they would e-mail me when it was shipped.

Anyway, depending on how we do with getting everything loaded and updated, we could conceivably have the game going again in the next couple of days.

We've had computer problems at home since Wednesday. It's a long, boring, frustrating story that will hopefully end after I buy Windows 7 tonight and we get that installed on our "new" used computer.

If the next entry doesn't go up tonight, I'll have it up tomorrow.

My apologies,
G³