NP: Blue Man Group, Audio

I'm outta here right after lunch, and not a moment too soon, as I've seen forecasts for Friday as low as two degrees. And that's the high temperature.

On the one hand, I'm glad to be escaping to balmy-by-comparison Williamsburg, VA to see my parents' new house for the first time. On the other, could everyone quit bitching? You live in Chicago. It's winter. This is not news, really.

The last 24 hours or so has been a whirlwind of preparations and last-minute errands. To the best of my knowledge, all Christmas gifts have been purchased and the ones that aren't on my person are all en route to their destinations. I always flub a bit with my godson in Lousiana, but it's nothing that throwing way too much money at shipping can't fix. A couple of gifts will wait until I get back, but they're in my possession, or allegedly already in Virginia for me to bring back.

One odd little sidelight of today's business is that I had to update all my recurring credit card payments from my soon-to-be expiring AmEx card. Last time I made a change to my tiny little AOL presence -- I have the low-volume plan for reasons I'm still not sure I understand completely -- I had to download the AOL client onto my newly XP Service Pack 2-enabled machine, which completely wreaked havoc on the system and had me seriously considering PC defenestration. There's still no way to update billing through the straight web interface, but this time, I called the 800 number and had an entirely pleasant conversation with a voice-recognition support computer. Seriously, this thing worked perfectly in response to voice commands from start to finish. It was pretty impressive.