Andrew just hijacked this post, but I’m leaving it there for posterity.

Anyhow, I made sushi the other night. It was awesome. If you are interested in such things, go read about it and see pictures here! I also made mesir wat, which is essentially a giant vat of lentils. It’s really good and really cheap and lasts forever (and makes you regular to boot!) No pictures up for that, yet.

So I’m back to square one for social time. We’ve been moved in here a total of two months now. The first bit of that was occupied with the basics of unpacking and locating furniture. Then came the need of “need to be social!”, so I signed up for approximately one gazillion Meetup groups. Went to two different hiking meetups, and while the hiking was fun and the people were nice, the groups seemed a.) mostly of people a bit older then us, b.) mostly of people who were far more interested in expensive equipment and less so in “I just wanna walk up this mountain for awhile”, and c.) caused my car to get rear-ended. In an ideal world, none of these should be an issue. But, in any case, I think we might need to seek out people with more parallel interests then just the shared one of enjoying wandering up large hills. Especially since winter encroaches, meaning my car is much more likely to go sliding off a hill into a ditch whereupon I freeze to death.

November was convenient for social time, because of Nanowrimo. There were writeins everywhere, and did one every Thurs. at the library near us as well as every Sat, at random locations around Denver. Number of common interests was definitely much higher then the hiking meetups, but now Nano is over, along with the writeins. Mind you, I could still certainly use them, as the book I’m working on is far from done. Anyhow, I suppose it’s back to Meetups. Debating going to a Drupal users group. Or maybe a Harry Potter fan meetup, could be exciting. Gainful employment would also help things along as well, but then again my OWP experience, where there were lots of neat people, is not exactly representative of all of my employment experiences. In any case, I suspect this is a common experience for anyone that moves to a new location, and I’m confidant that time + getting settled in with help expand social opportunities.

As for job stuff? Still in the air. Have spent last week rooting around in Drupal. I need to learn how to make patches, as Ubercart is littered with inline CSS, which is simply not appropriate for anyone that wishes to design the checkout process without hacking up code they really shouldn’t have to hack up. I’d heard that Drupal was better for developers then for designers, this might be why. Of course, first I need to learn how to use CVS, in order to check out files to make changes to be able to make a patch. Which is good, in that I shall learn things and can put things on a resume, but still, it can be a bit aggravating when I have a simple little change in mind and I have to plow through 23489389423 processes to make that change happen. However, it would be super cool to be a Drupal contributor, so plow I must.

Oh yeah, Job stuff. Meeting tomorrow with a cousin (the relation is more complicated, but cousin works for now) to build a few University health websites. We’ll see how that goes. I may or may not be hired by someone in North Boulder, but the communication hasn’t been steady so we’ll see. That would involve some commuting and some working from home. Pay is a bit less then I could hope for, but definitely more then I was afraid I’d have to settle for. Anyhow, I’ll just see how things go. The router site is coming along, still some bugs but it all seems manageable enough at this point.

Oh yeah, $3.50 theatre nearby. Gonna go see Zombieland (finally) sometime this week. Yay!

Job hunt is still up in the air at this point. I just took a PHP test that I may have passed with flying colors, so hopefully that will get me to the interview step with a company in Denver I’m looking at. We shall see. Drew’s looking around at various banks and various military places to make good use of his newly gotten Poli-sci degree + globs of BofA & Cap1 experience.

Movies! We’ve been watching entirely too many lately, some better then others. If you have a chance (and especially if you enjoy war movies) you need to go see The Hurt Locker, as it is excellent. It was only showing at independent theatres, but recently got picked up by some major theatre chain or another. I need to see if there is a dollar theatre out here someplace, as all of the movies I actually want to see arrived in one glob. At some point, I must see Bruno, District 9, and Ponyo! Albeit, I will generally have movies I want to see that I’ll just eventually see on DVD, or I’ll just forget they existed.

I justed downed an apple strudel. Satisfying and bloaty!

In other news, this weekend has been exhausting. This is because so much stuff has gotten unpacked that’s needed to get unpacked. And then I put up a teeny tree and added lights, it’s quite festive. And then I made magical apple chocolate muffins, which were quite delicious. And then we got a new bag of cat treats, which was much less indestructible then the last bag of cat treats. The last bag’s been in full view of the cats for quite awhile, they never messed with it. With the new bag, I left it on the kitchen counter, and later find it sprawled in the middle of the kitchen floor, gnawed into with pieces spilling out. Quite strange! Perhaps they are tastier then the last treats. So I put it in a ziplock bag. Sure enough, the next day they drug it out and the plastic bag had a few teeth marks in it (though no tears). Really weird, they don’t even do this with their food or anything. Kinda makes me want to taste it, to see if these treats are really super delicious and I’m missing out on something.

Speaking of which, don’t believe for a second that salmon cat treats are more then just a dribble of salmon. The second ingredient is chicken on this pack! The salmon is more like item seven! Madness. Kinda like that time I got pina colada juice. Turns out the main ingredient was apple. And after reading that and taking another swig, it totally did taste like apple! Lies, all lies! Speaking of which, I wonder if spiced rum would work in pina coladas. For I have spiced rum, I have pina colada mix, and I even have a can of pineapple for bonus nutrients. Hmm, this must be experimented with!