failing like never before

So That Was New

If this blog was a child I would be in prison for gross negligence. During my absence, a few interesting things of note have occured. Firstly, my apartment building burned down several months back. Which has lead to me discovering three new things:

• I should have gotten renter's insurance.
• Exposing a hard drive to high heat, dropping a roof and bucketfuls of ash on it, and then dousing it with water, will do nothing positive for said hard drive's longevity.
• Eating pizza and relaxing in front of the dying coals of your burning apartment is a great way to meet the neighbors.

And now, a few pictures.

I consider myself lucky, all things considering, in that I (nor anyone else) was not hurt in the fire, and having not owned too much, I lost relatively little. Now as far as potentially life altering events go, having my apartment burn down barely noted as even a slight blip in my day to day life. The day after the fire, I was buying a new toothbrush and some clothes at Target, by the end of the week I had a new place to stay and was allowed to pick through the remains of my apartment, and within a month life had returned mostly to normal, save for the fact that I only owned one pair of jeans.

Although my hard drives gave up the ghost in the fire, the non-moving components of my desktop, choking in ashes, bravely survived for a few more weeks of operation before finally surrending to death with a high pitched squeal. So I salvaged what I could from "wolfgang" and built myself a new computer, based around an Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5, and named it "phoenix" (because it was reborn from the ashes). My trusty IBM x61s (aka 'archpad') also fell victim, although I was still able it's recover the hard drive. In a nice turn of events, I used the fire as an execuse to buy myself a gloriously large 27 inch monitor that now bathes my room with more light than the sun, and a mechanical keyboard (very) vaguely reminiscent of the IBM model M.

My Christmas holiday, which was delightfully long, was unfortunately marked by me getting sick on Christmas night, followed by a short convalesence, a snowboarding trip (my first ever), a relapse in my illness (no doubt due a result of tossing myself down an ice-covered mountain several times), a much shorter convalesence, and a trip to Oregon. I spent a few days in Portland exploring the city on my own, going to musems, hiking around, squealing giddily in book stores, and buying iced milk teas from food stands (despite the fact that it was far too cold and occassionally rainy).

Work has been, well, work; interesting most of the time, often busy, occassionally tedious, and happily, rarely boring. In the meantime, I've been reading (far less than I should), watching TV and old movies (far more than I should) and trying (not hard enough) to keep myself from sliding into a totally sedentary lifestyle. Although, as the weather has been warming up again, I've taken to running 18 miles a week, alternating every other day between a six(ish) mile run and weight lifting.

Today at the company gym I was bench pressing an awe-inspiring 105 pounds, when I noticed in the indoor basketball court, a much older balding caucasian male dressed neatly in a polo shirt and slacks, blasting contemporary lyrical music loud enough to be heard through the glass doors and adroitly waltzing (with some sashaying thrown in) with an insivisble partner. He kept this up for at least twenty minutes, occassionally pausing, before resetting to his starting position and starting over again. He could have used one of the smaller dance studios that are fitted with wooden floors and mirrored walls which are most importantly, non-transparent and offer far more privacy. I'm not entirely sure what is odder; that someone would spend so much time practicing the same few dance steps in broad public, or that I bothered to watch him.