mandolin | And some actual catch-up.

Okay, I am doing catch-up for the week, but I'm cutting it like crazy.

First and most importantly: I have yet to get a hold of

leiza, and I'm starting to get worried. EDIT: For those of you wondering about Walkthroughs From the Geek, check

thegeekstatus - Leiza posted there a few days ago about the status of the site.

I finally went to visit

jennies down in Annapolis last week, and I'm glad I did. We ate dinner at The Fondue Pot on Friday for a trial run since it's not a place you can eat at alone. We just had the cheese fondue for a meal and the chocolate fondue (with Bailey's!) for dessert, and that was more than enough to fill us up. Saturday, we went out wandering along Main Street and looked in all the shops (some of which were extremely tempting) and stopped into the Annapolis Ice Cream Company to try their pumpkin pie ice cream and be amused at the penguins in the shop windows. I really do think the gang needs to organize a weekend trip down there and descend upon Jen's new condo. I don't know when, but we do. There's also the question of the Ren Faire, multiple people moving... you get the idea.

No D&D this week since we agreed that a party with just the barbarian, paladin and a thief wasn't going to be a match for more zombie ogres. So I ended up spending the night at Doug and Deb's anyway, and when I discovered that Deb had the Angel Season 5 box set and had NEVER seen "Smile Time," I insisted we watch that. Thank goodness for the pause button; she needed to use it at the end of Act 3 because she was laughing so hard she could not breathe. Not that I could blame her at all.

Got the estimate from Dynamo Electric and am still waiting on more. See, I've gotten varying opinions from people: one person said it was a rip-off, another said the prices were competitive based on what they paid for the extension on their house. The only thing everyone agreed on was that the price for the extra phone jack was exorbitant, but I only asked for an estimate on that out of curiosity. I've got two other electricians coming to give estimates on Wednesday (at different times), so we'll see.

I now have ABC, CBS and NBC in the back room. Thanks to

kahva for the tip!

The department picnic is Thursday, and with the picnic comes the inevitable division competitions - well, just one pre-picnic competition this year. I have NEVER seen a baby picture contest draw such a crowd before. Since it was between divisions, there were big clumps of people from the same division, comparing guesses and shielding their papers as they glanced over at people who weren't in their division. I brought a friend of mine from another department to show her the pictures when there were people from my division consulting, and we got looks and a comment of "Wait, we've got an intruder." I pointed out that she wasn't even in the department and they were back to comparing notes. I intentionally picked a baby photo that wasn't a dead giveaway, and it fooled a lot of people.

Despite our attempts, though, Architecture won AGAIN.

I've finally figured out some of my issues with the class. See, the class is Foundations of Information Systems - an introductory class, right? Problem is, Dr. G seems to think that we all have about as much of a background and/or interest in business as she does. Um, no. I consider this class a necessary evil in some ways: I have no desire to be a manager, I'd go insane getting an MBA, but I know I need to have a better grasp of IT business models and industry trends to be able to talk to managers. Even with the in-class material, I really doubt I'll be able to make more than an educated guess on the homework - that is, I don't think I'm going to be able to give her an informed opinion of whether or not the Time Warner/AOL merger was a good move by Monday. I think I'm going to have to dust off my old Honors BS skills for this one.

Anyway. I can leave now, so until whenever...