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With grad school done for the year (one year down, one more to go), I decided to take the afternoon off on Friday. After working in the morning, I headed down to Evanston to have lunch with Abby. We had been talking earlier in the week and had decided on Blind Faith Café, a vegetarian restaurant, for lunch. Those of you who know me might be surprised, but I thought I would give it a try. The short of it: I liked the ratatouille, and the macrobiotic plate didn’t look bad, either. I think I’ll head back down there again and try some more things from the menu, but don’t count on my giving up meat any time soon.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. We invited my family over, mostly because my sisters and I are horrible at planning nice stuff, partly because we’re all poor, too. I cooked up the beef pot roast because that’s just about the only nice thing I can make. It was an exhausting 5 hours, but a delicious meal came out of it. Plus, we have leftovers! That’s something that we almost never have when I make this, and that also means that I have dinner for tonight already.

A few funny things happened yesterday. The first: Mel showed up early. The second: Mel asks me, "Since when did you watch NASCAR?" The third and final one I will share: Mel goes, "So what’s this?" and motions around her mouth, referring to my facial hair. For another ten or fifteen minutes, I am the butt of jokes, including Chris repeatedly pointing out that several of her students like what I’ve done to my face. Yup, that’s right, I am the envy of a few high school students. Joy!

We’ll see if I can keep up the blog posts. I’ve got summer break from grad school in about a month, which theoretically means I will have more free time. I might actually have the free time, but I might not choose to blog with it. We’ll see what happens.

Well, it’s not really the whole weekend that sucked, mostly just Sunday. And it’s not even this weekend that sucked; it was the weekend before my birthday. I ended a recent post promising to expound on the suckery of Schaumburg and almost blowing up my house. Here it goes.

Note: This was supposed to be posted originally on November 16, 2008. Obviously there has been a slight delay. I hope it reads OK, but in case it doesn’t, now you know why. Oh, by the way, Happy New Year!

Just over ten and a half years ago I graduated from high school. Saturday, November 15, was my ten year high school reunion. First, Chris and I found it quite humorous when we signed in and received our name badges, complete with our senior pictures. Chris later recalled to me the episode of Psych where Shawn and Gus go to their reunion, and Gus is ridiculed throughout the evening for making the name badges with their pictures on them. It was so totally cliché, but there was at least one time it did come in handy (not that I recall talking to the person whose badge I needed to read to remember her name).

It was great to see people like Sam, Ilyse, Jenny, Tina, Melissa, Katie, Briony, Lindsey, Shilpa, Ami, Dennis, Grant, Chris (the other one), Al*, and I am sure there are others I am forgetting (or I had a fairly anti-social night limiting myself to talking to a dozen or so people). It was great to get a chance to talk to you all. There were many people I had not seen since graduation or prom, and Facebook stalking can do only so much as compared to meeting face to face.

To Laura, Robyn, Shilpa and Lindsey, you put on a good party. Thanks for taking care of it all. I just wish I could have stayed a little while longer, but it had been a long day, starting with 8 hours of graduate school.

Overall, I can say I enjoyed myself at the reunion. Do I feel like I am old enough to be attending reunions? Not really. Am I looking forward to future reunions? More so than I looked forward to this one.

Just last week, we missed the unofficial Reunion II at Easy Street Pub, just a brisk walk from our house. We had to miss it because of our own annual holiday party. I hear it was good times for all, and I do wish I could have been there. I guess I’ll have to wait for Reunion III to catch up with people again.

* Al was not in our class, but she knew just as many, if not more, people than Grant, Chris and I. That was one of the best parts of the night for me.

I have had mega home repair FAIL so far this weekend, and not just once, but three times! There is an update below, from after Jeff came to help Tim and me.

Tonight Chris and I went to the 2nd Annual Eat, Drink and Be Scary! Halloween fundraiser put on by The Foundation for Community Betterment. This year, the proceeds of the event went to support Normal Moments.

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On Saturday, we were planning on hitting up a few of the local car dealers to get some information about some of the cars I have been looking at over the past couple of weeks. I had planned on visiting Toyota, Honda and Subaru, then finishing the day at CarMax. Since we planned on visiting CarMax, Chris’s dad suggested that we stop there first. It ended up being the only dealer we needed to visit that day.

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