i've wasted my nights, you turned out the lights

The fun continues unabated...I missed the first half hour of the conference this morning since I slept slightly too late, but I forgave myself with absolutely no remorse (if anything, I wished I'd slept another half hour, since the presentation I did make it for wasn't that interesting). But the conference today was generally good, and made better since I snuck out for lunch and had belgian food down the street from the conference (sans gluten), where I alternated between making a massive list of all my marketing ideas for the next few months and reading an ebook that was tangentially mentioned during the conference about decluttering/getting rid of unnecessary things/habits/etc. Weird, I know. I learned quite a bit at the conference, I think - or at least learned where I need to do some more research, and where I'm clearly ahead of the curve. But I have a *lot* of work to do the next few months (years, decades), so while I'm eager to have fun the next couple of days, I'm also eager to get back to San Francisco and go into hermit mode for October.

But no hermiting today; instead, I came to Ritu's, where I was here approximately ten minutes before she got home from work. We hung out here for a bit, and then had dinner at Northern Spy, a new American (in the sense that the cuisine is new, not the restaurant) in the area known as Alphabet City, which is way more hipster/gentrified than it was a couple of decades ago. The food was *awesome* - everything I wanted the food to be yesterday, and I enjoyed every single bite of it. We had a cheese platter, and then she had some awesome lamb and I had some v. awesome chicken with a bit of gnocchi and a lot of vegetables - probably the best chicken I've had in months. She had three glasses of wine, but I limited myself to two (pity), and we talked about death a lot, which is always super fun. And I'm 99.999% sure that Malcolm Gladwell was at the table next to us (about 36" away - the tables were so close together that they had to be pulled out to get out), which was bizarre and entertaining.

Post Northern Spy, we stopped at a bar down the street and ill-advisedly had three jello shots each before coming home and watching 'Bridesmaids', since Ritu was horrified that I had never seen it. And now that I'm both amused and horribly depressed, it's time for bed - goodnight!