Neil Gaiman may have lost the title of nicest man in the world.

I went to see Sir Ian McKellen at SFU yesterday -- somehow the film society got him to come and do Q&A after they showed Richard III. He spoke briefly before the movie, walked around the room so the people sitting way over to the side and at the back could get a good look at him, then came back to answer questions for at least an hour. Finally he said he'd take three more questions because he had to go pack, ended up answering five more, then, when he was mobbed by people wanting autographs, announced that if people formed a line, he would stay until everything was signed. Such a cool guy. Apparently he's been doing a lot around town (he's here filming X Men II), including participating in a fundraiser for a local theatre, because he decided that that's the kind of thing he'd do if he lived here. Very cool.

And the audience was very well behaved and held off on the Gandalf/Magneto questions until near the end. And when someone did finally ask him to show us his tattoo, he did {g}.

I fixed my time/link thingies! I'm so clever.

No idea how they got messed up in the first place though. I'm sure I didn't change anything. Hmmmm.

I just spent about an hour and a half writing an email. Yeesh.

Spent yesterday at a family birthday celebration with a bunch of relatives and semi-relatives I hadn't seen for a while, which meant having the same conversations over and over and over. "So have you graduated? What are you doing now? Are you still working? Do you like school? How was Europe?"

It was somewhat entertaining when my aunt (it was her sixtieth bday) offered her words of wisdom to the group (do what you want, basically), and there was some mocking of my not-quite-uncle's haircut (if he's going to pay $7.50, they'd darn well better cut off $7.50 worth of hair!), but generally it was a lot of sitting around trying not to fall asleep.

Realized once again how bad I am with kids (I just don't know how to talk to em... oh well). Played a thrilling game of Go Fish.

And ate lots and lots of very yummy food, so that made up for a lot of the boring bits.

Now I'm going to spend the rest of today doing absolutely nothing. I love long weekends.