Like so many posts before, I believe I will start this one off with a sentence. How 'bout that?

I last posted in January, which you may or may not be aware of depending on how long, or rather short, this post is. It also depends on how large your monitor is and whether you have it landscape or portrait, as well as whether you've zoomed in or out within the browser. Therefore, I may or may not have had a reason to tell you that I last posted in January. Still, for some reason it seems like I posted in February. I think something is fishy going on here. Yes, the goings on are smelling of fish.

Look at that. Two paragraphs in and no content. I'm a self-proclaimed genius. And now three.

I think I'll have to renew my subscription for walloftext.net soon. I was thinking I made this site in March, but I think I did it after I got back from Jamaica, and that would have been April. I think that because it's you all, my readers, that are reaping the benefits of this subscription, and not I, the writer and self-proclaimed genius, you guys should foot the bill, but being generous in nature, I guess I can fork over the $8.

I suppose I should cover the usual suspects, that is, the things you suspect I'll write about: work, girls, faith, tofu, et cetera.

Work is going well, just like it was the last several posts. In sprint 7 I was tasked with making a watchdog process, which is a program that makes sure another program is running, and running as expected (that is, when asked for pi, not returning Euler's number, as most programs in a bad state would do). This work also involved becoming intimately familiar with the cluster deployment process. After you get used to doing it, and have done it a good 20 times (successfully about three and a half times), it's not too hard. It's like installing BSD. I also wrote up a quick doc that contains a step-by-step for common deployments. If this sounds boring to you, imagine doing it for two months. Ok, so it wasn't that bad, but it's not something you wake up and go "yay for work!" about. (Two years ago, that sentence would have had to have been, "Ok, so it wasn't that bad, but it's not something about which you wake up and go "yay for work!" You gain a word, lose a period, and increase awkward sentence structure by 36%.)

My cats are as sporadically energetic as ever. I have my desktop in my living room, originally so I could see how WoW looked on 1080p, but now so I can finish The West Wing on a big screen. I'm in season 6 again, and that's all I have to say about season 6. Because I need the keyboard and mouse to reach the couch, and the VGA cable to reach the TV, it's a bit of a stretch, and the cats have taken to running from one corner of the apartment to the other, sometimes jumping over the VGA cable, sometimes jumping through the VGA cable, and now, without something holding it down a couple millimeters, I only get the blue and green parts of the image. Cats are why I can't have nice things.

Am I just material? I was so angry at Danza as a kitten when she started chewing on my new Bible's cloth bookmark. I get angry when the cats scratch up the walls, or snag a shirt or the couch cushions, or my computer chair (which by now has seen much better days and I don't care so much anymore). It's one thing if a child breaks a plate. Sure, the plate is broken -- sad times -- but the kid probably felt bad about it and learned to be a little more careful, and besides it was a mistake. But if the child was breaking things on purpose, wouldn't it be right to be angry at them? Then we introduce instincts, such as cats. By nature they like to run around and are curious and all, but some things they know they're not supposed to do, like get on the table or counters, or chew on wires. The way I know they know they're not supposed to is because they get skittish when they're doing something wrong, and I get up to go to the bathroom, while they don't when they're doing something fine and I get up. Anyway, I get upset when something ruins the purity or integrity of one of my possessions, such as the cooler on iPod action that took place on July third, 2005. The thing is, I hardly use my iPod anymore -- in fact it's been at least a year.

Another thing that annoys me is when someone gets on your WoW character and gains six levels, even if I didn't really plan to play it again. I like to earn my status in games, especially if I can't get back to the point where I left off. If someone had taken my character and copied it to a test server to play on, I wouldn't care at all. Also, I think my Staff of Jordan was sold. I only spent two and a half times what it was worth to get it, and vendoring it is about 11 gold. Bah.

It's been a weird couple of months, though. I saw a psychiatrist about my depression or whatever it is. She put me on some meds about five weeks ago, and they seem to be working, sort of. When I try to describe my mood, I usually say something like, normal people's moods are like sin(x), oscillating between -1 and 1, where 0 is neither good or bad, though more realistically, it's not as smooth -- it jumps up and down according to circumstance, and most of the time it's a flat 0, rather than steep at 0. I'm like .8sin(x) - 1, oscillating between -1.8 and -.2, and circumstance has little, if anything, to do with it. On the meds, it's more like a normal person, only my high is still .2, and my low is -1 -- but it's more flat than sinusoidal, and circumstance-dictated. I hope that makes sense. Actually, I really don't care. I still wouldn't say I have hope or expectation of happiness though.

It's kind of a weird feeling. Things look clearer, in my mind's eye, but bleaker. On the bright side, I feel a little better about myself. I don't really understand it.

My sister's off to Europe today for three months. Ladies, now is your chance to hook up with her boyfriend. Dear John letters don't just have to be for troops, nor for Johns. The three of us went out to The Cheesecake Factory on Sunday for her birthday and for a last visit before she forgets our national anthem, and her sense of what freedom is. She's basically committing three months of treason. I, the responsible one, with no guidance from a mother who's never left the continent, experimented and scarcely recovered from two weeks in Australia. She could have -- no, should have! -- learned vicariously, but some people just have to learn the hard way. May God be with her.

My mom is nearing the end of her Master's class. Finally, people will stop saying to me, "Your mom's in college!" and I'll get to stop hospitalizing them. It's a lot of stress for her, so I'll be really happy when she's done with it. I think it ends in August, but the regular school year ends in June so the last two months should be more cake-like than the three months from now until June.

Denna and I are still talking, still as good of friends as ever, though we miss talking to each other quite as much as we did before. She's visiting in May, and I'm looking forward to that. It's on her parents' dollar, so she'll spend most of the time with them, but she should be able to spend a night or two on my couch I'm hoping. She called tonight. It was good to hear her voice again. We really should just call each other more often, rather than texting.

I met a girl, Emma, at work who makes me laugh. She's the first one, girl or person, that's been within two years of my age. I've got her going to Chuck and Heroes on Monday nights either at my apartment (which I finally mostly cleaned) or Swood's. I'd be interested in her romantically except that she's not looking for someone and she's not a Christian. Emma is, however, a big enough player in the game that is my life right now that I've renamed her.

Several weeks ago, now, on a Friday or Saturday I talked with an old friend from CCF I never know all too well, though I always thought she was cute. (Cute happens to be one of those words with ambiguous magnitude -- it might be an understatement, it might not; in this case it's an understatement.) We had a good conversation on facebook while she was at work, typing between customers. It was a good talk, and so, for a brief stint, I thought things might, might, might go further. A few days later, we had another talk that wasn't as good. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good, and so for now, I don't really care.

This past Wednesday (it's hard to believe that was a week ago), I drove up to Bellingham per Hime's beck, for filming of her pirate-zombie-ninja movie. The first one can be found here. I'm not in this first one because I was doing the camera work (and now we know why I didn't go into show business of any kind). Swood gave me a bad time for accepting for the two weeks leading up and the following Monday (two days ago). I took a personal holiday at work to do it. It had to be on a Wednesday for spring break reasons I think. Swood is secretly, or not so secretly, happy it was scheduled for a Wednesday so he couldn't go. Anyway, I got there an hour late (I didn't know when it officially started, nor did I quite care) around 11. We were still two hours away from actually turning on a camera. I got to know a couple of the people I'd not yet met, such as Hime's boyfriend, and caught up with a few of my friends I'd not seen or talked to in a while. We did about an hour of filming outside. One of the girls was sick, like really sick, so I don't know why we spent so much time in the 50 degree weather, especially when the ninjas, of which she was a member, were wearing summer clothing.

I'm inserting a breaking paragraph here mostly for the sake of a new paragraph, but since it is a new paragraph, I had better change the topic. I'm posting here on a public website in hopes that someone with the ear of the sky can inform them that snow in the middle of March is not cool.

About ten minutes into the filming, one of Hime's friends, Mallory, showed up. I never quite gathered whether she was supposed to be in the movie or was just spectating, as I managed to have the privilege to do. After an hour, hour-and-a-half of indoor filming, in which my hand was in two scenes in a laboratory lavatory, Hime called it a day. I don't want to give any plot spoilers of this summer's probably-never-will-be-completed blockbuster, but I'm the evil mastermind. With a baseball bat. Hime asked if I was going home right then. I wanted some time with friends that didn't involve directing, and suggested we should all go out for dinner to Applebee's at 9, when they have half price nachos. Then, all but five of us left, leaving Hime, her boyfriend, another male friend of hers, Mallory, and me. Hime, and the two guys not associated with the pronoun 'me' (saying "other guys" left it ambiguous as to whether I was saying Hime was a guy as well [oh man, what was the amazingly ambiguous sentence I heard or thought up this morning? There was no way to disambiguate it, and still use the expression. This is going to bug me. It was awesome!]), left to do something, so Mallory and I played a mind-riveting, tear-jerking, heart palpating, sitting on the edge of your seat, game of Sorry. I won after an unexpected comeback (ie, "your mom!"). I know there's nothing there between us, but every now and then this past week I've thought about her. She laughed at some math jokes, so that's a plus. She's ridiculously cute (no disambiguation need there). Her facebook says she's a Christian, and we didn't get into any faith-related conversations during my visit so I don't have reason to suspect differently. I just can't tell whether we'd be good together (in the very hypothetical hypothetical in which we're together at all), or if she'd drive me crazy. A couple of times she shot me down after I'd said something that I thought was fairly harmless. I've done that many times on accident, shooting someone down and making it awkward, and I feel bad afterwards but don't usually say something to the person, so maybe she did the same thing? If that's the case, I don't think I'd be driven crazy.

This is the point where you all think I'm girl-crazed because I've talked about three girls in effectively three paragraphs (the one that was split up by the weather rant doesn't count). Honestly, I don't think I am. First, for the first time in a long while, I'm actually content in that part of my life. I don't need a girlfriend; I'm fine alone, or at least, I don't crave the enhancement a girlfriend would bestow on my life. That is, other parts of my life certainly aren't fine right now, but the fact I don't have a girlfriend is no such part. Second, these are just my thoughts, and any guy that can say he doesn't notice three cute girls in two months is lying, blind, or alone (but if he's alone, how did he tell you? A mighty fine question, my friend).

It's past midnight now, so I should probably wrap this up soon. I wrote the first few paragraphs yesterday before heading south for Chuck, actually, but the same holds true today, so I didn't mess with them. However, tomorrow things change, as it's April, and much of this post's validity relies on it being March.

I bought a PS3 this past month. I got something like $3400 back from the government borrowing too much money from me. I think $600 of that was a stimulus package, which, as The West Wing has taught me, is an advance, not a rebate, so I haven't spent that money. I bought the console as both a console and a BluRay player. There aren't many games I'm interested in playing yet, though I bet FFXIII will look nicer on the PS3 than the 360 by a little. Either way, BluRay'd Batman is pretty amazing looking.

About three weeks ago, Solomon and Rufus both emailed me within a couple days of each other. I responded to both of them on the same day, with effectively a blog post. To Solomon, I noted that I'd be in Bellingham on this past Wednesday, and that I'd love to visit, but he never responded. Neither did Rufus for that matter. I'm guessing they were both on mission trips that week, but it was still a week to respond. Maybe it took a week to read it, and then they still had to pack?

I'm meeting with my pastor tomorrow over lunch. I think I've said this before, but we do that about once a month or so. Sometimes I go with something to talk to him about, but this time and last time I haven't. Mostly just catching up and bouncing ideas of each other. And of course eating.

There's more to write about -- there's always more to write about -- but I think I'll leave that for another day. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see. *dog with shifty eyes*

Future topics of importance include Rune Factory Frontier and what's been going on with my faith.