That was a lovely weekend that just passed. What did we do? Well, not a whole lot. Hooray!

On Friday, takaza was going to take a half-day because they were finally coming to fix the window in his office. The glass company said they’d be there between 7:30 AM and noon; they actually showed up at 7:35 AM. Wow. They fixed the window in a matter of minutes and were gone by 8:00 AM. Dan elected to call off the rest of the day and spent the day trying to bring some sense to the jumble of boxes down there. Because the room is below grade and has only one vent that is probably not properly balanced, the room stays close to 55 degrees when the rest of the house is at 68. That’s fine for Dan, but I’d freeze; come summertime it should be nice, though.

Dan informed me that we were going to celebrate the window installation by going out to dinner, meaning that neither of us were particularly motivated to cook. We opted to try one of the many Mexican places down the road from us, Rancho Nuevo in Round Lake. Downtown Round Lake (all one block of it) is rather amusing – it’s a toss-up whether there are more signs in English or Spanish. Not surprisingly, between that and Round Lake Park (the short commercial section on IL 134 that’s right around the corner from us) there’s approximately a half-dozen Mexican restaurants. Rancho Nuevo had a reasonably authentic air, though the decor tries a bit too hard, and the “Learning Spanish Is Fun!” placemats are just over the top. We split an order of asada quesadillas and each had the carne asada, mine with a cheese enchilada. The food was delicious, but unfortunately, the service was terrible. There was a decided language barrier with our waitress (though when does “beer” sound like “horchata”?) and the long periods of unrefilled drinks (a bit of a problem when eating moderately spicy food) might keep us from going back. Maybe if we don’t sit sequestered in a corner, outside of the view of the servers…

On Saturday we ran all kinds of errands. We’ve been trying to stop, as I put it, spending like drunken sailors as we continue to set up the new house. Fortunately, we have a little extra unaccounted-for income that we can put towards expenses like that, but at some point we need to stop. It wasn’t too bad for the most part, but it wasn’t until we stopped by the framing place to have three pieces properly matted and framed (to the tune of $300) that I started humming “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor” under my breath. Still, it’ll be worth it – one of the pieces is Kenket’s original artwork for the 2005 Midwest FurFest con book cover. That is going to look spectacular in our living room, I think.

We stopped by Lovin’ Oven Cakery, the place that supplied the truly deadly chocolate cake for my surprise party. They had king cake! Woo! It was wonderfully moist and tasty, too, but just too darn big for us to get one. We picked up a couple of tasty pastries to sustain us, and I am quite impressed with the range and quality of their products.

On Sunday Dan continued to putter in his office while I did some general housecleaning and cooking. I made a couple of loaves of challah that turned out quite nicely, as well as a wonderful garlic-potato soup from the new issue of Cook’s Illustrated. roho, genet, and linnaeus joined us for the season premiere of The Amazing Race: All Stars. The show was good – better than I expected, even – and the outcome was pretty good too. Numerous comments were made that Joyce looks a lot like chebutykin. By the way, this season they have a series of web episodes called “Elimination Station” the will follow the eliminated racers as they get to “Elimination Villa”, a mansion in Acuapulco where they will be sequestered while the rest of the race goes on. That looks like it could get entertaining.

Yesterday was spent relaxing, and I got to indulge in my latest video game obsession, Okami. It’s a very enjoyable, very pretty game. Not too challenging, but hey – that’s not what I look for in a game. This is something I do to relax, and I like the visuals and the music.

So, this afternoon I have to tend to a bit of house repair (the soap dispenser fell off the wall of the shower) and a few other things around the house. I expect tonight will be another early bedtime, since neither Dan nor I have slept too well for the last few nights.