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...