Another note about last night's RPG meet-and-greet: This morning I got up to a handful of emails that said "It was good to see you!" It turns out Meetup.com has added this function where, if you RSVP "yes" for an event, then afterwards, it'll show you the user icons of everyone else who RSVPed "yes," with a button underneath each icon that says "It ( Read more... )

• Holy crap, y'all, are you reading Order Of The Stick these days? What's up with these daily updates after years of erratic updates and illness-or-injury-related downtime? More to the point, holy crap, the current plotline and the end of the latest strip.
  
  
• I've been reading a lot of YA novels lately. Seriously, a lot. Ever since I started the YA ( Read more... )

Oscar parties are weird. At least, ours is. We throw it almost every year at Cass’ parents’ place, a split-level that can accommodate two separate parties: Us and 20 or so of our friends in the couch-and-chair-crammed TV room with the wall projector, and Cass’ parents and their friends and relatives upstairs with a giant flatscreen. It involves a ( Read more... )

The weekend ended for us at 11 a.m. on Monday, after checkout from the cabin, as we sat beside the compound’s koi pond and took a few deep breaths before heading back to the city. It was well above freezing, but the pond was largely iced over, except in the center by the fountains:

Me: Look, I thought the surface was just a sheet of ice, but there ( Read more... )

Cass and I spent the weekend in a cabin in rural Illinois again - our third time going back to this particular place. It was very relaxing, and a much-needed step outside the world, as it always is. The particular place where we rent cabins is so far off the grid that there’s no cell service, and the place doesn’t offer any kind of Internet ( Read more... )

Hey, remember back in September when I went to the earliest available Chicago screening of Resident Evil: Retribution, because it didn't screen for critics beforehand, and we needed a review? And two different guys wound up explaining things about the movie to me?

This morning, I did the same thing with the also-not-screened-for-critics Hansel & ( Read more... )

Office move accomplished! Granted, we had to move everything ourselves. My day started with me going to the old office and picking up a bag of books, my monitor and all the cabling, and my water bottle, and walking to the new office. I made a couple more trips later in the day to load up more boxes and bags of books, with significant help from ( Read more... )

We're moving to a new office on Monday. It's going to be an interesting process: I'm going from a cubicle with two cloth walls covered with notes and art and a calendar to a shared table with no walls, where I'll be looking across a divider at a co-worker all day. I'm going from an L-shaped desk with a lot of space to sort and store the 20 or so ( Read more... )

There are some basic things I learn over and over and over throughout my life, and yet I still never seem to internalize them and live my life accordingly:

1. I feel better when I exercise daily. My appetite drops, my energy goes up, my mind's clearer, I'm more comfortable in my skin. My body fizzes pleasantly after exercise. I feel good about myself ( Read more... )

I've heard for years about Polar Bear Plunges, where crazy people jump in frigid bodies of water in January, but I'd never actually been to one, so when some friends issued an open invite to come watch them take the plunge, I figured what the hell.

I had no idea it would be such a scene. I went down to North Avenue Beach at 11 a.m. on January 1st ( Read more... )