Woohoo! Michelle Kwan won the World Figure Skating Championship last night, for the fifth time in her career. Way to go!

House-hunting for a city condo has been pretty tough. The units I saw at 933 Van Buren (a new loft building in the West Loop) were very attractive (really nice finishes like hardwood floors, granite kitchen counters, ceramic tile baths, and the building itself is pretty neat), but noticeably smaller than my townhome. The thing is, I don't think I'll be able to find anything bigger for that price or less. And it would already be a stretch for me to purchase something at 933. Well, all I can do is keep looking, and if I can't find anything then I'll just stay put in my comfy suburban townhome for a while longer. :)

We've had very nice, spring-like weather the past few days! It's supposed to cool down a bit later this week though. Such is springtime in Chicago.

Mom and I drove Lori back to IU yesterday. It was a nice smooth drive. It'll take a car wash or two to get the bugs off my windshield though! :P

Watched a bit of the Oscars last night. Steve Martin was a hilarious host. He definitely did his part to keep the mood of the show upbeat. I can't say that I was terribly interested in the show overall, though, because I'm not much of a movie-goer. Still, I have crushes on Halle Berry and Nicole Kidman so it was nice to see them on screen. :) Oh, and in that vignette of past Oscar winners, I was pleased to see the lovely Marlee Matlin who I wanted to marry when I was in grade school. LOL!

Today I filled in for my team lead Justin at the weekly leads meeting. I didn't have to say much, thankfully. It was nice to get a glimpse of the "team lead life" however. :) It was also good to get a break from my &*#$%! computer and the VisualAge that kept crashing and crashing. Ugh.

Tomorrow I will be visiting a new condo development in the West Loop. It'll set the tone for my possible house-hunting in the city. Should be interesting!

So, the U.S. has begun its attack on Iraq. While I don't think war is a "good" thing, sometimes it has to happen to get things done. That's all I'll say about that. I just hope and pray that the objective is reached with a short conflict involving minimal losses.

I had my first class of Conversational Spanish II last night. It's a fun group. Four of my classmates were in the level I class together with the same teacher, and they were a chatty bunch :) but the class is pretty small so we all got ample opportunities to participate in dialogues and such.

Had a fun and interesting Saturday. First I had my final class of Conversational Spanish I. We learned some more verbs and got our "diplomas" :) ... I've enrolled in the Level II class which starts on Tuesday. Hopefully I'll enjoy it as well as I did the first one.

Later I had lunch with Mark to celebrate his birthday. It's always fun to catch up with him.

Finally I went to my friend Rod's bachelor party. We started off at an indoor driving range (I didn't hit, but I did enjoy watching Jim try his hand at some drives, some not as successful as others ;)). Then we went to Fuddrucker's for drinks and food. The "entertainment" arrived later. I'll spare the details :P but I will say that I didn't "participate" in any of the, um, festivities. Ha! We did toast Rod with shots of Jaegermeister, which was a first for me. Ick. :)

I had my second-to-last level 1 Conversational Spanish class today. We started learning how to conjugate regular verbs last week, and today we learned one irregular verb, ser (to be). I wonder why "to be" is an irregular verb in so many languages. :)

I finally started "real" programming at work today. I'm coding some test programs with my co-worker Kyron. We hit a few snags today but it's good to finally be coding for real. :P

I rented Moulin Rouge on DVD this week. I hadn't seen it before but heard good things about it. Generally, I like it. ;) Many scenes were just spectacular (or should I say spectacular, spectacular? LOL) with all the costuming and set design. Plus it was fun picking out all the pop songs that made their way into the musical numbers.