Roadrunner Twice

Ok so right, what in the hell have I been doing over here, anyhow? Assuming you haven't been following nfagerlund, that is.

• Working at the day job! Except unlike most of 2010, I'm not totally run-down and demoralized by it, on account of I have more or less free rein across my demesne and have interesting problems to work on and 've actually made one or two things or partial things I'm kind of proud of. I'm pretty busy, though.
• Writing Lulu and the Constellations! Slowly. Ever so slowly. It's in a bit of a mid-book slog, and I really need to pick up the pace. :/
• Regenerating! Sometime in November, after a year or more of happily practicing barefoot-style running in a pair of bog-standard flip-flops, I took an unplanned month off running, then attempted to resume at my previous pace while at the same time switching to a whole new footwear style with less sole padding and more skin friction. The spirit was willing, but the flesh got shanked, and my right foot gave me bullshit for MONTHS. I am now finally back to a point where I can run three miles without a lot of forethought or subsequent pain, so it's time to rebuild all those calluses and claw back to the seven mile mark. Also, since last year I've been slowly discovering the joy of picking up iron and setting it back down again. And I learned an energy bar recipe from rydra_wong's DW. Probably more on all of those later.
• Romancing! …with mixed results. More than one of the ladies involved is probably reading this, and in each case we all still really like each other, but stuff continues to not work out the way I would have hoped. Ah well.
• Aging! Yeah, so welcome to the last year of my 20s! I think I'm actually feeling pretty sanguine about this, possibly even pleased. My 20s were a thing, there's tons of stuff I'd do differently a second time around, but I'm actually pretty happy with where I'm at right now. I'm definitely smarter, prettier, and less deranged than I was nine years ago. Let what I ate build sinew and bone--I've another couple decades of youth on deck, and I'm looking forward to them. I mean 29 to be a swan song for this "I don't know what the fuck's going on" mode of being, so if anyone wants some 20-something angst from me before it's gone, best get in line early.
• Entertaining! Oh, and did I mention that threw my first successful birthday party in like nine years? (For which mad props to all the awesome in attendence but especially to misshepeshu.)
• Not reading, for the most part, alas. My brain's been in a bit of a weird place, part of which has to do with modernity-induced ADD, part of which has to do with busyness, and part of which is something else entirely. I've read a bit, I'll try and talk more about that eventually.
• Hacking! The Complete Albums script might deserve its own post eventually, but at any rate, I had this Perl project that I'd abandoned in a non-functional state months ago during the nadir of my tenure (poet: knows it) at QuikTrak, and I somehow picked it up and got it working exactly the way I wanted in about three evenings. Unreasonably proud of that, even though it never got the speed win I was hoping for when I made the change that broke it in the first place. Also, I've had a few chances to make code at work, which is basically super awesome. I'm kind of a Regex Whore, i.e. hey all you nails check out my bitchin' hammer, but it's very satisfying the amount of stuff I can get done regardless.
• Fretting and freaking the fuck out! Jesus H. Christ, the Republican Party is like a huge dog that bites you and shits all over the couch every fucking time it gets in the house. And I can't decide whether I want to kill the dog, or the brain-dead roommate who keeps letting that asshole pooch inside in the first place! FUCK. Also, this thing with Japan getting clobbered by BOTH aspects of Poseidon, followed by nuclear disaster in a not-existential-but-definitely-wicked-crappy way. (Is PDX ready for our inevitable 9.0 nightmare scenario? Fuck no.) Also, inspiring revolution across the mideast followed by the predictable brutal repression. Followed by MORE U.S. military action when it's completely unclear whether our ruling class has the slightest decency of motivation in the region given esp. our VP's fervent statement that Mubarak was "not a dictator" something like a month before we started dropping bombs on Libya? I am going to go fucking insane. Special props to the total and complete fecklessness of the American fourth estate through pretty much all of this. Balls to pretty much everything outside my neighborhood.
• Wait, where was I? Hmm.
• Anyway, world events aside, life is pretty great. I miss my roommate, I miss Kate, I miss my sister and my parents, I miss Eric, I want to see Robert and my brother more as the weather gets warmer, I remain a pretty terrible correspondant with my friends from Macalester and my non-Twitter internet friends, I could be way better at making shit happen with my Portland buddies, but… shit is decent.

Anyway, that's more or less what you would have seen if I HAD been posting all this time, all time-lapse-video style. Hi again, at any rate.