I had it for breakfast yesterday. It's called "The 18-Wheeler" and you get it at La Peep, the breakfast place we walk over to once or twice a year. We don't go any more often than that because I'm pretty sure that every meal there increases my cholesterol count by out 20 points.

I don't have high cholesterol, understand, but I also don't want it, and I'd imagine that eating two slices of French toast, two eggs, two slices of bacon, and a heaping helping of fried potatoes at one sitting could be considered a step in the wrong direction.

I barely ate anything at all for the rest of the day.

Alvin is off in the conference room "beating on"' the Chipmunk via telephone. Once he finishes that portion of today's business, he'll bring me in and make it a conference call. Nothing I like better, approaching the holidays, than being invited into the room just after everyone has had a fight.

Blah, blah, blah. I am completely ready for the holiday, including being ready to not work for a couple of days. I've been here for 3-1/2 hours and the only work-related things I've accomplished so far are to check my e-mail and voice-mail.

My head is still full of Spike, in spite of the repeats being in a Spike-free zone at the moment and yet I'm still finding the show itself woefully predictable, I'm afraid. The plots of the episodes I've been seeing recently have been yawningly unsurprising, anyhow.

I'm willing to believe that things improve, but I am, after all, watching Season 3, so it's not like I'm judging the show by its freshman year or anything. I have to assume that, by now, the show has hit its stride. Still, I find it easy to believe I'll prefer the upcoming episodes, set after the characters graduated from high school.

I've also heard a lot about "snappy dialogue" in this show over the years, but I've heard darned little of it in the episodes I've seen.

After a while, a character responding with tangential non-sequitors becomes so predictable that it's no longer amusing, and having half the characters constantly making sarcastic rejoinders isn't, in my book, enough to qualify as "witty dialogue." The writing seems to be good, so maybe it's that the actors aren't delivering the lines in a way that raises them from "lines" to "repartee" or something.

Dialogue requires rhythm and that's what the show seems to lack. There's this sense that many of the actors are delivering their "line" and then stopping politely to let the next person deliver the next "line." Drives me nuts to hear it.

There are, of course, exceptions.

(Long, uneducated rambling about the acting of the various actors removed. Suffice to say that I think Giles and Spike are sexy, that I'm impressed with how the actor handled the part of the Mayor, and that I love the character of Willow but that I think the actress needs to stop trying so hard.)

I have no idea why I'm writing all of this. It's not like I have any intention of becoming involved with any of the online fandom/reading/writing contingent.

I think I'm just bored and avoiding honest work since I am fully aware that I haven't seen enough episodes to make an overall judgment about the show yet.

It's been an hour, maybe more, and Alvin is still locked in the conference room. I wonder what in the heck is going on?