/home/todd

For the past year I’ve been trying to manage my finances with iBank.  After hearing nightmares about Quicken for the Mac, it seemed like the only other option.  While the software itself is stable and, in true Mac fashion, full of lovely eye-candy, it completely lacks support for online banking via both my credit union and primary credit card.  Judging from their user forums, this problem is pretty widespread–it seems their database of supported online banking sites is tragically tiny.  Importing data manually got old quickly, so I find myself only using iBank once every few months or so, importing everything at once and looking at the generated graphs to get a general sense of my spending.  I’d prefer to be able to do this much more frequently.

Today Intuit sent me an email notifying me of the beta release of Quicken Financial Life for Mac.  It’s supposedly a complete rewrite of Quicken based on Mac OS X 10.5, and thus may solve the problems of the previous version, which I guess were from porting the software from OS 9 to OS X.  I’m downloading as I type–hopefully it will be functional, stable, and support the banks I actually use.

Update: Nevermind, the Quicken beta can’t use direct connect to interface with any of banks.  Le sigh.

This morning I attended my first Yoga class.  Two observations:

1. It really is remarkably relaxing.  Even with my awful posture and balance, it was a great way to begin my morning.  I’m excited for the next class on Wednesday!
2. Blue jeans are not appropriate Yoga attire, even when they fit properly.  This rule goes doubletriple for Mr. Saggy-pants who sat in front of me.

I received a couple of wonderful-looking new cookbooks over the holidays, and last night I finally tried one of them out.  I decided on a spaghetti dish with broccoli, walnuts, and a ricotta sauce.  It was more exciting than it sounds–I finally got to use the zester I’d picked up months ago!  The only trouble was with the cheese; after stirring in the ricotta, it didn’t take on the creamy texture the photo in the book displayed.  After some Internet searching, I think the cheese should have been mixed or blended before-hand.  I’ll try that next time.  Other than that, it was fantastic and I have plenty of leftovers for tonight.

New Year’s Resolution 2009: Quit smoking [again]

Secondary Resolution: Do not fall back into a position where I need to make this same resolution next year.  Seriously.  I’m getting tired of it.

In 2007, quit for a month.  In 2008, I lasted until the end of October.  SO CLOSE!

Well, here it goes…

So I’m back in Corvallis, returning to a house that’s been terrorized by a lonely cat for the past two weeks.  He did a number of most of the plants and vomited the remnants in little out of the way places, but I think I’ve finally found and sanitized them all.  Also, I need to re-plastic all of my windows, he completely shredded every single one.  Can’t really blame him–I hate feeling left alone, too.

I had a ton of chores I wanted to get finished today, but I’m already feeling wiped out, and tomorrow’s going to be a long day on campus.  I think it’s time to make dinner and chill for the evening.

On the upside, it’s awesome leaving the midwest’s winter wonderland for a region that’s still full of green things!

A few days ago I was snowed in; now I’m fogged in.  Midwest weather is bizarre.  I don’t think I ever saw this much snow in December during the 25 years I lived in Michigan, and now it’s all about to melt because the temperature has spiked to 60 degrees.  Flooding in December?  What a strange year.

This past week has completely flown by.  I put together a draft of our next research experiment, finished off my holiday shopping, and spent an evening building a collection of family photos to fill a cute little frame my sister found for my grandma.  I’ve met up with Leslie and her sisters and gone out with Colleen and Jon a couple of times, but mostly I’ve stayed home and visited with family.  Christmas was a day-long extravaganza that started with just the immediate family, then migrated to my Aunt’s house to see my dad’s side of the family, and ended with 30+ of my mom’s relatives coming over for dessert and drinks.  I think the photos speak for themselves:

Small

Medium

Huge

I can’t remember the last time we had the whole family together like that… with so many cousins, it seems there’s always at least someone missing (and aside from being home for a couple of weeks each December, for the last couple of years that person has been me).

So now I’m realizing that I leave in less than 48 hours, and sort of wishing that I was staying longer.  There’s no special someone I want to rush back for this year, and visiting with family has been pretty relaxing.  I’m still having plenty of teary moments when something around here reminds of when Twinkle was staying with us, but they’re finally starting to ebb.  Thankfully I didn’t take her to the nearest coffee shop, so I’ve had the ability to retreat there when being around the house has me a little too depressingly nostalgic.  Yesterday I hid out there for a few hours and tore through a book on audio engineering–at least when I get back, I’ll have some fun new recording projects to try in my home studio.

I was kind of hoping to have a chance to try snowboarding with my little brother Kyle while I was home, but I had research to work on when I first got back, and now the weather has turned all warm.  At the very least, I got to take some cool photos of him on a couple of homemade jumps in our backyard.

Kyle pulling a 180

Evidence

Their explanation: everything’s bigger at Costco.

Also, randomness: the waitress at Mongolian BBQ remembered me from a single visit last August.

Hurray, I finally finished updating this site to use a modified version of the Elegant Grunge Wordpress theme.  I hacked in support for threaded comments, so now you should be able to directly respond to one another.  There are still a few visual issues, especially with image borders, but everything seems to be functional.  Please let me know if you notice any problems with the site.

My second day back in Michigan, I got snowed in.   Now it’s 7 degrees outside and dropping, and more snow is expected tonight.  In fact, more snow is expected for the rest of the week.

Next year I’m inviting my family out to Oregon for the holidays.

Amazing how time flies when you’re traveling.  Suddenly it’s Friday, yet part of my head is still back on Sunday-time, getting excited for the week nearly over.  In fairness, it was a pretty awesome week (sort of).  After making up my mind to ask a severely cute barista on a date (but not now, I’ll do it later!), I went to run some errands, sort of hoping to bump into her at the Co-Op (which has happened before).  So I’m nearly done with my shopping, trying to pick out a case of beer, when all of a sudden there’s her familiar voice… but it’s asking if she can help me find anything, sir, and I do a double-take before realizing it’s really her.  Chalk one up for two sort of awkward senses of humor.  After some babbling on my part, I must have eventually gotten English words out in the right order, because she seemed excited at the prospect of dinner the next night.

So we went out for drinks and some dinner and chatted for a few hours.  I was pretty shocked by how closely our personalities seemed to match, my thoughts constantly oscillating between that and things like, “OMG her smile is so cute!”… so yeah.  It seemed to go well, and I was in a pretty good mood.

The next night the two of us went to a party my friends were hosting.  She seemed a bit more distant this time, though it may have been the overwhelming numbers of new people… I usually get pretty shy in that sort of situation, too.  Less ambiguous was when, on the ride home, she said that she wasn’t really looking a relationship at this point in her life.  Fair enough (and possibly open to interpretation, but I think it was her way of saying she wasn’t interested).  We hugged and parted ways for a couple of weeks (I flew back to Detroit the next morning), but I’m still hoping to hang out with her some more (and maybe even meet her friends!) when I get back to town.

Wednesday was a busy day of shuffling from Corvallis to Portland to Minneapolis to Detroit to Rochester Hills, and combined with the time-loss flying from the west to east coast, was over before I even knew what was happening.  At least I scored a fantastic martini to pass the time in MSP.

And today… today has been weird.  The last time I was home, I was introducing it all to Twinkle.  I’m still catching myself looking around for her when I head upstairs, or wondering if she’d like a cup of tea, too.  I’d finally gotten over this in Corvallis; I didn’t realize I’d have to do it all  again in Detroit.  On the upside, my mom took me and Kyle shopping for the evening and I snagged a fabulous old-school Detroit Tigers t-shirt and some new Doc Martins.  Still searching for that ever-elusive pea-coat (the one that will actually fit me) but there’s plenty more time to continue that adventure over the next week and a half…