So, back from the road and back into the dreary toil of everyday work. Woe betide me.

Last week was a welcome relief. After two weeks of business, pressure, and annoyances, being up in Indianapolis was a nice break, even if it was still doing company business. This week, I have an hour-long presentation to give tomorrow on the fascinating topic of material handling within the department (at least it’s scheduled for an hour – I’m not going to sweat if it clocks in at less than that). After that there’s some paper work I need to finish up, then more all-day batches of electronics adhesive. Only eleven more to go!

The weekend was fun, though not as relaxing as I would have liked. Takaza woke up early on Saturday and we decided to run a bunch of errands. First, it was over to the eyeglasses place to get the temple piece of my glasses fixed, then we popped over to Petsmart to see who was there. It turned out to be Chatham Animal Rescue & Education. They had some adorable dogs there, but none of them really caught our eye. We agreed to stop by again on Sunday and see who else they had. From there, we stopped by a few record stores looking for CD’s by a very nifty band we just discovered, Great Big Sea. No dice, so we headed up to the latest Temple of Retail Godlessness, aka the new mall in the area. Not a bad place, though still about halfway under construction. Definitely more pleasant to shop there than the other new shopping Mecca – much brighter, open, and airy.

We picked up some evil (but oh-so-tasty!) caramel sauce at Williams-Sonoma, and a GBS CD at Barnes and Noble. Finally, we drove way too far to check out a local dairy that is reputed to have very tasty ice cream. Their ice cream was, sadly, rather pedestrian and certainly not worth the drive to reach their store (where reputedly it was the only place it was sold – we saw it in a local health food store on the way home, though). Ah well, at least the drive in the country was nice. Right after we’d gotten home from our Tour of the Triangle, Janelle called and invited us over for meat and cheese and wine. Yummy! Great company, and good food. It was a lovely way to end the day (and the Australian “syrah” was quite tasty!)

Sunday was a bit more of a scramble. We’d invited the gang come over for grillables that night, so we had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in. Dan put in some laundry while I made some lists. Then we drove over to Petsmart once again and met the very cute, very sweet Mattie. She is the most adoptable dog we’ve met so far, but I still have a lot of reservations. I’m not sure I’m ready for the commitment of having a dog, but it’s something that I know means a lot to Dan. It’s always been a matter of when, not if, we would get a dog. Much of it is finding a dog that suits us well , a dog that can spend time by itself, plays well with other dogs, already has some training. It’s a lot to ask, and sometimes I wonder if I’m just subconsciously throwing up roadblocks to avoid the issue entirely. Anyway, we may drive over to Pittsboro next weekend to see Mattie – we’ll see.

After a quick stop by the store and my work to snap some pictures for tomorrow’s presentation, it was back home. We cleaned a bit, Dan made banana bread, and I made up some nice guacamole. The gang started arriving, and I could see we were going to have way too much food, as always. Chips and dips, fresh mozzarella, muenster, havarti, crackers, salami, baba ganouj and grape leaves, snickerdoodles, chocolate chip cookies…you know, the usual. This on top of the 18 burgers that we’d bought (thank you Sam’s!) No one went hungry, that’s for sure. We socialized, I got rained on while cooking the burgers, and a good time was had by all.

I even got some folks to take some of my book collection. I’ve been carrying around the same several-hundred SF/F paperbacks for about the last ten years, and I decided it was time to winnow them down a bit and take out what I’ll never re-read. So I kept the Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Steven Brust, and the Piers Anthony, Jack Chalker, and Harry Harrison went up for adoption. I’ll do a few more rounds of that, then the rest will get toted off to Wake County Library, when they can sell them for part of their annual fund-raiser.

Not much going on this week – we’ll probably get together with folks on Wednesday night – Janelle is threatening to host a Pizza and Bad Pr0n night party, featuring “The Erotic Witch Project”. Well, at least I might like the pizza 🙂 Next weekend, we have precious little planned, and I plan to make sure it stays that way!