John emailed me a couple of days ago and chided me for not posting more often. I believe the quote was, "I check your site far more often than you update it." It's good to be loved. And, man, do I wish I had the time this week to do more updating. I'd been going strong for a while there and the last week it all came crashing down. I'll explain a bit.

We (the design group at work) had a big project dumped on us pretty much out of the blue and it's taken up a lot of our thoughts and time lately. It's also resulted in a lot more meetings this week compared to normal. This combined with the fact that I had some articles to write for the magazine -- while still trying to get to the gym regularly, meant that I didn't get any freetime to do any posting. Oh, and I'm trying to get ahead of the game a little bit because I'm headed to Las Vegas for four days beginning Saturday. And another thing, I have to finish up everything for a new game in the next month. I just found out the deadlines earlier this week, and, yikes. It's very doable, but it's going to be a lot of work, especially because I still have to work with one of the other designers here to write the program that will create the game stats. The rules themself shouldn't be a problem. It's a simple game.

I mentioned I'm going to Vegas, well, since I was, I volunteered to help out at the convention -- but I explained that I planned on making this mostly a mini-vacation, not a work thing. It was cool with my boss, and he said he'd probably pull me into a meeting or two, and get me a badge for the show, but nothing more. Then one of the other people at work asked if I could teach the retailers how to play one of our games after dinner. In this case, the retailers probably number about 400. Anyway, after preparing some things for this presentation, another one of the managers here came over and said, "Hey, since you're doing this presentation, I think it's ridiculous that you should have to pay your own way, so my department wants to cover it." Um, wow. That's cool. So, now I'm going to the show for free and I just received a check for $200 that I didn't know was coming. That rocks. If I'd known this a day or two earlier I might have offered to help Seth pay for a ticket to the show. It'd be fun to see him again.

I was here until 1:30 last night and for some reason I just woke up at 6:45 (I got to sleep at about 2:30). Weird. Anyway, I'm really tired, but I wanted to finish up some work, update here, and now I'm going to work on my articles some more. Tomorrow -- I sleep in, then run some errands before being taken to the airport by a friend around 2:00. I'll return Wednesday sometime and I hope to update you then.

Wish me luck!