It's been a long September and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last

So I promised to catch up before I fell too far behind. But I'm going to be cagey about the rest of September because it mostly involves my work (which is not uncommon these days). But believe me that the middle two weeks of this month were packed with travel, work, and serious overtime.

I did spend one night in Las Vegas as part of this travel. Everyone else had already been there a million times (crazy Southern Californians!), but I've never even set foot in Nevada. Luckily for me, my colleague and friend Crizzaig promised me a personal tour of the strip. "But first, a drink!" he proclaimed. Well, one drink turned into two, which turned into four, which turned into a promise to drive down it the next morning before we left (and a glass of the most extraordinary champagne to soften the blow - my one drink for the evening). Well, when the next morning came, I tried to collect, but Crizzaig wasn't there. Instead, I got told by Boo-Radley that tickets from Sac to Vegas are, like, five dollars.

The next day was the last day of the trip, and the guys were planning on celebrating the project completion by taking a swim in the pool. "But first, a drink!" Which turned into two drinks, which... well, you know the story. We ended up playing pool, but not actually going in one - which was just fine with me because the only suit I packed was my birthday suit and I certainly wasn't going to wear THAT to the pool!

After that was another of my regular trips to Detroit for SAE. And I have to say that Detroit Airport Smith Terminal is not only the crappiest terminal in the Free World, it also has the worst food. But the J-Man and I made up for it with our obligatory trip to La Shish, home of the creamiest hummus this side of Morocco and the famous gut-busting (so I hear) Flaming Tower (the J-staff insist on calling it La Shi-Shi, which I find rather funny because "shi-shi" means "pee-pee" in Japanese).

After the regular interminable delays in Chicago, I got home, and had to put in some serious face time with the katz to make them stop hating me for being gone so long. Feeding them soft food again helped. Dusty got in a fight, and the writhing furball that was this other cat and him rolled into the street and almost got hit by a car, so I put him under house arrest for a while.