As a brief summary, I ended up spending all of Thursday in meetings with our team to port our game to a new device, which I will call the Q. The team is from London and they had delicious accents which, of course, made everything they said sound terribly witty.

Friday I had to go into the city for more meetings, but this time the meetings were in the old Sega offices in downtown SF. Sad, really, seeing all the vestiges of a once-successful videogame company. The meeting itself was...interesting. We got a lot of corporate runaround and one very cocky producer trying to impress us during his presentation.

I got lost on the public transit system (Bart/MUNI) thanks to some really bad online directions and was late to the meeting, but that turned out to be OK. I learned a good deal about getting around in SF in the meantime.

Saturday, we finished unpacking (lord, what a task!) and picked Lakshmi and Mayhew up from the SF airport around noon. Phew. We spent the day preparing for my birthday party and had crepes at the Awesome Crepes place with Ira, Lak, and Mayhew. We also played a game of Puerto Rico (a really good board game.)

Saturday night was The Birthday Party. I had invited a small group (10 total) of people to come and celebrate an early birthday (mine is next weekend but most people will be out of town by then).

It was the best birthday party I'd ever had.

Not because of any momentous event or anything. It was just a wonderful group of people having a genuinely good time, and being very sweet about my birthday and wanting to make it a good time.

In attendance were Lakshmi, Mayhew, Joshyho (old drama troupe friend now at Stanford), Larn, Obi, Ray, Laura, Ira, myself, and Hunter. Everyone who was invited came, too! :) :)

We drank copious amounts of alcohol, listened to Strong Bad Sings, played DDR, and played a Pirates of the Carribean movie drinking game. Larn and Obi brought chocolate cake and everyone sang. It was really really nice.

It was also wonderful just to get this group of people in the same room. Ira's leaving in a week to go back to Pittsburgh permanently. Lak and Mayhew are here for 5 days from Georgia. Laura is leaving to visit her parents in Egypt soon, Larn/Obi/Joshy all live in Palo Alto 2 hours south... it was like a convergence of the planets.

Everyone got along swimmingly. Once Pirates came on, I spent the rest of the evening speaking in a British accent and drinking any time someone had a big hat with a feather in.

That is, until I went to lie down for "just 5 minutes". I guess the drink caught up with me -- can't imagine why, since it was only two glasses of wine, two glasses of champagne, one Smirnoff triple black, shot of vodka, shot of Soco, and one chocolate martini.

Mmmm. Chocolate.

So I passed out on my bed, and woke up at about 10AM the next morning. I stumbled out blearily to find Joshy and Ira sleeping on the couches in our living room. Lakshmi and Mayhew were sleeping in the "office". It was like the party never left. ;)

Hunter had, amazingly, cleaned the apartment - all the dishes and glasses were in the dishwasher. Josh had amazingly brought his own comforter - guess SOMEONE figured he'd be partying hard. ;)

Hunt was hung over most of Sunday, so I helped the guests with breakfast and then set Joshy up on the GameCube to play a little Wind Waker, which he had never seen before. I gave Laklak my GBA cart and let her play our game.

We ended up watching Joshy play Zelda for 5 hours. I can't tell you why it was compelling, except that Joshy's reactions were priceless, and he often did voices for the ingame text. Heeheee.

At about 7, we [me, hunt, lak, mayhew, josh] dragged our lazy asses to our favorite Indian restaraunt downtown where we joined Ray, Laura, and Ira in a grand feast. We ordered 8 dishes and shared them amongst ourselves.

Oddly enough, at the end of the night, all of the plates had found their way to my end of the table, where Joshy, Hunter, and Mayhew were sitting. They're eating machines.

Last night, after dinner, Joshy took leave of us, leaving the four of us to our own devices. We played Pokemon Sorry! (yes, I know you're jealous - it was a birthday gift from Mayhew) and watched some anime.

It's been a crazy week, but a lovely time overall. I managed to get tomorrow and Wednesday off, so I will likely take Lak and Mayhew into the city. We have tickets for the 12:05 showing of LOTR ROTK tomorrow night - yes, we will be tired. ;P

Actually, we're angry because SimParentCompany had an early showing of ROTK but they didn't tell SimCompany about it. Bastards. Ah well, we will see it with our dear friends instead. :)

That is all - sorry we're not being more witty over here, but such is life. Have a lovely evening, all.