A Trip During My Trip

I took off early Friday for Madison, but I stopped for lunch in Janesville to have lunch with my friends from LSS. We had a darn good time and Donna was happy to let me know she's moving to a new job in the next week. It was especially good to see Greg... and tell him in person not to post pictures of his daughter's waste on his blog anymore.

I met up with Scott in Madison (he drove in from Green Bay for the day) and we checked out all the game stores and stopped at Westfield to pick up some comics. Around 6:30-ish we met with Kevin, Aimee, Stephanie, and Phil for dinner at the Nitty Gritty. Dinner was filled with many odd conversations -- I especially enjoyed overhearing Phil going on about some specific parts of WWII with Scott while he was watching the Packer game on the T.V. over Phil's shoulder. It was great to catch up with Kevin and Aimee, too. It sounds like her quilting thing is doing well and continuing to make progress, plus she's lost a lot of weight and looks better than I've ever seen her. I'm totally jealous, but good for her! After dinner all of the people with spouses had to head home, so Scott and I walked Steph back to her car, then went to see Glenn and Liana for a few minutes before going to The Brothers Grimm, which was enjoyable and good. That's as high of praise as I can give it. Oh, and I liked how the wove all of the different parts of many (all?) different fairy tales into one story. After the movie I crashed at Kim and John's and Scott drove home.

Saturday I met Tim for lunch and we talked about work things, including how things are going, where they're going, where we think things should go and all that sort of thing. It was good to get a chance to sit down and chat with him a while.

I tried to get in touch with Steve, as we'd talked a bit at GenCon, but I didn't remember until I returned her and checked my email again that he had a wedding to go to this weekend -- which undoubtedly fell exactly when I had some free time to get together. Instead, I spent the afternoon buying some gifts for my nephews and visiting with Kerry and Kristin. Then the three of us and Kim, John, and Kitra went for dinner at the Great Dane Pub on Cahill Main. We had a blast. I think Kristin actually hurt herself laughing. I hope Kerry and Kim and their significant others get together again when I'm not around, because they really had a lot of fun together.

After dinner Kim, John, and I went back to their place to watch Shaun of the Dead. They happened to have it lying around and I thought they'd like it -- plus John kind of looks like Shaun and he has that whole English thing going for him. Prime Halloween costume material there.

Sunday I drove home, had a nice little birthday get-together for me, Jean, and Jess and Reid.

The next couple of days I get to play with the nephews some more and try to root through all of the things I have in storage at my mom's old workplace. I'm sure I can whittle that down to significantly fewer items by turning some of them into garbage or donations. Wish me luck.

Note to self: Check out Nine Shift.