It appears that I’ve carried over a nasty habit from my pre-MFF planning: the to-do list. Actually, it’s not that nasty a habit, but it is surprising to look at all the stuff I need to do and realizing that it takes the whole day to accomplish and then some. On the bright side, it is always lovely to be able to cross stuff off the list.
So, when last we saw our intrepid heroes, they were making like bandits at the company Holiday Party. I hadn’t realized how much stress I’d been dealing with up until then. I realized I’d been worrying about the music for the party to the point where I was waking up with headaches and grinding my teeth at night. Definitely not good. Things have improved muchly since then, at least temporarily.
So, Sunday was nice and stress-free. Dan slept late, I puttered around FurryMuck, and life was good. I improvised some kind of potato pancake thingy for brunch and then we finally got showered and ready to face the world by, um, 4 PM. We then headed out for some nice retail therapy. First stop, Party City. I was looking for some acetate to do some cool chocolate designs with, as well as powdered food coloring to use for royal icing for sugar cookies. No dice on either. Man, do they suck. I have no idea where in Raleigh to find these things – I need to keep poking around. I’ll probably have to go online to get the stuff I want.
So, from there it was a trip over to the evil Beast Buy to pick up a new printer. After having to hand over the Samsung ML-2151N, a fabulous workhorse of a laser printer, to aureth, we found ourselves in need of a printer, if only to print up Registration confirmation postcards, though I have a lot of other printing as well. Samsung’s ML-1710 fit the bill well, and given that it’s a 17 ppm laser printer for all of $83 after rebates and discounts, it’s a damn good deal. We would have dropped more while we were there except that the Firefly DVD set didn’t come out until today. That will be ours, oh yes. Complete with the unaired episodes, oh hell yeah. If anyone has not seen this, you should.
So. After Beast Buy, it was a walk across the parking lot to Dick’s Sporting Goods (which, surprisingly, is not actually located at dicks.com, though something NSFW is). There, I picked up my own set of darts, courtesy of the gift certificate we won at the Holiday Party. Then it was over to one of my favorite places to shop, Bed, Bath and Beyond. There, we got a new strainer that we very desperately needed, as well as a new timer/temperature probe that we needed after I discovered that this is not the equipment to use for monitoring temperature when making beer. (That reminds me, we need to pick up a candy thermometer, which will be better suited to that task)
After our nice shopping spree, we grabbed a less-than-inspiring meal at Papa Lou’s. This is really disappointing to me, because when they first opened it looked like it would be a decent, locally-owned burger joint. Their food quality has really gone downhill, and I doubt we’ll be going back any time soon. Then it was off to Silvia d’Italia to check in with Silvia and see what was going on, scheduling-wise. Well, she didn’t need me this week, but is in the middle of “cleaning house” with her employees, so things are going to get very interesting with the new year. I expect she’ll be needing me for a lot more hours than unemployment will allow, but I’m sure we can work something out.
Monday was spent catching up with Midwest FurFest correspondence and getting our computer network back into shape, such as moving the Aptiva desktop back to the basement where it can quietly serve as a fileserver and not much else. Finished off the laundry and did the week’s grocery shopping as well. In the evening, we had a surprise visit from justincheetah. Given that he arrived at RDU at 8:15 PM and had to fly out at 6:35 AM this morning, there wasn’t much time for socializing, but we took him over to Silvia d’Italia’s and introduced him to some yummy gelato. We also got the opportunity to discuss some con-related stuff, so that was cool. We dropped him off back at his hotel by 10:30 and we crashed a little before midnight.