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Random Update
Prompted by a friend (who I don't see very often in real life due to my having relocated to another state) poking at the fact that he hasn't heard hardly anything about what's been going on lately...
The stuff that I think most people have heard about and that I might have already posted:
I'm now living in Maryland, just inside I-695 and just south of I-70. I bought a house there last October and have been settling in very, very slowly (more on that in a bit). The reason that I bought a house there is due in large part to the fact that I am now doing web application development for Johns-Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD. It is incredibly shiny, and while it has its frustrations too I'm really glad to be here and hoping that I'll get to stick around for awhile ^_^
That out of the way, onto newish stuff!
Went back to Rochester, MN for the holidays! It was a lot of fun, my immediate family was there for pretty much all of the time that I was. ~wry~ A good chunk of the time leading up to Christmas was spent running various preparatory errands with various family members (many of which were related to the buying of gifts, and many of whom are not yet vehicularly enabled, respectively). I love the fact that in Rochester, pretty much everything is fifteen minutes away from everything else...
Given the size of my immediate family, we draw names for Christmas gift exchange. This year there was some confusion, and both the elder of my brothers and I thought we had the younger of our sisters. So I ended up giving her some tea and art supplies and such as a belated birthday present (we didn't realize there was a snafu until I'd gone to put my gifts to her under the tree and discovered that there already was a pile there with her name on it...)
So I ended up with the elder of my sisters instead ^_^ I got her a copy of a recent translation of War and Peace, through a sequence that, had I not participated in it firsthand, I would more expect in a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan flick than real life: In one of the aforementioned gift-buying runs, our whole family ended up at a Barnes and Noble (we all knew the others were there). I wandered off to see whether they had any of the DVDs that my sister had on her wish list, and apparently while I was doing that she returned her old copy of War and Peace (a translation for which she really did not care and had stopped reading) and went to see whether they had a copy of the one that she wanted. She found it, then went to find Mom and Dad so she could show them and perhaps ask them to let Santa know that he could find it here. In the meantime I had determined that the store did not have any of the DVDs that she wanted, and asked whether they had this translation of the book. The clerk took me over to the book and handed it to me, and I purchased it and hid it under my cloak. By then, my sister had brought our parents back to the place where she had found it only to discover that it had vanished in the interim. She was somewhat disappointed, figuring that someone else had bought it. I also had ended up doing a bit more shopping for her afterwards because I was also making her a silver Byzantine chain bracelet, so she figured I probably hadn't been the one who got the book if I was still looking for presents for her. The look on her face when she opened the present was priceless, to say nothing of hearing her tell the story afterwards ^_^
And in the interest of not writing a book here, I'll close for now.
The stuff that I think most people have heard about and that I might have already posted:
I'm now living in Maryland, just inside I-695 and just south of I-70. I bought a house there last October and have been settling in very, very slowly (more on that in a bit). The reason that I bought a house there is due in large part to the fact that I am now doing web application development for Johns-Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD. It is incredibly shiny, and while it has its frustrations too I'm really glad to be here and hoping that I'll get to stick around for awhile ^_^
That out of the way, onto newish stuff!
Went back to Rochester, MN for the holidays! It was a lot of fun, my immediate family was there for pretty much all of the time that I was. ~wry~ A good chunk of the time leading up to Christmas was spent running various preparatory errands with various family members (many of which were related to the buying of gifts, and many of whom are not yet vehicularly enabled, respectively). I love the fact that in Rochester, pretty much everything is fifteen minutes away from everything else...
Given the size of my immediate family, we draw names for Christmas gift exchange. This year there was some confusion, and both the elder of my brothers and I thought we had the younger of our sisters. So I ended up giving her some tea and art supplies and such as a belated birthday present (we didn't realize there was a snafu until I'd gone to put my gifts to her under the tree and discovered that there already was a pile there with her name on it...)
So I ended up with the elder of my sisters instead ^_^ I got her a copy of a recent translation of War and Peace, through a sequence that, had I not participated in it firsthand, I would more expect in a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan flick than real life: In one of the aforementioned gift-buying runs, our whole family ended up at a Barnes and Noble (we all knew the others were there). I wandered off to see whether they had any of the DVDs that my sister had on her wish list, and apparently while I was doing that she returned her old copy of War and Peace (a translation for which she really did not care and had stopped reading) and went to see whether they had a copy of the one that she wanted. She found it, then went to find Mom and Dad so she could show them and perhaps ask them to let Santa know that he could find it here. In the meantime I had determined that the store did not have any of the DVDs that she wanted, and asked whether they had this translation of the book. The clerk took me over to the book and handed it to me, and I purchased it and hid it under my cloak. By then, my sister had brought our parents back to the place where she had found it only to discover that it had vanished in the interim. She was somewhat disappointed, figuring that someone else had bought it. I also had ended up doing a bit more shopping for her afterwards because I was also making her a silver Byzantine chain bracelet, so she figured I probably hadn't been the one who got the book if I was still looking for presents for her. The look on her face when she opened the present was priceless, to say nothing of hearing her tell the story afterwards ^_^
And in the interest of not writing a book here, I'll close for now.
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