And so the downward spiral of Christmas week continues. We’re down two (out of seven) people in our office, and tomorrow it’ll be three or four, until by Thursday it’ll be just me and the other two Manpower drones left here. This makes things a bit more relaxed, which is pretty cool. If I haven’t said it enough, I really do like this work environment – the people are nice, the atmosphere is comfortable.

Last weekend was pretty mellow, which was enjoyable given that the next few weekends are going to be nuts. On Friday, it was the unclevlad/rennie_frog/wyldekyttin/crim_ferret Christmas gathering (wherein it was learned that Whole Food baked goods are Not To Be Trusted, and much fun was had by all). On Saturday I pretty much lazed around the house a bit, then got motivated around dinnertime to go down to Whole Foods and get some ingredients for cookies. The El trip down was pleasant – uncrowded, and a light snow was falling. Not too cold, either. It was a good winter-in-the-city evening. I stopped for dinner at Wishbone, which OK except they seem to have this impression that in North Carolina they put some kind of beans in with their mashed potatoes. Not bad, just…odd. Went back home and completely lost all motivation to cook, but that’s OK.

Sunday I did finally get around to making cookies. My original intention was to make shortbread with caramel and chocolate. I made the shortbread and the caramel sauce (which turned out too thin for my purposes, but still quite tasty!) and melted some excellent chocolate and put it all together. It was…too much. Definitely gilding the lily. Maybe if the shortbread were less sweet, or the caramel sauce cooked a little longer to give it a slightly bitter edge. Ah well, it was fun experiment, and now we have plenty of caramel sauce for ice cream! I also got motivated to do a bit of winter cooking, so I made up a nice batch of carbonnade (a Belgian beef and onion stew). boixboi, daveqat, and jimcyl joined us for dinner, and rustitobuck came over later. A pleasant evening of conversation, good food, and good wine ensued. Way cool.

Yesterday I gave Linnaeus an early Christmas present, a Netgear WAP/router. Linnaeus took it back to the office and puttered for a bit. He disconnected the old router and removed it from the network, learning in the process that the old router’s power supply cord, well-chewed by his cat, Marble, crackles when he moves the wire. Hoo boy. He hooked up the Netgear WAP and tries to make it connect to the DSL connection. Waits. Waits. Waits. No dice. Tries again. Repeat. No dice. Gahhh. Some kind of weirdness with PPPoE over his Earthlink DSL connection.

Finally, Linnaeus decided to put the network back the way that it was. Except that he couldn’t plug in the old router power cable for fear of starting a fire. So he was off to Radio Shack. In the meantime, I tried to call Netgear, except they wouldn’t talk to me unless I first registered the router’s serial number on their website. “Well, just connect your laptop directly to the DSL modem…” Yeah, right. I’m probably up to date enough on my patches that it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I still have this image of throwing a tasty rabbit in front of ravening lions. Linnaeus came back about 45 minutes later with a generic adapter, except that the connector doesn’t…quite…fit. It provides power, but unless it is at just the right angle, it falls out. Ugh. And the Netgear router still isn’t working. Yes, it’s the gift that keeps on giving…pain. Sorry Linnaeus!

Looking ahead to the rest of the week, I still have a little shopping still to do, and of course a good bit of gift wrapping. I fly out to North Carolina on Thursday night, to fly back on Sunday night. I realized that paying $52 to park in O’Hare’s cheapest lot is a bit more than I want to pay, so I’ll be taking the CTA in, and hopefully will be able to get a ride home on Sunday night (still working on that one). I’m really looking forward to spending Christmas with my husband, and we’re going to be joined by zenwolph as well. Woohoo!

There’s stuff going on next week, some party or something, and a few weeks after that a possible roller coaster event as well as an MFF staff meeting, but that’s all sort of beyond my event horizon right now. I’ll think about that on Monday 🙂