If you live in Seattle, you owe it to yourself to check out the puppet show (for grownups – it’s “delightfully inappropriate”) A Boy in the Beastly City. It’s like all the best parts of Family Guy turned into a silhouette puppet show about a boy who lost his monkey – it’s got musical numbers, entertaining asides and tangents, and fantastic voice talent. See it before they close on February 16th. (And you don’t just have to take my word for it – The Stranger recommends it!)

I went with Jared & Chika to see the puppets last night, and afterward they introduced me to Maekawa, a great izakaya (Japanese bar food) restaurant in the International District. Hooray for more late-night food options.

As predicted, the robot arm circuit boards arrived just in time for me to head off to San Francisco and not make any progress this week on the project. From what I can tell so far, 4pcb did a great job on the boards, for about half the price of their next competitor. Plus they included some microwave popcorn in the box! Though I won’t get to work on it much this week, I did put together a list of parts that I don’t have for the board, and I’ll put in a DigiKey order while I’m in California. It’s gonna be a busy month and a half counting down to my birthday (target date for the robot arm’s debut)!