Well, I have to say it’s been a very interesting week. From dealing with my own birthday last Sunday to going to Jinny’s birthday party yesterday, I must say that I’ve had plenty of things to do this week. It all started with my birthday last Sunday. All in all, it was a quiet day. When I got up, I found that Mom and Dad had bought me Tom Clancy’s EndWar and LEGO Batman for my Xbox 360. Mom had also bought me seasons 1-3 of Doctor Who, but Amazon had yet to send them. That evening, the folks took me to PF Chang’s for dinner, which was excellent as always. Otherwise, I had a nice and quiet birthday.
Tuesday was the big day, because that was the day we did the Fight Night event for Mortal Kombat Online. I arrived in Chicago close to noon, and quickly made my way to the L station at O’Hare so that I could meet up with Crow. Once Crow and I got on the L, we made our way to the hotel, with a couple of wrong turns along the way. We also stopped for lunch; we ended up eating at Cheesecake Factory, which he had never been to before. Once done there, we made our way to the hotel, where we started to work on picking questions for the event. When 5 PM rolled around, we got a taxi and made our way to Midway.
The event itself was fun. Fortunately I had planned ahead of time and set up portable versions of X-Chat onto a USB drive customized for each attendee, and simply needed to copy the folders to the desktops of the attendees’ machines. While I coordinated the questions and answers, Crow sat with Jeff with Midway and picked questions. I was also happy in that I finally got to meet one MK team “bigwig” who I had never met before, and that was Carlos Pesina (an artist, who actually played Raiden in Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II. and Mortal Kombat Trilogy). If you’d like to see how the event turned out, well, a transcript is available here. I personally thought it went well, even though this was the first Fight Night we had done where the event took place before the game’s release. Once the event was done, we caught a cab back to our hotel, where we put our stuff away, and then walked a few blocks away to find a bar and have a couple of drinks to wind down. That done, we went back to the hotel and turned in for the night.
The next day, after grabbing some breakfast and checking the channel for the post-chat reaction, we ended up making our way to O’Hare. After going through security (and Crow realizing his normal pants had too many studs, causing him to be wanded down), we found a Chili’s to have lunch at. Once we ate at Chili’s, we went to Crow’s gate, and waited for his flight. And waited. And waited. His flight ended up leaving an hour late, but I ended up utilizing the time to upload videos to YouTube for MK Online news stories. After Crow had left, I went to my gate and waited for my flight. From there things were uneventful, other than the overhead bin not having room for my backpack, leaving me stuck with little legroom and making me very uncomfortable.
Otherwise, the big event for us was Jinny’s birthday party. Jinny decided that she wanted to feel more like 5 or 15 than 35, so we planned appropriately. We all met at the McDonald’s at Kuykendahl and Louetta for dinner. Once we were done there, we went to Dean’s (Sean’s father) house for drinks and cake. Once we all had a drink and some cake, it was time to go to the roller skating rink.
Yes, you read that right. We went to the local roller skating rink.
The manager didn’t know quite to make of our group of ten people in our mid-30’s who had come to skate, but we just told him we were reliving our childhoods. :-) Oh, man, it was a BLAST. Some of us took a while to get the hang of it, but after a few unsteady minutes I was back into the swing of things. Granted, I also had more wipeouts than anyone else. But still, we had a LOT of fun, even if some of us were complaining about how out of shape we were and how much it was causing legs and hips to hurt. We stayed until the place closed down, at which point most of us went back to Dean’s for more drinks. We stayed there, sat around, and BSed and had drinks for a couple of hours, until one point where Jinny said, “You know what? I want hash browns.”
So, it was off to Denny’s we went.
We were there for about an hour and a half, still talking, having coffee, and eating. We ended up breaking up around 3 AM, which was fortunate for me because I was nearing a crash point. I drove home, quickly brushed my teeth, and fell into bed without even bothering to change my IM status or check messages.
As for today, it’s been relatively quiet. This week probably won’t be eventful; I have an optometrist appointment on Tuesday, and I THINK Jesse is coming into town this week, but at the rate things are going I doubt I’ll get to see her or Rob. Ah, well. I also need to pick up a copy of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe and get cracking on that. For now, though, I’m just going to go to bed and catch up on rest. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.