Tuesday, February 2nd
Let's see; what have I been up to? Two weekends ago was Steve's LAN party, which was a good time as always, but didn't get us home and into bed until 8 am on Sunday. That meant we didn't do a whole lot on Sunday.
The past couple of weeks at work have been busy, but it's been interesting, so I can't complain. Two of my coworkers are abroad, one in Hong Kong and one in London, and another has been out this week, so it's been a bit quiet.
This past weekend on Saturday Sarah and I went to see Avatar down at Navy Pier on IMAX in 3D, since the first time around we didn't get to see it in 3D and this seemed like the sort of movie you'd want to do that for. Sunday I drove down to my mom's to celebrate her birthday with her and my sister.
Otherwise, Mike and I have once again been working on iPhone programming and I've been devoting much of my evenings to that. It's coming along, but after a long break it's hard to pick it up again. We're hoping to get this app done fairly quickly, since it's pretty basic.
Sunday, January 17th
Once again I haven't kept up well on events. I do like to come back and record them for myself, if nothing else. We spent a couple of days with Sarah's family the weekend before Christmas. We exchanged gifts, saw Avatar, and got to see everyone save Will, who was on a boat in Africa.
Christmas Eve we drove up to Minnesota to my sister Melissa's house and spent Christmas with my family there. We stayed until Sunday morning and then came back home. Originally we had thought Sarah would have to work on Monday, but since she left her job and got the two weeks with pay we were able to leave for Ohio Monday morning rather than Monday evening.
The drive to Ohio was interesting since they had rebuilt and moved the freeway since the car's map was made, the directions from the cabin owner were kind of out-of-the-way, and there was little to no cell reception. Even so we managed to find our way down some dark, curvy, hilly, snowy roads to the cabin, where we spent a few days playing video games, enjoying the fire and hot tub, and visiting Old Man's Cave a few miles away. For those wanting pictures, I'll refer you to my Facebook gallery rather than uploading the pictures here as well.
New Year's Eve we drove home, checked on the cats and unpacked and then drove up to Milwaukee to Eriq's where he was having friends over for a New Year's party. We rang in 2010, had a fire in his back yard pit, and got to see some friends for the first time in a while. Then we drove back home, capping an extensive bit of mileage for the week.
A few days later I met Mike for coffee in Rockford so we could discuss fresh plans for iPhone development. Since my sisters and I got my mom a new laptop for Christmas, last weekend I drove down to her house to get it set up and her data transferred over from the old one. And finally this weekend we went out to Sarah's grandmothers to have a late Christmas with her since she recently got back from Missouri.
At work I've been testing the new version of the computer management software we use so I can get our new server built and ready to migrate in a couple of months. It's a bit new and different, so it's keeping me busy. I think that's about everything worth talking about. Perhaps I can update in less than a month next time. We'll see.
Tuesday, December 15th
Ok, let's get caught up on the chronicling of daily life. First, Thanksgiving was spent with Sarah's family at her sister's mother-in-law's. Saturday after my mom came up to visit and we had a little Thanksgiving with her. That precipitated finally getting the house cleaned, which I had been lamenting the state of in previous posts for some time. Since then it's managed to stay in good order until we got out all the Christmas stuff a couple days ago, but I have hope that we can get that back under control shortly.
The next weekend Eriq and Meg came down to visit on Friday. We went to a Vietnamese restaurant and shared photos of our respective Asian trips, theirs to Japan and ours to Thailand. It was good to see them, especially since we hadn't really done any hanging out with friends since the cabin trip back in June.
Then last weekend Sarah baked a bunch of cookies and we went to Steve and Kathryn's for Kathryn's cookie exchange. While Sarah did that I spent the evening with Steve and the other guys playing Demon's Souls and going to dinner at Branmor's.
As usual it's now another week at work. Sarah gave her two week notice at work yesterday so she can start her daytime classes in January. I'm working on a plan to upgrade our new server to a new software version before it goes live. Not a whole lot more going on at the moment.
This weekend will be early Christmas with Sarah's family before we drive up to Minnesota over Christmas to see mine. Then after that we're heading to Ohio to stay in a cabin for a few nights, and finally up to Milwaukee for New Year's Eve at Eriq's.
Friday, November 20th
Believe it or not, the past several weeks have been spent on more than not keeping up on journaling. We've mostly been homebodies, excepting Nicole's birthday party, an excellent Halloween party at Sean and Michelle's, a trip to Sarah's parents to see Will off before he departed for Africa, and mountain biking with Matt B at John Muir trail. I also met Mike for coffee a few days ago. It was good to see him as it had been a few months since our last coffee.
We embarked on a large, multi-day office reorganizing project which still hasn't gotten it clean, though it is much better than it was. In fact, despite spending what seems like an inordinate amount of time picking up, doing laundry, washing dishes, and just generally cleaning, the house is still a complete mess. In addition to the causes I mentioned when I was bitching about this in my last post I can add Sarah undertaking a near constant stream of cooking, canning, and now spinning as I got her a spinning wheel for her birthday with the help of her parents, brother, and my mom. While the fruits of these labors are good (and often delicious), I'm left wishing we could reach a point where we were caught up and then somehow manage to keep it that way.
I attempted to remedy my home entertainment problem, which was a combination of a receiver with an odd tendency of switching to full volume at the start of watching something that had blown one of the speakers and an aging Xbox media center that couldn't play high definition files. I got a new receiver and a Western Digital TV Live. This has resolved the old problems but created new ones, like too few component inputs to actually connect all of our stuff since the TV doesn't have HDMI, and a finickiness in network connections and file formats we didn't previously encounter. Hopefully a solution less expensive than a new TV will present itself but so far it has not.
Already we're nearing the holidays and the days are getting short. It's been a busy year with a lot of events, both good and bad. At the same time it feels like a year of transitions, like one chapter wrapping up and a new one starting. I got married, changed jobs, turned thirty, and a lot of little things grew, faded, came into focus and got blurry. With more than a month left in the year I'm hoping to have some good times with family and friends.
Tuesday, October 13th
The honeymoon was great, but now we're back in the normal grind. We had a lot of fun shopping in Bangkok, seeing some of the temples and palaces, and then headed down to Krabi where we stayed at a gorgeous resort. We kayaked, went scuba diving, and hiked up a mountain, amongst the normal honeymoon activities.
I managed to get sunburned on my shoulders, which are now moulting like a snake, and took a lot of pictures that I'm sure I will get onto the site in the near future, possibly after I get the wedding pictures up, which will of course require me to get them. We got back on Saturday and so Sunday we went shopping for a book case for the office, as well as some of the remaining wedding registry stuff that we wanted to get with gift cards and checks from the wedding.
The twelve hour time difference took a bit of getting used to, and even yesterday I was still getting my sleep schedule straight, succumbing to an unexpected two and a half hour nap after work. Today I'm doing a bit better, but I still don't have the energy to tackle the massive mess that our condo has become since we returned, between the aforementioned stuff we bought and the unpacking of backpacks and suitcases. Hopefully we can get it back to a semblance of order by the weekend.