In better news, I had a fun birthday with SWHTL. Friday she took me to see a presentation of Blade Runner followed by a  Ph.d hopeful giving a presentation on AI. I went in with the plan of having a couple beers and then hassling the presenter with increasingly technical questions but after he did so well on my first question ("Is deep learning really different from Perceptrons or are is it just "bigger"?") I decided to let the poor kid off the hook. (He did accuse me of being one of his professors in disguise...)

Anyway, Saturday we went to a fancy place for dinner where the calorie counts on the menu were, well, a lot. How do you manage to create 1200 calories of Brussel Sprouts? (Answer: by adding a really yummy sauce...) I had my first ever "smoked" cocktail and was impressed with how it tasted and SWHTL gave me a pasta-making accessory kit for my Kitchen Aid mixer, so I immediately made a batch of fettuccine.