So, what have I been up to these last few weeks (besides, you know, answering questions)?

Well, back on January 17th we had the first staff meeting of the year for Midwest FurFest. Time to start it all over again! It was a good meeting, recapping some of last year’s activities, and including a walk-through of the new hotel space. We’ve got a lot of big plans, but it’s going to take some time to bring everything to fruition. I’ve got some items for the website that I need to take care of, and I need to get some information posted. That’ll come this week, I hope.

On January 23rd we braved some freakishly dense fog to visit aureth and jenwolf‘s lovely place in Hebron. Excellent company, some very tasty beer, and entertaining games followed. The next day I finished up my taxes and arrived at some very happy numbers (yay for first-time homebuyer’s tax credit, boo for not being able to e-file if you claim that credit!).

That week kicked off what may be my most stressful week at work since I started with $employer, and it’s been pretty crazy ever since. This has really put a damper on my time that I would be able to post to this journal, or even to think about posting anything since when I get home from work I just want to de-stress. Unfortunately, this trend will continue at least until the end of February, though I’m hoping that things will ease off a bit after that. It’s all but certain that I’ll be working Saturdays for the rest of the month, though.

At the end of January I squeaked out of work on Friday the 29th and takaza gave me a ride down to O’Hare Airport, where I caught a flight to Columbus to spend the weekend hanging out with fordshepherd. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to give him a weekend to relax and not stress, but we all know the futility of this – it would be like someone wanting to do the same for me 🙂 Anyway, it was a delightful weekend, with dinners with roby_panther and kai_darkwolf, cooking up a storm (and a lot of smoke) with crappy recipes from Jamie Oliver, and generally just hanging out and chatting. I had an excellent time!

This brings me up to this past weekend. On Saturday, Dan’s mom and sister joined us, along with roho and genet for a joint early-birthday celebration for me and Dan’s sister. We had a delicious turkey dinner, and I made a butternut squash risotto that turned out really well. Afterward we watched “Julie & Julie”, which is a really fun movie. Last night we took all those leftovers (along with a freshly-made bread pudding) to Genet and Roho’s place where they hosted a Super Bowl party. We were joined by linnaeus, Aureth, and Jenne. We had a whole lot of fun and I really enjoyed the game. The couple of beers I had didn’t sit well with me, though, and as expected I had reflux issues all night long. I’m dragging a bit right now with the combined lack of sleep and lack of caffeine, since I can’t face the acid of coffee right now. Maybe a soda before I head off to work…

Speaking of which, time to shower. Hope everyone has a great day!