Yes, I did almost title this blog post “Friday, January 1, 2009.” Better than December 32. :)

Happy new year!

Probably due to the crap amounts and types of food I’ve been putting in me lately (not that the quality has been sketchy, just the balance), I didn’t really feel great today. I spent the day in bed watching TV and drinking water (and occasionally eating something like PB&J with dried apricots). By the end of the day, I was feeling quite a bit better.

Also in there, I filtered out the best of the previous night’s pictures and posted them privately out to Flickr, so some select people could see the set. I’m still waiting to hear back on that, to see if anything worked out particularly well.

Tim had asked me earlier in the week if I’d be their designated driver, with plans to do things like rent a minivan to go pick everyone up and drop everyone off. I’m not really a drinker anyway, and Tim and his crew are a fun group to be around, so I told him I’d be up for it.

The day started with lots of sleeping in and a fairly late coffee, as well as the occasional post on Twitter to let everyone know I was still alive, and trying to nail down the details of the plan. As the day progressed, the plan seemed to fall away, each progressive message knocking another peg out. You see, Tim and his crew have been working hard on some new project, involving many late nights and long hours. So, one by one, people said “Oh, we’re not going to drink that much, we’ll be okay to drive.” By the time all was said and done, no one needed a ride, and I was just driving out there to party.

The night was long, fun, full of conversation and pictures. After the place closed down, most everyone headed to Tim & Jenn’s for the “after-party.” As this was even further from home, and I was starting to get tired as it was, I decided I should just head home.

Once home, I cooked some after-party pancakes and broke out the laptop to look at the night’s haul. I pretty quickly figured out I didn’t have much the mind to process photos, and so I just headed to bed after finishing off my snack and cleaning up.

Another glorious day hanging out with my friend. I spent the morning and afternoon futzing about the house, getting cleaned up, and such.

Toad and I started with a nice game of Scrabble, our second of this visit. I was often a “STAN” away from some former Soviet state, but I put up a good fight. Toad still got me by about 50, evening the match at 1 game each (the first game was last week). From there, it was off to the opposite side of town for pizza. Having heard that this place does Chicago-style pizza right, we had to give it a shot. We ordered a “works” (without olives), waited for it to pop out of the oven, and dug in. It tasted good (I’d easily eat there again if it weren’t 10 miles away), and the sauce was atop the toppings (which all had good flavor), but the crust was not “authentic,” at least to my memories of Chicago pizza. It was deep and tasty, and definitely Chicago-inspired.

After pizza, we headed back to my place, where we turned on the Nebraska football game. Oh, what a routing that was. At halftime, we broke out the Scrabble board for a deciding game. Despite Toad’s best efforts to lock down the board (again), I somehow found room for “PlANTER” and “ATONERS” to pull out game 3 (and keep the board open enough to finish).