It’s been a while since I wrote about what’s going on in my life, so it’s time to rectify that.

Not a whole lot went on last week. The weekly LAFF Coffee in the City event on Wednesday night garnered a small crowd of seven, which was just fine by me. Discussing things over coffee, it would appear that I have become one of the planners for the LAFF New Year’s Eve Party (heaven help me). Mind you, I definitely consider it to be Linnaeus‘ and DaveQat‘s show, I’m just helping out where I can and offering annoying suggestions in the background.

On Friday I took off during lunchtime and drove over to the Country Inn and Suites on Grand Ave. in Gurnee (IL) to check it out for suitability for the NYE Party. Looks like we’ll have a 20 x 25 room, plus another 15 x 25 room with tables (normally the Breakfast Room). Couple that with a small pool and hot tub area, and it looks like we have a winner. Keep an eye on the LAFF list for details as they become available, or let me know if you’d like for me to relay the info to you.

Friday night was a nice quiet night at home. Linnaeus was off having dinner with his family, and there wasn’t much in the house for dinner. Initially I started to walk the 15-20 blocks to a little sandwich place in Lincoln Square. After about a block of walking I realized it was really freakin’ cold and that finding something closer might be better. After initially considering Boston Market, I decided to instead push my boundaries a bit and check out some of the other numerous restaurants along Foster Ave. The Mexican place looked kind of scary (advertising pizza, burritos, and hot dogs? Um, maybe not). The Swedish restaurant looked good, but it appeared that they were only serving Julbord (a Swedish Christmas smorgasbord), and it looked on the pricey side. That left the Thai place. Well, I hadn’t had good experiences with Thai, but I decided to give it a shot.

Man, was I wrong about Thai food! I ordered the basil duck, which was sizable chunks of duck pan-friend with green beans and carrots and flavored with garlic and ginger. This was served on a bed of fried rice noodles, then topped with basil leaves that had been quick-fried until crisp. It was absolutely divine! And cheap, too – $8.95 for a sizable serving. For dessert I had the banana rolls, which were taquito-shaped, crispy rolls filled with banana, served hot and drizzled in chocolate sauce. Yum! I’ll definitely be going back there.

On Saturday I made a quick run out to the MFF storage locker in Glen Ellyn to look for some registration materials that I thought had gotten packed away (it turned out that I had it at home in my computer bag the whole time). I can see that we’re going to need to get a few people together to clean out the storage locker and get it back into some semblance of order. Mind you, Aeto, I’m not faulting you! Sunday night at the end of con, your first priority is to get the stuff off the truck and into the locker while you still have the help available. I’m thinking that Registration and Art Show and Con Suite need to get together and sort through everything, since those three departments are responsible for 95% of the stuff in there. Maybe a project for sometime in the first quarter of 2005…

From the storage locker, I headed up to Vermin Hills to meet up with Roho, Genet, Feren, and Ashryn for lunch at BD’s. Good food (way too much good food) and good company. From there we drove up to Antioch, and I had a good conversation with Roho about next year’s Registration system, and how we can tie together Registration and Art Show into one application. We’ll have a lot of work ahead of us to make that work, but I think we’ve got some great ideas to start with.

Saturday night was spent hanging out, watching four straight episodes of Drawn Together (gahhhhh!), and watching Roho, Feren, and Ashryn blow the hell out of each other in Halo 2. Well, mostly Ashryn blowing the hell out of Roho and Feren. I foolishly decided to take the opportunity to finally upgrade my laptop to Windows XP SP2, so it would quit nagging me. Everything went exactly as I expected: Sure enough, after installation, the computer wouldn’t boot at all. Thank you, Microsoft! Fortunately, Feren did some excellent detective work and just happened to have a Win XP Home Edition CD on hand, and was able to replace the damaged files and bring my laptop back to life. Thanks again, Mister Panfah!

On Sunday we had a delicious meal at the Las Vegas Restaurant, which has neither slot machines nor dancing girls. But hey, it’s Antioch, so what would you expect? I headed some not long after and spent the afternoon doing laundry, playing Katamari Damacy, and generally relaxing. It was quite enjoyable. Plus, I finally posted the last Registration report, so I can stop worrying about that. Yay!

Looking ahead for this week, I think we’ll be doing a coffee gathering on Thursday night. On Friday, I’ll be taking the afternoon off from work to go down to Maywood and present myself before the Traffic Court of Cook County, Fourth Circuit. With luck, I’ll be able to get the ticket I received dropped and can forget about the whole thing (except, you know, the increase in insurance rates. Grrr.) As soon as I get that wrapped up (which will be sometime between 2 PM and 5 PM), I’ll join up with Linnaeus and we’ll be driving down to glorious Chambana to spend the weekend at Mirko’s. It should be a lot of fun; I’m looking forward to it.