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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.

Elly took this a couple weeks ago during the eclipse:

Featured in this Cookie Magazine blog article.

Circa 2001...

Here's one from six or seven years ago featuring my dad fishing in Fisher's Island Sound on our boat. If by any chance you're a patient of his, you can now see where your root canal money goes: squid, sandworms, and gasoline. I think this was the 2nd or 3rd movie I made on my (then) new Sony Digital8.

Tova and Toby were having too much fun at Libbi's wedding. The collision doesn't happen until around 1:20 into the clip.

I'll post more of Tova's all-night dance party tomorrow. Also coming soon is my mom battling a New Zealand chicken with a wading staff.

The quote of the trip and the week was from Tova: "I don't want to go home--never!"

We went up to Salida last weekend.
I had never really hung out around town before. My only previous trip was compressed into one afternoon, most of which I spent fishing a few miles outside of town on the Arkansas. This time, Elly, Tova, and I stayed at the Thomas House, which was within walking distance of basically everything (except Sonic).

On Friday night, we went to Amica's Pizza, which was extremely good. I ate way too much but I do not regret it. If you go to Salida, definitely eat here at least once. We also went to this store called Slim Pickens, which sold insanely high quality Pendleton flannels for an insanely low price ($13.99 for any shirt). These shirts sell for around $90 online. So, yes, this store was a gold mine if you like wool shirts! I bought two and Elly bought a cape (wonderwoman style).

On Saturday, we walked around town, played on the playground, interviewed strangers about life in Salida (in case we ever decide to move up there), watched skaters at the skate park, and ate dinner at Bongo Billy's. We also took a stroll by the river so Tova could check out the fix and throw rocks into the water.

On Sunday, we stopped by Buena Vista on the way home. Since the yarn store was closed and the coffee shop had a power outage, we only stayed for a few minutes. We got home Sunday in time to grill some burgers and watch the few remaining Robot Chickens and NYPD Blues on our Tivo. A fun weekend!

Bis and Joel, I have to publicy thank you for our wonderful merchandise from the Horn of Africa. Of course, my adhan-playing "Mosque Shape" alarm clock is the most prized item that we received. It is truly amazing that someone would choose to wake up next to this thing. It doesn't just make you feel like you're in Sana'a--it's like you're actually up in the minaret with the caller. Like 4000 decibels, I'm not kidding.

But the funniest thing we got, by far, was the "Leondard di Venchy" tag:

Here's what it says on the inside of the tag:

Leonard di Venchy The Famous Italy Male
Fashion Brand,inherits The
European Classical Design Style,simple,fluent,
comfortalle And Dainty,with The Best
Quality Raw Materials refined And Precise
Workmanship,its Top Style Display In All Aspects!
With Great Efforts To Emerge Into
The Globalized Economy.

[All spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors are reproduced faithfully above.]

Now if Gap sold clothes that made great efforts to emerge into the globalized economy, I might shop there more often. Oh Leonard, I mean, Mr. di Venchy, did you ever dream of the fashion you would one day inspire in lands far and wide?

We're out in the desert this week, biking, camping, and checking out dinosaurs. We spent most of last week in Fruita, Colorado, before driving down to Moab, where we've been hanging out this weekend. Highlights from the trip thus far:

• Elly got a new bike.
• Tova spent her first night outdoors in the tent.
• We saw the Dinosaur Museum in Fruita.
• Went on a hike in Arches National Park.

Here are some pics.

I don't know how many times I've cursed my HP PSC 1600 printer/scanner over the past few months. For the longest time, I could only print one page at a time because of the constant paper jams. Documents longer than one page required me to sit at the printer and feed in one piece of paper at a time. It sucked.

As it turns out, the paper-jam problem might have been caused by something other than this printer being a piece of crap. While Elly was fooling around with these iron-on t-shirt printouts last night, she discovered the work of a mini-saboteur:
Unbeknownst to us, our little printer technician had done some unscheduled maintenance on the PSC 1600. I guess Tova thought that the printer needed more Care Bear Power or something, because she jammed this little piece of paper down into the guts of the printer's paper feeder. Once again, I'm amazed at the sophistication of Tova's methods for breaking things.

Too bad the HP QA department isn't hiring 1.5 year-olds...

The time for giving and receiving has arrived, so I'm posting a list of cool stuff I've been eyeing over the past few weeks. Here goes.

• Bookendz Docking Station for my Powerbook
• GPS Watch for running, hiking, and skiing
• A CS-1764 4-port DVI KVM switch (reviewed here)
• LOTR ROTK Extended Version to complete the extended trilogy
• PG's LISP Book
• The Little Schemer
• Strong Bad hoodie
• Elly and I need a new doormat since ours was stolen
• A new mug

Well, that's all I can think of for now. Stay tuned for updates though... ;) And suggestions are always welcome.

Dear Family,

If I don't answer my phone, it's because you read my blog and never post comments. This is not a one way street you know. Click the 'Comments' link and do your part or enjoy talking to my answering machine.

Regards,
Your Son/Brother/Brother-in-law/Son-in-law/Grandson