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Things have finally calmed down a bit here. We're moved in to our new home, my office is set up, and I'm no longer looking for rogue printers to smash.

What's new? Well, I bought a house, got a dog, and moved. All pretty much within a month or two of elapsed time. I feel about 20 years older after doing all of that, but the calendar tells me that I've really only lost two months. Plus however much time you lose from eating 30 Filet-o-Fish sandwiches in as many days due to not having any of your kitchen stuff to cook with. Probably shaved about six months off my life there.

I've been on Facebook a bit lately, mostly for work. I don't really like Facebook, but on the plus side I've located a bunch of old friends. It's a bit weird how the internet enables you to keep track of your friends without really having to keep in touch with them. I mean, there's the usual "Hey, you're still alive, that's great!" conversation that seems part of the "friending" ritual. But beyond that, Facebook seems to be just a glorified address book for me. I know my friend Dave sees a lot of potential in Facebook, so I haven't completely ruled it out as another fad yet. But it will be a while before I'm really sold on it, as a user. As a technical person, of course I see the huge advantages it provides as an application delivery platform. As a regular person, I don't know if I'd still be a Facebook user if my job did not require it.

Our new dog is proving to be a great addition to the family. We found her at the animal shelter in Belgrade a week after we moved here. She is a Karelian Bear Dog, a breed with which I have been enamored since first reading about how they are being used to help with problem bears at the Wind River Bear Institute. When Elly looked on PetFinder and saw that a KBD was available, it seemed like a sign from above. We had both been joking prior to moving up here that I could own my very own bear dog, but I don't think either of us thought that it would happen so fast. For one, they're supposed to be super active and need some land to roam. Our tiny backyard would seem small to a Pomeranian, so I wasn't planning on getting a bear dog until we moved to a place with more acreage. But luckily for us, Sadie is an older dog who would rather lay around and squeak out dog farts all day in exchange for some chicken jerky treats. She's still a great dog, and she will play with you if you pretend to be a big vicious animal, but she is by no means chewing off our doorknobs or running off into the hills. In fact, just this morning she made me walk at about negative 1.5 mph up a hill back to our house in a windy snow squall because she was tired after our morning jaunt.

On the technical side, I'm continuing work on TravelersTable, while in my spare time trying to resuscitate WalkingBoss and develop a time-tracking module for the IDE I use (NetBeans). I've found that all of the dog-walking I'm doing has been good for my creative-technical side. The ideas come a lot easier when you're not stuck behind the LCD all day long. I'm considering getting back into ObjC or OCaml once I'm done with my other projects. I got an OCaml book for Christmas a year or two ago, and I never made it past the first chapter. Plus I've got some ideas about a WebKit app I want to build in ObjC. Too many ideas, too little time.

I guess today is tax day, as two people have already reminded me in their emails. I had forgotten because my taxes were done a bit earlier this year. The deadline for corporate returns is a month early, so I got all my stuff together for the accountant back in March. I'm pretty excited. I think this is the first year I will get a refund in about three years. It's not too much, but just knowing that the government won't take a big bite out of my hiney this month is a great feeling. For a couple years there, it seemed like any savings I built up were gone after April 15.

Speaking of money, I am totally amazed at the difference between Whole Foods and the local Town & Country supermarket here. I swear we pay 30% of what we did in Boulder. I do not understand cost of living at all. Dave told me he paid $13/lb for turkey at a Whole Foods in California while he was visiting family. Thirteen bucks for a pound. I think here it's like $4/lb or something. Of course, the comparison is a little skewed--I mean, it's not just cost of living differences when you compare a regular supermarket and Whole Foods. The Whole Foods turkey most likely spent part of its young life reading Plato, playing frisbee, and talking about social issues late into the night over some kind bud at a $40,000/year liberal arts college, so that figures into the $13/lb. But still. That's a huge difference.