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Gee golly Whitakers, I am a busy boy this week! How’s that, asks you? Well, allow me to exemplify. After working every day (at a somewhat frantic pace, so as to clear my schedule for next week), I will be doing the following:

Tonight: I and a certain lady-friend of mine will be taking in an Iowa Stars game after work and, hopefully, dinner. I believe this will be my 5th Stars game this season. I have yet to see them win. I haven’t yet had the heart to look up their overall statistics online, because either they aren’t doing so hot in general, or I’m acting as a mighty powerful bad luck charm. At that point, I’d just as soon not know.

Wednesday: A bunch of friends (it’s looking like 8 - 10 of us) from various workplaces will be heading to Appare after work. For those not in the know (which included me until about an hour before I sent out the invites), Appare is a new Japanese sushi/steakhouse in Urbandale (located here, for those curious). I’ve heard they have the best sushi in town, and Wednesday is their $4.50 martini night, so we’re going to go check ‘em out.

Thursday: After work, a few of us are taking a tour of the new Gateway Lofts in downtown Des Moines as part of an event hosted by the Greater Des Moines Young Professionals Connection. I’m not currently a member of their lil’ club, but I’m thinking about joining. I figure this would be a good opportunity to check them out. Afterwards, I’m planning on going shopping for a few essentials (such as shampoo, 3.4 ounces at a time and new shirts) and starting to get my pack-on.

Friday: More social goodness. A group of us are going to a wine tasting, followed immediately thereafter by wine making. Sound cool? You bet it does. It’s at a place called Vines to Wines, and it should be a lot of fun. We’ll sample all of their wines, pick the one we like best, and make a batch of it. A couple of months from now, we’ll come back and bottle the stuff, and we’ll each get a couple of bottles of our very own wine. :)

Saturday: Goodness! More social. Friend Hannah will be hosting the Passover Seder at her place of residence. Technically, the Seder should be April 2nd or 3rd, but this Saturday worked better for everyone else, so there you go. Besides, Hannah’s only half-Jewish, and the rest of us aren’t Jewish at all, so really we’re going with the idea that it’s the thought that counts. It should be a cool chance to partake in an extra-cultural activity. Plus, I hear there’s a fair bit of wine involved. ;)

Sunday: I plan to wake up late, realize I’ve wasted the entire week being social, and frantically pack as fast as I can. I hope/plan to be at the airport by 2pm in order to catch my 3:40pm flight to San Diego (via Chicago). I’ll land in California around 8pm Pacific (10pm CDT) and hopefully be to the hotel shortly thereafter. Then I’ll spend the next four days attending a conference, eating at quaint restaurants, walking along the beach, sneaking in to (and hopefully out of) Tijuana, calling the ladyfriend, and trying not to think about the work I’ve left behind. I’ll fly back Friday afternoon and be in Des Moines again around 10pm CDT (8pm Pacific). And then I’m going to drink.

So! If I don’t blog again in the next ten days or so, well, at least I’ll have a better excuse then I did for the last ten days or so. ;)

You know, for the record, I didn’t specify how much later. :) Patience is a virtue, children.

So! Yes. My blog is up and running again. I’m a little annoyed with my webhost over the ordeal. I got an email from them last week saying they’d randomly decided to move me to a newer, faster server. I was happy about this, until I noticed that my blog’s database did NOT come along for the ride. I emailed back and forth (and back and forth…) with their tech support about this for five. Stinking. Days. Before I solved the problem. Yeah. ~I~ solved it. Five days emailing their tech support and I ended up fixing it myself. Admittedly, I did need their help getting to the solution, but still. It kinda sucks that I had to fix it myself. Normally their tech support is great on the rare occasion I have to use it, so I’ll assume things’ll get better for now.

Alrighty. Big announcement time! Some of you already know, but here t’is just the same: Amanda Marie Wurzinger and I are a couple. :) We have been, in fact, since December 9th, meaning we celebrated our first monthiversary just last week. I waited to post about it because there were a few people I wanted to tell in person first. And then, once I’d spoken to them all, my blog broke. :p So goes life. You know now, and that’ll have to be good enough.

What have we being doing with ourselves? Good question. We keep busy. We went to the Nutcracker Ballet in Ames one weekend, although that might have been before we were an official couple. We’ve went to two Iowa Stars games since the big day (the Stars lost both games, but the last one was really close), which is fun and I hope to continue going. We watch a lot of movies, though we’ve not yet seen one in the theater together (we’re hoping to change that this weekend).

Last weekend, we painted my upstairs living room. T’was a chore! I’d been saying I was going to paint it for months, but hadn’t gotten around to it. On Saturday afternoon we made the spontaneous decision to paint the next day, so we ran to The Woodsmith Store for supplies. I heart my employee discount there. :) I got two gallons of paint in two different shades of pale blue-gray, four rolls of painter’s tape, roller covers, tray inserts, drop cloths, and so on. We, my friends, were going to try vertical stripes.

And try we did! And I think we did a pretty kick-butt job all around. It was close, though. I almost didn’t buy enough supplies. We were very literally scraping the bottom of the can for the base coat. We finished with maybe an ounce or two of useable paint left. And then, after the paint had dried, came the stripe-taping. It was wearing work, and we ~very~ nearly ran out of tape. I’d bought four rolls of the stuff, which is 240 yards (720 feet) of tape. When I taped off the last stripe, I pulled out the remaining tape to see how close we cut it. I had less than eight inches left.

Now my living room walls look awesome, but they are making my furniture look crappy by comparison. I’ve decided I need furniture covers in a rich, solid color of some sort. That’ll come some other weekend. I still haven’t gotten my living room put back together again yet. When I do, I’ll take pictures and post them to flickr.

That’s a good enough update for today. I get the feeling I’ll be posting again soon. If anything, we have a new guy starting in my department at work next week, so my work load should lessen somewhat.

So as of last Tuesday (12/12), I have Internet access at home. As you can see, it hasn’t really improved my posting frequency that much. And by “that much,” I mean “whatsoever”. I’m still hung up on that one fundamental problem: when I get home after 8-9 hours at work, I’m really in no mood to sit back down in front of a computer. And besides, I’m rarely at home anyways.

I think last Tuesday best exemplifies these points. I got a call at work in the afternoon to let me know that my DSL had been turned on (in the middle of a meeting, and I’d forgotten to turn off my ringer, go me). Instead of rushing home to install my modem and whatnot, I spent the evening at my first-ever hockey game (Iowa Stars… we lost mightily). I had a really good time, enough so that I fully intend to do it again in January sometime. I bet it was even more fun than sitting alone in front of YouTube all night would’ve been.

All of this sorta begs the question as to why I bothered to get Internet access at home in the first place. Well, I’ll admit that it did come in handy a bit this week. See, I decided to be all domestic and send out a few Christmas cards this year. I think I prepared 13 in total — not nearly all of my friends/family, but enough that I felt like I’d accomplished something. Only problem was, I didn’t really have very many addresses. I had two addresses from cards that had been mailed to me, but after that, I was sorta at a loss. Enter the Internet. I found two more addresses scouring my email archives from 2003 to present. Then I turned to Google and was able to track down four more. After that, I logged into Facebook and got ahold of two that I had expected to find in my email but had proved elusive. And for the grand finale, for those who were proving particularly difficult to track down online, I turned to the government: property tax records. I found three addresses — in three counties and two states — by searching through property tax assessment records. :)

Man, I’m beginning to think I’m in the wrong line of work.

Anyway, life continues to go well. Work is ~extremely~ busy this week (I had to schedule all of my tasks for this week several days in advance to ensure they’d get done), but I think I’ll get enough done that I can take off a couple of days next week. Tonight, I’m heading out to Felix & Oscars with some coworkers for some Chicago-style pizza and beer. Tomorrow, I’ll be enjoying a lovely dinner of steamed salmon, some olive-feta salad thing, white wine, Grey’s Anatomy, and Firefly for dessert (I’m on disc 4/4 though… very sad). Oh, and also some of Anne’s chocolate mousse, which I hear is pretty darn good.