Journal Entry: February 11, 2009

Friday night, K-- invited the guys out for a long-discussed pre-baby drinking night. Sort of like last hurrah before fatherhood. I dunno.

Although there were five names on the invitation, it ended up being D-- and K-- and me, and that was enough for a fairly impressive evening of revelry. We started at Henry Hudsons, where we ate and drank and talked programming and politics (and D-- and K-- discovered a startling similarity of ideas, even if it's offset by a difference of priorities), then between eleven and midnight we took the party to Fox and Hound, where the atmosphere was more pleasant even if the drinks were more expensive. By that point we didn't have that much drinking left in us anyway.

We did close the place down, though.

D-- dropped me off at home around 2:45, and I stayed up playing WoW until 3:45 before I finally felt ready to fall asleep.

In the end, I basically traded in half of my Saturday for some extra Friday, because I didn't end up crawling out of bed until 3-ish on Saturday afternoon. Shortly after that T-- disappeared for her crop at the church, and I spent the evening watching TV and reading books with AB. I tried to feed her dinner, but she wasn't interested. She had a good time, though, and went to bed a little before nine.

After that I spent the evening getting caught up on "Flight of the Conchords" and playing WoW, and T-- got home from the crop earlier than usual and we both went to bed at a reasonable hour.

Sunday morning, after church, we had lunch at the regular second Sunday fellowship. We sat with K-- and N--, of course, and we were right next to the Bolings and the McElroys. As we got up to head home, Jerry Boling asked me about my writing (indicating that he would be interested in reading one of my books), and then Rob McElroy's son invited me to join in a writing group with him and a couple other people from the congregation, and I didn't have the nerve to say no. So apparently I'm doing that.

K-- and N-- came by the house after that, to officially admire our handiwork. I also spent some time discussing my HTPC with K--, and talking about the MovieHoard plugin, which he's been working on extensively.

T-- and I spent the afternoon watching "Psych" while AB napped, and then K-- and N-- came back over for dinner. They brought the ingredients, and T-- and I made up some chili. It was delicious.

Monday morning, I woke up early but feeling unwell (more tired than anything else), and ended up calling in sick for the day. I had an RDO scheduled for Friday anyway, so I went ahead and burned it early, to stay home with T-- and AB. We took care of several of T--'s errands, running up to Hobby Lobby in the morning and then going grocery shopping later in the afternoon. We also grabbed some Schlotzky's for lunch (delicious), and then T-- made hamburgers and hotdogs for dinner (even more delicious). D-- joined us for that, and hung around for a pretty quiet evening watching TV and playing WoW.

Then Tuesday I finally came back to work. Mid-afternoon, I got a call from T-- informing me of killer tornadoes in the area, and spent the next couple hours in mortal terror for my family's safety. In the end, we never saw anything damaging at our house, and the worst we know of for friends and family were some power outages at my sister's house and K-- and N--'s, but in both cases they were resolved within a few hours.

Still, it was an exciting few hours. We had frozen pizza for dinner and I worked on our finances, then watched "Flight of the Conchords" with T-- while she got caught up with me. As she said, the whole show is basically just really complicated music videos, for a They Might Be Giants-style novelty band. Each 22-minute episode is essentially an 8-minute setup for a 3-minute song, rinse and repeat.

I find it hilarious. It's the sort of comedy I expected from the British version of "The Office" when everyone was saying the British version was so much better than the American version. (I never liked it much.) This is good quality absurdism, though.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.