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[warthog9]

The life and times of a Warthog

So the last month and a half has been..... Interesting and it's been busy. First a quick update on the situation back home. Things have calmed down some, though the entire family is still on edge. No one is sure if dad's going to survive this ordeal he's being put though. There is a small reprieve so to speak and he has gotten an extension so things are now delayed until the end of February. Which currently begs the question since I'm penny pinching as much as possible, do I spend the money and go back to Iowa for a short while for Ayyam-i-ha, or do I sit and have a gothic holiday (sitting in my apartment and celebrating alone)? I don't have an answer but I'll certinaly keep my eyes peeled on plane tickets. If you find some cheap ones or know of somewhere to find them cheap, let me know.

So beyond that lets see what else is going on. Thanksgiving was a bit hectic, getting people to / from the airport and such. I ended up going home for Turkey day as I had already had tickets. It was good, and it helped the family a lot to see me, heck it helped me a lot. It was a good Thanksgiving, though everyone was on edge and stressed. It was good to be home, and just be with everyone.

December was fairly quiet, work was busy, hectic and insane. I got some decent testing done for a demo we were working on with a 3rd party, though I'm not entirely sure how that finally turned out. So the big news of December was I went into talks with 3Leaf Networks, and found out they were pretty cool and my 'Christmas Presant' to myself this year was accepting a job offer from them. C2 wasn't exactly thrilled but they took the news fairly well.

Christmas eve I ended up doing a big dinner party and made deliciously yummy food. Well, it wasn't my best dinner I've cooked but it was reasonable, and I've got some notes on what I can do to improve it if I cook it again (Pork tenderloin over potatoe beds, string green beans, salad, etc). Everyone seemed to enjoy the evening in general, did dinner and than we were going to watch a movie of some sort but got side tracked and played with my MythTV setup for a while and just chatting. People really seemed to like the setup, so I might just try and do a dinner & a movie thing maybe once a week or once every other week or something, kinda depends on how gung ho I get about it all. But it was fun and I definately want to do it again.

Christmas Day however was eventful. I awoke, and was an utter bum for most of the day. At some point I decided to start text messaging everyone a Merry Christmas. About 3/4 of the way through this process Rob M. gives me a call and calmly says 'Hey, I was about to call you anyway as I was going to ask if you could give me a ride - I think I may have broken my foot'......... Well as you can imagine, I dropped everything I was being a bum and doing and went and got him to the emergency room. So I spent several hours hanging out at the hospital. It turned out to not be broken (WELL they don't think so anyway.... but thats an odd story), and I got Rob home and went to pick people up from the airport (I did a lot of that in December, something like 5 trips to SFO and a strip to SJC in the span of a couple of weeks). The only downside to spending the time at the Hospital, which makes for a good story and was well worth it, was I caught a cold that I only got over a couple of days ago, so par for the course I suppose.

Anyway New years eve was pretty quiet this year, nothing really to report on that front. It was spent more or less about the same as last year, though instead of being subjected^H^H^H enthralled by Happy Tree Friends, we played 'House on the Hill' an Avalon Hill board game. If you haven't played it, it's a lot of fun and because of the way it's done it's new and fresh almost every time you play it. Go check it out!

Anyway this week has been my first week at 3Leaf, which you can imagine is filled with brain dumps, and just trying to figure out whats going on and getting settled in. I've already got a quote back on my desk for a new build server that I get to rig out as part of my duties (it's monsterous, trust me so you can imagine how much glee it brings me). The funny thing is not two days after I'm out of my last job, they had to call me up to have me come in and fix a few things that had broken, and in them trying to solve the problem ended up making the problem worse. Go figure, I'm gone two days and they end up having problems. Cest la vie! Things are fine now, and should go back to the smooth sailing I would have expected (the problem was a partial hardware hiccup, and not something I'd expect to happen again)

And here I am up to date, in a whirlwind update. My goal is to update this a bit more often and to vent more random frustrations and comments with the world in general. Not that I think anyone actually reads this, but hey it's like shouting through the void, maybe someone will hear you, and if not at least I feel better for having shouted ;-)

Happy New Year everyone, so far this year is looking up and I have high hopes for it!