A Good Few Days

The end of last week was great. Thursday and Friday we had a retreat with the rest of the department. We spent Thursday looking at mechanics and playing games -- as well as eating food that was far too rich. It made my head hurt actually. Friday we all sat down, discussed some things and proceeded to design a game in a few hours. I hope we end up doing something with it, but even if we don't, it was an intersting exercise.

Friday night I met Shana and a couple of the guys from Palisades (who were in town for the Emerald City Comic Con) for dinner at Ruby's on University. It was okay, but I'd had really rich food again that day, so I wasn't particularly hungry. Afterwards we went around the corner to the Trabant Chai Lounge to watch Katie perform at a new venue. She was excellent and it was nice to see some new people there -- including her mom and dad. After Katie played her sister's band, the Consequences, performed. They're usually fully electronic, but this time they played mostly acoustic, which sounded pretty damn good. And finally, after that, I went down to Linda's (a bar) with a bunch of people from Katie's show and ended up staying there until about 2 a.m. It was a good time.

Saturday I met up with Seth, Kevin, Kim, Jim, Olivia (Jim's daughter), Jason, and a couple of others from work. We all carpooled into Seattle to check out the Emerald City Comic Con. We managed to get free tickets, so that was cool. The floor was good, bigger than two years ago when I was there, so that's a good thing. I managed to find a copy of a book I lost a while ago. Kind of annoying that I lost it, but I'm happy I found another copy of it.

After the show Seth and I met up with Chris for a late lunch. I was more than a little surprised to see Suzie with him when he showed up. I had and have a lot of thoughts about Suzie's presence here, but mostly it just weirds me out. What was especially weird for me was the fact that she was coming to town, but neither Chris nor Suzie felt like letting me know about her visit. Very strange. I'm trying to be as nice and normal as I can about it, but there's a lot of history there that's hard for me to divorce from the situation and from her. It's very soap opera.

After some really good sushi we decided to go to the local Rock Bottom and visit for a while. On the way over we bumped into Carter and Penny (from work) and they decided to join us too. We all had a good time talking for a couple of hours, then walked over to Border's to do the book thing.

Shana called later and asked if I wanted to do dinner. She had planned to have dinner with the guys from Palisades again, but they never called, so she was starving. I said good night to the others, then drove over to pick her up. On the way, I talked to Shane and Cathy and they decided to join us, so I picked the two of them up, Shana up, then drove to Cedar's -- which was closed, so we went back to Shana's to order pizza and watch volume two of the SNL Will Farrell DVDs. He's funny to me, so we had a good time.

Sunday I went to Jason and Liz's to watch the Superbowl and enjoy some excellent food that the two of them laid out for us. It was a good time. I enjoyed playing with their cat and just hanging out with everyone -- even if I was doing some work for part of the time. Seth and I left fairly quickly afterward because we were going to meet up with Chris and Suzie for dinner at Bucca di Beppo's in downtown Seattle. Dinner was good. Then I came home. Now I have to get to bed because I have to be at the dentist's by 7:30. Ugh.

I feel like this blog has turned into a diary with very little substance. Okay, maybe I fear that this blog has become a diary with very little substance. I'm going to give that some thought and see about making some changes over the next few days. I guess I have a couple of weeks off, so I should have the time to do it.