And There Was Much Relaxing!

This past weekend was excellent. I think in the last year I've had very few weekends in which there wasn't something going on. The time's been filled with staging the old house, keeping it clean, packing, moving, organizing, and all the little errands in between. But finally, this last weekend it was like things were back to normal. I didn't have anything planned for all day Saturday and Sunday, so Julia and I stayed home and did whatever we wanted. It turned out she wanted to make jewelry and I wanted to write and play games. Perfect. It was so nice and so relaxing.

I should have said this first; we had one thing planned for the weekend, and that was to go to Julia's work party in Seattle. It was held Friday night on a boat moored in Lake Union. We had a nice dinner, some drinks, and played fake gambling games. (Which means they gave us about $30K in chips, but we couldn't trade them in for cash at the end of the night for real money.) We played a bunch of blackjack; I lost, Julia won a bunch. I'm taking her to Vegas.

Monday morning Julia was sick and ended up staying home all week with a cold. I avoided contracting it, which was very good. I don't have any sick time, so it would be bad for me to get sick.

Tuesday morning I didn't feel very well and I thought I was getting sick, so I cancelled out of the game that night. I'm bummed about it, but it allowed me to hit the sack early and that seemed to end the threat of catching cold completely.

Thursday morning we woke up to snow. Julia was feeling well enough to go to work, but the roads were bad. Seattle's just not set up to handle snow, so the roads (even the highways) were clogging up. In an hour and 15 minutes we'd made it about 5 miles (from exit 4 to exit 9, about 1/3 of the way to work) and I was seeing more and more signs that it was only going to get worse, so I convinced Julia that it was best to turn back. We did and it turns out we made the right choice.

That night Julia and I made some cookies and frosted them with a mixture of maraschino cherry juice (Is juice the right word for that?) and powdered sugar, then topped them with some M&Ms and other little treats we had around the house. They turned out very well, actually.

The other thing I accomplished this week is that I've cleared all of the boxes out of the downstairs hallway. That space was acting as our staging area for boxes to go upstairs and I finally took them all up. I still need to organize my office and game room, but at least the boxes aren't in the public spaces anymore, which I'm really happy about.

Today I'm at work and clearing up some things I couldn't take care of yesterday from home due to a bad connection to me work email server. Ugh. What a pain that was. It's good to get some of that taken care of. At lunch I even had time to run out for comics -- and I picked up a board game that normally retails for $25, for only $15. Considering I almost bought it a couple of years ago at GenCon for full price, I consider this a good thing. The game is Desert Bazaar and I'm hoping to play it this weekend.

Okay, enough for now.