So, the new year means everything is different, right? Right? Ah well, maybe not.

Not too much has happened in the last week, which explains why I haven’t posted much. The one item of note was Takaza‘s company’s holiday party. See, it was supposed to happen in early December, but got postponed due to unforeseen circumstances.

On Saturday, Dan and I showed up at the Raleigh Elks Lodge at noon (-ish) and started to help set up – we were providing the sound and music (with equipment rented by Dan’s employer, of course). Pretty basic stuff – four large speakers, an 8-channel mixing board (way more than we needed), and a microphone. Music was provided by my laptop, and the 3,300+ MP3 on it. They had also rented plenty of other entertainment: a pretty good pinball machine, air hockey, ping pong, and pool, plus a karaoke machine. Thank heavens the karaoke went unused all night, since it was right next to the mixing board. I wound up handling most of the music since Dan was part of the organizing committee and had to help out with running the party. Even though I have a couple hundred Christmas tracks that I’d accumulated for the party, at this late date they were kind of out of place. Instead I set up a playlist of 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and a couple of recent tracks for background music and just let it run for the first three hours of the party (I’d looked around for decent cheap [free] DJ software and in the end couldn’t beat the old reliable – it was nice to be able to set the playlist and pretty much walk away and not have to worry about it). At about 10 PM, the free beer they were providing started kicking in and I started getting requests for dance music, so I pulled out the Haddaway, C + C Music Factory, and the like (think “dance music for children of the 80’s”). This seemed to go over pretty well, though I took some flak for not having any country. Oh well – we’d asked for requests before the party, and no one volunteered anything, so they could just suck it up. I thought we did a passable job, though I was shocked when Dan in to work on Monday and not only got some compliments for the music we played, he had someone mention that they might need someone to do music for an upcoming wedding. Oh my.

On Sunday, we did…nothing. Again. I could learn to like this. Unfortunately, Dan was feeling crappy, bad enough that he took a half-day on Monday and stayed home on Tuesday. According to the doctor, it’s what could a (possible) precursor to strep throat – he’s on antibiotics now, feeling better and back at work today, so with luck the worst is past.

What to do today? I need to get some forms together to cash out my flexible spending plan from last year – I certainly have plenty of receipts for them from my gym memberships. Also, I need to put in some job applications to keep the Employment Security Commission happy. I also need to start doing some deep cleaning around here – I figure that once every couple of months you have to really scrub the place down to keep it looking spiffy for prospective buyers. I think if I concentrate on one room per day I can have it looking good for when we leave for Chicago next weekend, which coincidentally is a weekend that we’ll be having an open house.

Then there’s next week – we fly out Thursday afternoon for Chicago, probably hanging out with small groups of friends on Thursday and Friday. We’d kicked around doing a big gathering of folks, but since we’ll be doing NoCoasterCon on Saturday, the MFF Post-Mortem Dinner Saturday night, the MFF Board Meeting Sunday at Noon, and the MFF 2003 Kickoff meeting right after that, well, I thought we’d probably get all the large-scale social interaction that we wanted out of all that. Best to keep things simple while we can. Let’s see, a few more posts then I’ll actually go be useful…