Surreal

The weekend was good overall, but surreal and with a big dose of bad news early on. On Saturday morning, Mark and I found out that someone very close to us has just been diagnosed with cancer. This person just turned 27! It just hit a little too close to home. The entire day, I just kept saying, "I can't believe it..." Anyway, this person values privacy very much, so I'm not going to say who it is (since sooo many people read this blog, after all). The good news is that things look relatively good. There's an 85% success rate with this type of cancer, and if it was caught early enough (which it appears to have been) the chances are even better. So...it could certainly be much, much worse. But...wow.

The highlight of the weekend was a holiday party with my department at work. It was held at a house way out in Martinsville--it literally took 45 minutes to drive there, not including a short detour in which we got lost. Once you get there, however, it's a lovely place to live. We dressed up and drank wine and generally had fun. Mark was excited about having a thoroughly intelligent conversation about video games with our host, Megan, and we ended up staying until 3:30 a.m. And Megan even let me borrow FOUR books, one of which was The Name of the Rose, and a movie, A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart. Yessssss.