we’ve been introduced to ‘rock band’. i’m a bit embarassed to say exactly how many hours we spent playing with the game over the last few evenings, but i’ve developed new respect for the 10 year old chinese kid on ‘ellen’ who played the top level guitar hero song flawlessly.

here we are, novices. first at our house (click here, 2.56Mb, .wmv), and then again at waymen and lynna’s. even helen couldn’t resist and got in the action.

i had a very busy and stressful week of work, which happily has now ended, but has left my brain a little mushy. therefore the only thing i can think of to blog is about this cute orange. i found it at a coffee-house thing (in which joe performed “keep it simple”… for all you noolas fans out there). it came with the sticker and it was tasty. looking forward to a week of holiday in vancouver.

we went out for some pizza the other day. i noticed i was missing my cutlery so i asked the waitress for it. i was a bit confused when she came back with crayons and a children’s colouring puzzle thing. i realized she thought i said “colouring”, so after a few more tries of “cut-le-ry”, i smartened up and just asked for a fork and knife. joe tried to explain to me that “cutlery” is a british influence thing. ok.

today i attended hamburger university. seriously, that is what it’s called; the training facility on the 80 acre campus of McDonald’s Corporation which is located in a suburb of chicago. i was there for a medical conference… not to learn about big macs, of course. however i did pick up a nutrition facts pamphlet and learned that a big mac is 560 calories. if you’re curious about the calorie content of any other mcdonald’s food item, just let me know!

we were lucky to get tickets to a ben folds concert on campus, which was part of his midwest campus tour. the music was great, and it was amazing watching ben folds at the piano; he plays around with the strings to make different sounds and plays really hard, even breaking a piano string in the middle of the concert. it was cool to hear him play “the luckiest”, which joe sang at our wedding reception. the $13/ticket was certainly money well spent!