Does anyone still check this site? Probably not, since it’s been a pretty long time since I updated anything.
KrisDi’s grandfather passed away a couple weeks ago, which made for a hasty and sad trip back to Chicago the weekend before last.
The other System Engineer at my company left for another job (for very good reasons), which leaves me in the somewhat overwhelming position of being the only System Engineer and having about three jobs’ worth of work to do.
Pixel Chick’s magazine (the apparently no-longer-existing Washington CEO) was bought out and closed down by the competition (nefarious evil-doing Seattle Business), so she lost her job. If anyone’s looking for a graphic designer…
KrisDi got straight A’s this semester in her Master’s program (she’s a badass). P-dubs got three B’s and two A’s (he’s not as much as a badass).
We had a little Thanksgiving (KrisDi, E-Dubs, Pixel Chick, Mom, and me) with a 22 pound turkey, and ALL the fixins (stuffing, sweet potatoes, kidney bean salad, cranberry salad, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, pumpkin trifle, rolls, deviled eggs, sauerkraut). We ate all the leftovers except some gravy and some mashed sweet potatoes. In addition to the traditional turkey samiches, we had the becoming-traditional turkey tortilla soup and experimental turkey pop pies. Somehow, we still didn’t have enough turkey. Tragedy!
We had shopping day at work (they give us some cash and take us to the mall for half a day) — I spent it at Taphouse with some co-workers. Yum!
We went to A Christmas Carol (and drinks) at ACT with some friends, which was fun. It’s a very nice little theater — it’s round, with seating on all sides. Actors’ entrances and exits frequently go through the audience. We were also going to make gingerbread houses with said friends, but the hasty trip to Chicago disrupted that plan.
We decided to try the Winter Beer Fest this year with E-Dubs and Pixel Chick — it was extremely crowded, but somehow the lines weren’t very long, and we got to try lots of tasty beers.
The first annual Brewhaha occurred at a co-worker’s house as well — there are several homebrewers (and beer enthusiasts such as myself) at my company, and one of them organized a small brewfest. That was a lot of fun, but since it was the day we needed to fly to Chicago, we didn’t get to spend as much time as we would have liked.
Seattle weather was chaotic, mostly because they don’t have the equipment to handle it and the drivers don’t know what they’re doing. Luckily, we traveled on quite possibly the last sane flight out of Seattle, the 11:30 PM red-eye last Friday.
So now we’re at KrisDi’s parents’ place again — Merry Christmas! But, tomorrow’s our last day here. We’ll go to Lou Malnati‘s for delicious pizza and take the leftovers on a train to Minot. It’s an eighteen hour ride, so we expect to get hungry.
We went looking at tuxes, we had a two hour session with the photographer for our wedding (I’ll post about that sometime soon), we had presents and Polish food, we went shopping, drank some beer and some wacky home-made hooch, so on and so forth. We’ve been having a pretty mellow time of it.
I’m looking forward to North Dakota. Northwood and I are going to narrowly avoid immolation and self-explosion with our Ruben Tube project, for which I’ve been programming interesting audio waveforms. You can look forward to pictures and videos and a more detailed description when we have them.