Long over due
So, as you have guessed, I’ve been busy busy busy. This time, there’s been an attack on my free time from all sides.
So let me start with the bad news, I guess.
My girl friend’s step father has passed away. He had been diagnosed with bladder cancer early last year. And despite his determination and effort to beat the disease, it ultimately took him from us in November. All the while, my girl friend has been battling a new disturbing issue of her own. In the middle of last year a lung biopsy revealed that she has a rare and incurrable lung disease. Her parents’ daschund nearly paralized himself a second time and has needed constant attention and care. My dad has been laid off twice recently, and is currently unemployed. It was recently discovered that my dad has some heart trouble, and his blood pressure was dangerously high recently. My own blood pressure has been unusualy high as of late, so I’m in the middle of some testing with my own doctor to find out what’s going on and to check if any damage has been done. My giel friend’s grandfather (who is 94) recently had a stroke.
I think that’s most of it. Needless to say most of 2008 and the start of 2009 were not so great.
On to the good stuff.
My girl friend and I are taking a vacation in March, shortly after my birthday. I’ll be staying at the time share, so at least I don’t have to worry about paying for a room. We got a decent deal on the car rental and the air fare. So we’ll be relaxing on the beach and generally just trying to stay care-free for that week.
Also, my birthday is coming up. I really wasn’t much in the mood to celebrate this year, but since I’m turning 30, the girl said we should celebrate. So, I decided to just let everyone know that I’m going to Dave and Buster’s in Providence on the 7th at 7. If people show up, great. If not, that’s fine, I’ll drink booze and play video games.
Work’s been pretty good. Actually this company, and specifically my new boss are really good to me. He’s been verry understanding about letting me work from home when all that stuff happened last year. I obviously wasn’t going to be at work with loved ones in the hospital, etc.
I’m currently involved in the (mostly) peaceful take-over of the Rhode Island Linux User’s Group. There’s still a lot of work do, and the web site is currently down, but I’ll be posting updates here about it.
The girl friend bought me a Wii for my birthday. I’ve got a couple games, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. Hopefully, in the coming months, life will be a little more quiet/peaceful and I’ll have more time to enjoy the console.
The holidays were nice. I got to spend a lot of time w/ family, and specifically I spent a whole day with the boys, which was nice (my godson and his little brother). We need to do that again, soon.
The girl and I have reclaimed a portion of the office, so I have access to my desktop again. This means I can start organizing all the photos on all of my memory cards, and getting them uploaded, etc. Also, she bought herself a new Sony DSLR at Circuit City when they were liquidating their inventory. So for out aniversary, I bought her a new lense, some fun filters, a camera bag, and a memory card. So, now we’re both setup with essentially the same hardware, except she has a much newer camera body with better resolution and some features that mine is lacking. We’re going to bring both cameras on vacation with us.
Speaking of aniversaries, we’ve been together for a little over 2 years, now. That’s pretty freakin’ cool.
So, there’s a lot more to talk about, believe me, but I’m at work, now, and terribly busy, as always.
The good news is, I have a little XMLRPC program on my laptop that makes posting a little easier / quicker, so I might be able to post more often. We’ll see how that goes.
