Mary just got back from a week-long visit to St. Louis. While she was away, I let my inner geek run loose.

There was the Saturday tech conference, of course. I finished the first season of Chuck, a show about a computer geek who accidentally ends up with government secrets downloaded into his brain. And my dad and I watched all three Lord of the Rings movies in 3 days. Inspired by that, I also sketched out an idea for a fantasy trilogy of my own if I ever decided to write one.

Chuck is a fun show–a guilty pleasure of mine that I was only introduced to a little while ago. It wouldn't work nearly so well if Zachary Levi, who plays Chuck, were not so incredibly likable.

Watching Lord of the Rings (LOTR) the way we did was really fun too. We didn't really pay attention to where the movies ended, and when we called it for the night, we were usually somewhere in the middle of one of the movies. We watched the theatrical release of Fellowship and then the extended editions of the next two movies (I'm not a fan of the extended version of Fellowship). According to IMDB, that means that we watched 652 minutes of LOTR, which is nearly 11 hours.

And for my own idea for a trilogy of fantasy novels … well, I'll keep that in the dark for now. First, I'm likely never to do it. Second, all fantasy premises inherently sound bad. It's like trying to get a sense of baseball by studying the rules (ie, two men throw a ball back and forth and a guy in the middle tries to hit it).

So I'd say that's a sufficiently geeked-out week, no?