The last few weeks have been insanely busy, and the next few weeks will also be insanely busy. I'm kind of in the eye of the storm this weekend, the quiet part where you scramble around to get a bunch of things done before the chaos starts up again.

I've tried to not shop very much this week and eat what I can out of the freezer and pantry, especially since it's been so hard to plan ahead amidst all the activity. Tonight's dinner was a pantry type meal, "drunken pasta" from the Serious Eats blog. I used less liquid than it calls for to cook the linguine--I usually cook my pasta in less water than normal people do anyway--using a $3 bottle of perfectly reasonable merlot I found last night at Big Lots while I was picking up $1/pouch tuna for the cats. It turned out well; a nice switch from the usual pasta-with-butter-and-cheese-and-maybe-some-herbs-or-lemon. It'd likely work well with rice, too. In fact, it was somewhat similar to the rice starter/risotto I had at my friends' dinner party a few months ago.

The main reason we're so busy at work is that we're about to launch a search for someone to be the next Duke Nukem, an initiative companies with normal budgets would hire production companies to handle. That's not the case here. We had an extremely successful GDC, so I guess all the sleepless nights and constant level of near nervous breakdown was worth it, but we're only halfway done with this nutty plan. At GDC I got to do a few things I've never done before, including scouting good places near the Moscone Convention Center to drop urinal screens, and serving up Popeyes chicken and biscuits to well over 100 people at our client's party (arranging the chicken was a lot more work than the company website would indicate, but that's a long, boring story for another time; let's just say the crew at the Fillmore Popeyes deserve a medal). This is why I got a Master's degree, folks.

When I have a quiet moment or two, I've been reading Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning (twice!) novel Midnight's Children, which is fantastic. It never would have occurred to me to read it, except that I heard Rushdie on City Arts & Lectures a few months ago while I was puttering around town, and he's absolutely hilarious (he was also going through a bitter divorce from our Padma when she started hosting Top Chef). New blog reading includes yet another look at trying to live frugally by W. Hodding Carter on (of all places) the Gourmet magazine website.

I'm behind on a lot of tv, but have pretty much stopped watching Hell's Kitchen, and am sustaining only slight interest in Survivor (although I am surprised about the last vote--99.9% of the time you can bank on men keeping the hottie around over the smart chick, but this time I was wrong... yes, me). Running in Heels continues to fascinate, but I watched the episode in which they mainly whinged about having to work a chaotic sample sale right after GDC was over, and it made me want to hunt these girls down and hang them up by their overglossed lips.