The cats went to see the vet last week for their annual shots and exam, and also because Isis has been barfing a lot, usually around 5am. The vet said she seems to be fine, it may just be a hairball that got down into her stomach. She's only barfed once since then, so hopefully it's not chronic kidney failure.

I found out today that someone I worked with for several years died yesterday at age 33 of a rare form of cancer, a tumor in her pituitary gland. I first met Rannie at E3 when our PR agency had just hired her, a completely green kid who had been putting together comic book cons. After helping me stuff many, many folders with press releases and fact sheets (the days before electronic press kits and ftp sites), we had a nice dinner on 3DO's tab. She was such a sweet person, always ready with a big hug and a smile, even if we hadn't seen each other in ages, and she always said she never forgot that dinner at E3. No one deserves to die of cancer, but this one seems especially unfair.

This evening I made a vegetable soup completely from scratch (no, I didn't grow the vegetables). Using guidelines from Alice Waters, I threw together some chopped onions, carrots, turnip, leek and some of the veggie broth I made last weekend and it magically turned into soup! A good soup, even! It's finally cooling off again after another few warmish days, so that coupled with a not-great day, made a hot, comforting meal pretty essential tonight.

Things are busy at work and pretty tense. I was in Las Vegas last week for a tradeshow and nobody was very upbeat. The Mandalay Bay casino was deserted; only Excalibur which had rooms going for as low as $30 a night had much activity. I lost $7 at video poker, freaked out and quit. I hate gambling.

Tonight I'm planning to roast another game hen. My first attempt was about 2 weeks ago and it didn't get cooked thoroughly even though the thermometer read 170°. Since it was supposed to be a cold meal, I'd wrapped the hen tightly in foil and popped her into the fridge right after taking her out of the oven so I didn't realize it wasn't cooked until I unwrapped the foil the next day and it was full of pink juice.

The quinoa salad I'd made to go with the hen was awesome, however. Very easy and filling, and you could probably use couscous just as easily as quinoa.

Trying to get back on track after E3 but there's just too much to do. Work is insanely busy and about as ridiculously drama-ridden as All My Children. Koosh has adjusted to her collar and leash--for the most part--and loves going out on the patio for short periods of time. She usually just lies in whichever chair has the most sun while I putter around spraying aphids and sweeping up leaves. Isis doesn't always come out with us, but when she does she likes to look out through the broken fence board. The only problem with Koosh so far is that if she gets scared, she tries to dart back in the house faster than I can free her leash from the chair leg which causes some distress, but at least it all ends in Greenies once we're back in the house and settled.

Tragedy in Dublin! For the past few weeks we've had a pair of doves bobbing around the open-air office building walkways. At one point they decided to build a nest on a 3" wide wood beam supporting the stairway roof (though I strongly advised against it on several occasions). You could tell it wasn't going well because twigs littered the stairway and nothing stayed put on the beam, and as of Friday they seemed to have wisely abandoned the idea and moved on. But this morning we got to work and found a huge mess of scattered twigs all over the stairs, along with a tiny broken egg. Doves are the stupidest birds on the face of the earth. It's a wonder they've managed to keep the species going this long.

In other nesting news: despite a lot of frantic swallow activity and the barest beginnings of a mud nest on a ceiling beam, a nest has yet to materialize on my patio this year. I have no idea what happened to the swallows who started the work, but we also have had a lot of hawks hanging around, so maybe they feel it's safer elsewhere.

The first two roses of the year bloomed late last week and unfortunately hit their peak this weekend when I was down in LA. I've already had a helluva time keeping the aphids at bay. Yes, mom, I will prune those dead leaves as soon as I can.

Observation of the week: Kerrygold Blarney Stone cheese + Saltine crackers = Cheetos (Puff style).

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.

Another glam business trip to Los Angeles on Tuesday: barely made the 9.00 a.m. Southwest flight after oversleeping and needing to stop for gas (I was sick Sunday and Monday with a fever, headache, and cough). We were about 20 minutes into the hour-long flight when somebody about ten rows back let out a loud yell. Everybody turned to look, but we couldn't see much except the flight attendant running over. Nothing or a few minutes, then another shout followed by, "I invented crack!" Oh, really? There's a celebrity on this flight! Another few minutes before he declared "I can do anything!" followed by a somewhat mournful, "I need to be a dee jaaaaayyyyy..." Oddly enough, the flight attendants didn't seem especially concerned. A little tense, but they went about the service as normal and when the pilot got on the PA he did his usual spiel about the weather in LA, not congregating around the forward bathroom and keeping your seatbelt fastened in case of unexpected turbulence blah blah blah. When we got to LA, everything was totally routine as if nothing odd had transpired at all. We landed, they told us to stay seated 'til we got to the gate, and we all got off. No cops, nothing. I guess because the dude stayed in his seat they really couldn't do anything else. Bizarre, though. I wonder if he did invent crack.

On the flight back to Oakland that evening I was reminded that Southwest gave away beers for free on Tuesday in honor of St. Patrick's Day when the woman next to me got a free Heineken. Nevertheless I opted for a white wine with one of my frequent flier coupons. Never drink beer on a plane; the bubbles and altitude make for a bad abdominal situation and unhappy seatmates.

Last night I finally made a recipe from Rachael Ray that I've had on the short list for a while now, Mac-n-Smoked Gouda with Cauliflower. Though very tasty, it ended up being kind of a pain in the neck to make and I ended up with easily 12 servings of mac & cheese. The part where you thicken the sauce of milk, broth, roux and onions said nothing about how often to stir, which made me nervous so I stirred it pretty constantly for about ten minutes before adding the cheese. It turned out fine, but the entire recipe took an hour, not 30 minutes or less, and I'll be eating it for some time to come.

The Contra Costa Times ran an interview with Jamie today.

Chopped has done it again! They let one of the chefs get away with not using the cheese packet from the boxed mac & cheese, even after he was snotty about it. Isn't the fact they gave them instant mac & cheese the whole point? Guess not.

Made a fairly easy curried cauliflower soup with a halved recipe from Veggie Times to use up the half head of cauliflower I had leftover from the kitchuri. It was kinda "meh" the first night but quite good the next.

Breakfast this week has been hot bulgur, which I make ahead of time by pouring boiling water (1 1/2 C) into a bowl of coarse bulgur (1 C) and raisins or dried cranberries (1/4 C) and then letting it sit in the fridge overnight. Makes enough for 3 or 4 days. Easily reheated on the stove with a splash of milk, brown sugar and some chopped walnuts--or whatever's on hand. This is great when I get sick of oatmeal or protein bars. Right now I have a batch of mini mushroom & sausage quiches from Eating Well in the oven, so we'll see how those turn out.

Work is insanely busy as we get ready for the Game Developer's Conference. Cathy is a good friend, but as one of my clients I'd cheerfully slit her throat about now. Everyone in the office is on edge and we pretty much hate all our clients and each other. Can't wait 'til this is over.

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.

The horrorfest that was Stylista is finally over, with Megan proving to be one of the worst losers in (un)reality tv history. I can't say I'm glad Johanna won exactly; I'm just glad that DyShaun did not win. I think it was entirely due to the stupid hat that made him look like a perpetual freshman at NYU. Ashlie was probably the strongest competitor, but out of that bunch that's not saying much. I kind of feel sorry for the Elle editorial staff for having got themselves roped into this whole mess.

The food thus far on Top Chef has been surprisingly uninspired, given the caliber of this season's cast. Jamie from Absinthe is hanging in and seems to be doing well, but it's still at the point where I'm having trouble telling all the balds and beards apart. The blond guy is kinda scaring me. Unclench, dude.

I'm pulling a very late night tonight for work as we're releasing a bunch of assets in conjunction with the client's European office and there's no way we can currently "unlock" a folder on our public ftp automatically, so I have to start uploading a giant movie file at about midnight so it'll be available at 1 a.m. when the press release goes out. Whee. PR is all glamor all the time, people. This week I managed a local press tour for a client who was sick as a dog with the stomach flu. While we were all amazed and impressed with his ability to carry on while having to run to the bathroom about every 90 minutes to barf, I'm just very, very thankful he managed not to puke in my car.

Update: Um, wow. I had not yet watched the latest episode of Top Chef when I wrote this post about an hour ago. Kudos to Tom C. for staging a mini intervention.

I've been enjoying the first season of Mad Men so much that even though I'm watching the episodes on On Demand I'm still tempted to buy the DVD set just for the commentaries. By chance, The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine rose to the top of my Netflix queue just after I watched the MM season finale, which was perfect timing as it's set in the same year and revolves around office politics and affairs.

Could not have cared less about the finale of Hell's Kitchen. GR certainly likes perky blonds.

Knitting is mostly on hold lately because of persistent pain in my hands. The symptoms are neither classic carpal tunnel nor arthritis, so hopefully it'll go away soon with some rest. It's making yoga challenging, too.

E3 was this week and I doubt they'll hold another one next year. While losing the out-of-control megabooths and general show chaos was a good thing, the ESA's and IDG's disorganization meant a lot of press didn't come to the show and many of those that were there missed the Concourse pavilion booths entirely, thinking all the companies were up in meeting rooms. Some big companies even sent their demo'ers home Wednesday night, leaving their games unattended all day Thursday because the traffic in the pavilion was so light.

One of my clients did receive the distinction of having the Worst Trailer at E3 (maybe Ever) as decided by the trolls over at gametrailers.com, so that was something. Never mind that it wasn't exactly a trailer and had been thrown together in a couple of hours right before the show because the deal had just been signed and they wanted something to catch the attention of walk-bys. At least they're talking about the game.

What is it with mayonnaise lately? First the guy on Top Chef didn't know it was just egg and oil, then it shows up in the relay race. Top Chef came up at lunch on Mother's Day because we're all watching it, and Paul told us how his friend Richard got all excited about making his own mayo with a hand blender after seeing it done on an infomercial in the middle of the night. Now Michael Ruhlman's blogging about mayo. Must be some kind of trendlet.

I've spent the past few days on press tour for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (no, I didn't get a say in that annoying, overly-punctuated title) and some other games that aren't getting quite as much love, so I'm a little tired and cranky. Bought new yarn today in hopes of starting this shawl soon.

I finally got a better look at the birds that have been hanging out on the patio. They are small and fluffy and have patches of blue, gray and black. They are certainly adorable and entertaining for the cats, but they also poop a lot.

This extremely interesting day planner (Japanese, of course) is making the rounds of the planner/notebook-obsessive blogs. Seems like something that might work well as an alternative to an Unschedule. I've been procrastinating about actually implementing the Now Habit ideas (ha!), but given all the stuff on my plate that I really need to tackle, I probably ought to give it a go.

Just got back from Austin last night. Nice city, but they have an annoying lack of street signs. I think we got lost every single time we got in the car to go anywhere.

Alton called it last week when he said they should toss out this lot and start over. There's no one left whose show I'd be willing to watch. And now JAG over Paul? That makes no sense. JAG is an overemotional loose cannon with a questionable military record, while Paul is hyper but probably sane. Plus, JAG just can't cook Food Network food. I also thought it was a little bit rich of Alton (who turns out to be one mean SOB) to quiz the hosts on ingredients when he gets fed all kinds of info on stuff and even overdubs when he hosts Iron Chef.

I leave for the new-and-not-at-all-improved E3 tomorrow. While it will be nice to spend some time in a house that is not a disaster zone for a few days, I'd really rather not have to deal with a trade show when there are so many other things that need to be taken care of. The latest thing is that the painters apparently did not hook up the washer correctly when they put it back, so now it's leaking. A lot. This morning I just turned off the taps and will deal with it tonight.