Chicago or Bust

I'm back... Again, just offline for a while due to slight internet problems... i.e., no internet. I'm once again at Elmo's drinking coffee, downloading work stuff to work on over my break, and doing random internet stuff.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Chicago for ten days. Return the day after Christmas. Ironically, I'll probably be online more while I'm in Chicago.

Today I had to ship eight FERC mugs to Chicago. They're gifts for all the aunts and uncles. Yes yes, cheap crap gifts, I know, but you should see what they give me. And they're all coffee addicts anyway. They'll actually like them, I swear. Anyway, you should have seen the way I packaged the mugs. I cut down a xerox paper box and divided it into eight sections with strips I cut from an old foam poster of the NERC regions I found in the file room that was badly outdated. Then I taped it all up with gummed tape (my favorite stuff in the world, btw), weighed it in our mailing room, printed out a label and postage, and walked it to the post office. In case you want to track it's progress... (0503 8555 7490 0313 1339).

Well, I gotta get out of here. Still have to do laundry and sleep before my 6AM flight.

I'm back...

Where have I been for a week? Well, here's the story. My internet magically disappeared. It does that from time to time. And I have a "no blogging" policy at work. It's a strict policy I've imposed. But here I am at St. Elmo's cafe enjoying a cafe americano and some free wifi on this beautiful Sunday afternoon.

I'm still really desiring to attend a Christmas market this year. I mean here in DC... I've already made plans to lead a small team of mulled wine-drinkers to the Chicago Christkindlmarkt, as I believe I have already mentioned in a previous blog post. But I've found nothing in DC so far. Pia and I went to this Alexandria Scottish Christmas Market yesterday for a couple hours. In the paper they said that they would have hot drinks. Well, the only hot drink that I saw was a thermos of coffee. And the market was rather sucky. You can skip the Alexandria Christmas Market, in my opinion.

Last Friday I ran my first semi-real experimental auction. I say semi-real because we didn't actually pay anyone, and the participants were just professors and grad students. But it was cool. I spent kinda a lot of time making my data reduction software, and it worked the best of any of the auctions I've seen run by students so far. But I got a lot of good feedback on things that can be improved. All in all it was pretty fun. Thinking I might like experimental economics. It's basically playing games for a living. I think I could do that.

Going home in two weeks. Tentative plans, aside from normal Christmas/family stuff: aforementioned Christkindlmarkt trip, meet Christine and Matt's son, take little sister wall climbing, drink, run on lakefront w Evanston Running Club, dinner w Rich and Andrea, swim at NWU, see some live music, watch some Illini basketball, eat at some of my Chi-town restaurants, etc. Am I missing anything?

OK, I think that's enough for now. Oh, some advice before I go: Beware of Kai's new dog. I've got the bite marks to back up that statement...