/home/todd

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…

This post is just to claim my blog on Technorati.

Technorati Profile

I wasn’t expecting to see snow for a few more days, but tonight Corvallis is being gently blanketed by soft, picturesque flakes.  I ran out to the store as soon as I realized yes, we really were going to get snow tonight, and stocked up on firewood and spiced apple cider.  I should be all set for the next few nights, and then it’s back to Michigan, where I’ll get snow plus blustery winds… while colder than normal here, it still feels pretty calm outside.  I even went out for a bit with my camera and tripod to snap a couple of photos.  Tragically, I discovered that long exposure times don’t lend themselves to rendering the snowflakes softly drifting down from the sky.

The view from my porch

Looking back at my apartment

Early Wednesday, I’m heading back to the Detroit area for two weeks and suddenly feeling completely unprepared to leave because I still need/want to:

• Clean the apartment (a friend is coming over to watch the cat while I’m gone and I want the place to look nice)
• Stock the fridge with some beers to thank the above-mentioned cat-sitter, and empty the fridge of anything that’s going to spoil.  Oh, and get more food and kitty litter for Henri!
• Do a serious amount of laundry
• Work on our next research experiment
• Begin preparing another fellowship application
• Pack everything I’m going to need to work on over break (eep!)
• Attend any research meetings Monday and Tuesday
• Put together an outfit for Chris’ murderless-mystery (Tuesday night!)
• Screw up the courage to ask Andrea out for dinner (minus the rest of the group this time)

But mostly, right now, I just want to take a nap.

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.7 and everything seems to be working smoothly so far.  I found a small bug in the comments system, where I kept getting an enqueue_comment_hotkeys_js(); is undefined error every time I tried to edit comments in the administration panel, but commenting out that line in edit-comments.php seems to have fixed everything up.  Please let me know if anything on the site isn’t working properly after the upgrade