Sorry I haven’t posted much lately. I’m at the tail end of a serious crunch session at work. Trying to nail down some stretch objectives for our release candidate. Hopefully things will lighten a bit middle of next week.

Probably not though.

My storage drive appears to be toast. I’m a bit too distressed right now to really go into it, but I probably lost 200 GB of data easy. The rub is that I just consolidated all my data onto that drive because I was planning on building a file server with redundancy in just a couple weeks.

I’m still hoping for a miracle that I’ll be able to rescue the data, but honestly at this point it doesn’t look good. At all.

Last Thursday I went to Chicago for four glorious days of friends, fun and not-giving-a-damn. The punishment for taking a few vacation days of course is now I’m really under the gun at work, which is why I haven’t written this post till now. That’s also why it’ll be pretty short.  But here’s the highlights!

• Hung out with my childhood friend and good buddy Evan of The Sapiens Thursday night. Had an awesome German dinner where we each drank two liters of beer out of a glass boot so large that we had to put a deposit down on it.
• Reaffirmed that Mexican bakeries are the greatest thing ever, by getting some seriously tasty pastries at roughly 3:30 AM for dirt cheap.
• Got over my first hangover by staring at aquatic life at the Shed. I love that place. It was kind of nice to go by myself for once and just stare at whatever I wanted.
• Rested my legs after the aquarium by taking in a couple shows at the Adler planetarium. I hadn’t been there since I was a little kid, so it was pretty cool to go back and take it easy.
• Met some great people my college buddy Chris works with at Sears. They do some surprisingly cool work over there. It may be fairly different industries, but it was amusing to see how similar my job is to some of the people that I met there.
• Epic Saturday involving car shuffling, relaxing, meeting more new people, lots of beer to celebrate the unofficially-official St. Patty’s Day, cab rides to Wrigley and clubbing.
• Meeting up with my old coworkers from Crowe. In some ways this was the highlight of the trip and it made me realize that if there was anything at all I missed about that life it was that handful of people that I met up with in Chicago.
• Sunday spent recuperating, more car shuffling and one of the best gyros I’ve ever had (outside of Detroit’s Greektown that is).

Chicago is a fantastic city with tons of stuff going on. In many ways it’s my favorite city in the US. But despite that, it isn’t home. I seem to be one of the lucky (unlucky?) ones who can appreciate Detroit for what it is, and am comfortable and happy here. Still, I love visiting Chicago and there’s no question I’ll be back in a few months.

I’ve decided to start capturing more of my stream of thought on here. I think of all kinds of various things throughout the day and it’s really a shame more people aren’t subject to them. Let’s start with this:

If you’re brushing your teeth and then decide to add mouthwash to the mix before you rinse, will it have some kind of horrible chemical reaction? Will it explode, or turn to rubber?

These are the things I think about.

Yesterday I took a vacation day. This is worth noting because I have hardly taken any vacation time this past year. Unfortunately one of the major reasons I did that was to work on my taxes (more on that for another post). I did take a break after lunch to go see 10,000 BC with my dad and sister though. My impression of this movie was that it had cavemen, dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers AND pyramids. I basically expected this to also have some crazy alien twist and a gigantic explosion.

While the movie was good and entertaining it took itself far more serious than I thought it would. There were no dinosaurs or aliens or explosions. The movie was lacking because of this. I wanted something completely over the top that was unbelievably ridiculous. This movie is rated PG-13 and unfortunately it’s way on the tame side of PG-13. It should have been R. I just needed more in every way.

Camilla Belle was extremely attractive in this film, but again, PG-13. I was hoping for slightly more compromising caveman attire.

Seriously though the movie needed dinosaurs. And men riding those dinosaurs, using them to build pyramids made out of diamonds for their alien overlords. It could have been so much more…

Apparently if it’s after February you can’t buy a shovel in Michigan, at least around me. I broke my other good one with the last ridiculous snow we had and with another 8 inches on the ground I had to do something about it. So yesterday after work I went to the hardware store near me to get a snow shovel. Nothing fancy, just a good normal snow shovel. They were sold out. I tried another home improvement center: nothing. Then another. Then WalMart. I ended up trying five different stores (4 of them quite large) and they did not have any snow shovels.

Their garden centers were however stocked with lawn seed and fertilizer. Awesome.

My sister was good enough to come over with a couple shovels from my parents house and give me a hand. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with another 10 inches projected for this weekend.

Spring please.

I just got back from the gym here at my office a few minutes ago. Allow me to recount this vignette.

I finish my workout and hit the showers. As I’m drying off at my locker I realize I had left my deodorant in my Aikido bag from the clinic this weekend. No problem, I think to myself. They’ve got aerosols of deodorant by the sinks. So I wander over there and grab a can and apply said deodorant. As I’m finishing I notice that it doesn’t smell quite right… I look at the can: AquaNet.

I did my best to remove as much as I could but alas, my underarms were already done up with aplomb.

(Thanks to Paul for the title idea.)

I’m by no means one of those people that lives in a four-season climate and loathes the fact that a portion of the year it gets cold and (gasp) snows. However, anything can get old and the lousy March weather (especially in the earlier weeks) really has me ready for Spring. Yesterday it was 50 and today it’s back down below 30. And we might get another 3-5 inches tonight after what was one of the top ten snowiest February’s on record.

But it just means the Spring will be that much more welcome. A favorite memory of mine from college was going on long drives with my buddies in early Spring. The trees just starting the bud and the ground throwing off the shroud of salt. The sun shining brighter than you remembered it could; flip-flops in 55 degree weather. And of course finding a random pub off the beaten path at the halfway point, signaling that it’s time to head home with the stomachs full.

These last four weeks of Winter are the hardest to put up with.

They moved my company from the 11th floor to the 9th over the weekend. Now that I’m settled in again it feels pretty much exactly like it did upstairs, except now I’m near the windows. Embrace the cubicle life…