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.

My mom really enjoys The Last Restaurant Standing on BBCA, and I've seen it promo'ed endlessly during The F Word, so last night when there was nothing else on I decided to give it a try. By the end I think my blood pressure had spiked into the red zone. The level of tension and grim desperation on the show is truly unbearable.

And did that couple actually try to serve up Welsh-Chinese food? What is that, exactly?

I went to a dinner party a couple of weeks ago thrown by a friend from library school, and one of the other guests was a psychology professor who wrote a diet book a few years back called The Shangri-La Diet. The basic premise that you can fool your brain into lowering your body's set point by slurping down a couple tablespoons of unflavored oil each day. Rita has been doing it since she had her baby and has lost 60 lbs total--down 20 lbs from before she got pregnant--and hasn't even been working out. She says she's only really hungry about once a day. I got the book and it's pretty interesting. Cathy and I are going to give it a try. He recommends flaxseed oil, which is quite good for you anyway. Seth is a pretty funny guy and currently teaches in Beijing.

I finished Sonny Barger's book earlier this week. Even though he has very different philosophies about life than I do, it's hard not to kinda like the guy.

After letting it languish untouched for months, I've been trying to make as much progress as possible on my Cozy shawl and have almost hit the halfway point. Because I was in a hurry when I bought the yarn and didn't have the nice people wind the skeins into balls at the store, I have to do it myself at the end of each ball. This time around I managed to make an unholy mess (while trying to keep Isis from "helping") which took a good four hours to untangle and rewind. I watched all of The Last Templar, an atrocious miniseries starring Mira Sorvino as the world's most incompetent archaeologist, while I worked on it, which is how I knew it took four hours.

This recent post on one of my favorite blogs made me laugh because we used to get raccoons in the backyard in Danville all the time and it was a constant effort to keep the cats out of their way, especially Koosh. I vividly recall one morning trying to shove Isis and Sparkle out the back door, surprised that they were resisting so much when usually they were frantic to get out. It suddenly dawned on my sleep-addled brain that something odd was taking place on the deck: two gigantic raccoons were going at it. Ours weren't quite as noisy as Laurie's pair apparently was, but a disquieting experience nonetheless.

Random (mostly foodie tv) notes:

Royally pissed about the latest Top Chef; Leah totally should have packed her knives on this one. Carla is turning out to be absolutely hilarious.

Slowly warming up to Ted Allen's new show Chopped, which is like Top Chef meets Iron Chef in a dark room. Who was that contestant in this week's episode who was unclear on the concept and kept whining about the time constraints? Did he wander into the studio by mistake?

If you're on a diet, watch Man vs. Food on Travel Channel. Food has never looked more unappetizing. I DVR'ed the episode on Portland where he visited the Stepping Stone Cafe, Voodoo Donuts (of course) and Salvador Molly's. For those of you who live in Portland or thereabouts (and have cable), the episode repeats on Saturday at 8am. Salvador Molly's supposedly serves Indonesian food so we might have to check that out at some point.

Need to catch up on Lost and Gossip Girl. Not sure about whether I'm on board with Hell's Kitchen just yet.

In home cooking, I think I've moved from the garbanzo phase into a mushroom phase via that spicy cabbage soup. Most of the recipes I've pulled to try involve mushrooms in some major way. Will be trying a tofu mushroom stroganoff this weekend.

Two new things I've discovered Isis is afraid of:
1. the drawer under the oven where I keep the baking sheets
2. the plastic bag the paper comes in when it's raining

This weekend's assignment is to read Sonny Barger's biography to get in the right frame of mind for a client's game about biker gangs in the 60's. It's interesting though because a lot of the action took place very near to here in Oakland and Modesto and points in between. Also a good thing I just finished a potboiler about Tibetan monk horror on the plane back from Minneapolis because their other big triple-A title centers on that subject. We spent all day yesterday in LA mapping out plans for their 2009-10 lineup which grew quite suddenly by about 40 percent over what they'd been planning just a couple weeks ago.

One of our other clients who is currently on hiatus with us for unrelated reasons has been battling a boatload of lunatics over a sound file in a game that shipped over a year ago. We've been getting a lot of phone calls about this, and it has made for a very busy couple of weeks.

New at Big Lots: Trivial Pursuit® branded Pop Tarts.

My computer at home is still a mess, but I can at least check email if I boot up in safe mode. Still unpacking, but the apartment is getting much better; it's possible to walk around without stepping over any boxes now, and I've labeled all the remaining boxes so I don't have to tear everything apart frantically looking for stuff. The problem now is that I've maxed out my storage space, both at home and at the storage unit, so I have to figure out how to arrange everything so it fits. Luckily I'm good at spatial reasoning puzzles.

Hell's Kitchen thankfully turned out the way it should have, with both Rock and Julia as winners (although Julia certainly didn't act much like a winner at the end). Kudos to Bravo for embracing the feud between Rocco and Tony Bourdain instead of pretending it doesn't exist, like most media companies would have.

Current reading: Creation Spirituality by Matthew Fox, The United States of Arugula by David Kamp, and The Coffeehouse Investor by Bill Schultheis.