new pictures and year

Happy festivities to all and welcome to the year of my return!!!! bwahahahaha

With that, there are various (additional) random photos in my picasa thingy that illustrate the deep emotions and incredible personal expansion I've been having over the, oh, past two weeks. These events include cooking, standing on a frozen lake on and off for about 6 hours, and small children. It'll change your life too!

I did win half of my snow sumo matches on the lake, though. And I didn't completely freeze my hands and feet.

One of my sitemates did have a firework explode in her hand, but only bruised herself. Yay poor-quality fireworks! Boo inability to read the chinese instructions!

New year's day cooking extravaganza included, among other things, baklava, horse meat fajitas, pineapple-upside-down cake, pancakes, kahlua (making, not really drinking), and the final day of corning beef. Subsequent days were of eating glorious, glorious corned beef hash and some semi-ghetto reubens.

The new year's old man (similar in appearance to Santa Claus if he were a Mongolian man wearing a cotton beard and blue tinsel-edged robe-deel) terrified a few of my coworkers children and handed out candy, then took off his beard, which helped matters. Around New Year's in three days I ate cake approximately 5 times and drank champagne or harder stuff perhaps 4 times. I still have some cake in my fridge I need to throw out. Oh, and loads of candy from the Governor and the Health Department. Pleasant.

Internal apartment temperature is approximately 47F in the mornings, which is unacceptable. Unfortunately, out of my four electrical plugs, only one will not trip/smoke/melt with a heater plugged into it and it's the one that I use for cooking. So I am often faced with the choice of heating up to a more tolerable 52F (tolerable in that I can type without my hands being stiff and I'm wearing two shirts and pairs of pants and my deel and sometimes a hat) or having a fridge. Fridge tends to lose. Perhaps I overexaggerate, though. Well, actually, I'm not, but it sounds worse than it is, really. Though I wish I could heat up the room I sleep in rather than the kitchen, but once I'm in bed it's not bad.

We're in the coldest part of the winter, so my personal goal is to just get through January and it'll be ok. My choice of waiting until March to vacation is seeming increasingly silly...

Thesis notes are finally sorted and categorized, so I hope to push out a general proposal/overview tomorrow. By god, I will. Ugh. Otherwise things are calm outside of watering office plants and various lurking work tasks. I've noticed when I have something big, like this thesis thing, hanging over my head I suddenly come up with all sorts of other more interesting projects and thoughts. I suppose I should write them down for later, but typically I'd do them. But I'm trying to not procrastinate any further, so I just ignore them and hope they'll go away.

My officemates have discovered YouTube, and it has destroyed any semblance of me having an internet connection at work. Perhaps I will sneakily go onto the computer, edit the hosts file, and make it redirect to localhost...hmm...

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