I wish everyone who says that they can't cook would read this. You have the perfect attitude; in the kitchen, being afraid of messing up usually ends up a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whatever you do in there, act as if you had done it a hundred times before. Mistakes are something you sort out and learn from after the fact, not during.

For me the thing that made me comfortable was reading a book that approached cooking from basic scientific perspectives. Reading that gave me the tools to analyze what I was doing and adapt when inevitably things didn't go perfectly according to plan.

I can only hope so.

I would say that racism is a defining problem of our culture, but saying it is a "sign of our times" kind of undersells how terrible racism has been in the past.

My Father was actually a priest and Dominican monk for close to 30 years before leaving the priesthood and marrying my mother. From the stories I've heard there was a lot more room to believe and practice as one personally saw fit in the immediate aftermath of Vatican 2, and that the slow conservative shift following that has pushed many out of the church. My father considered himself a catholic until he died, but he ended up worshiping in another church.

Side story: When I was a kid in the 80's my father used to rage about the church moving around molester priests instead of defrocking them. I grew up thinking this was one of those terrible things that everybody knew about and nobody cared about, and I was really surprised when it became such a big story.

So Classic was a super amazing host when I had to hit him up for a place to stay one night, and everybody should know how great he is.

Alright. I'll call back and change it today.

On transportation, I'm ignorant of how terrible navigating Chicago by car is. Are we better off meeting up somewhere and then carpooling to dinner/the karaoke place, or would we be better of just using public transit all around?

This is also just assuming you have a car I guess.

Also now that I realize that place is for Japanese food and not specifically sushi I'm actually more inclined to go. We don't have a lot of non-sushi Japanese food in OKC.

I was hoping one of the locals would make a suggestion for where to get dinner. Karaoke would be here.

Important update. We'll actually be doing one this year as well! 

I got a new 18th century american style leather gambling box that fits my custom deck and dice boxes side by side perfectly and I'm nerding out about it so hard. I'm not sure what this says about me, but I feel like the classiest gamer now.







I seriously could not believe how well it fit my deck and dice boxes.





This deck box was done by a guy in the L5R community who is a big woodworking nerd. He usually gives out woodwork prizes at his tournament every year. This is probably my favorite thing that he's done. It's lacquered green for the Mantis clan colors and has the Mantis clan mon burned into the top.
 



This is a tiny velvet lined chest that my friend got for me at a market in Turkey.