Ok, time for an update! Lots of things have happened over the last week or so, not the least of which being my first two rejections from grad school. Disappointing, that. That said, I’m trying to maintain a positive perspective on things, as I have plenty of other opportunities that I can look forward to. I’ve still got two more universities to hear back from, I’m still putting together my application for the Monbukagakusho (Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Technology) scholarship to go to Japan for post-graduate study and if everything fails on the academic front, I can always explore employment opportunities in a number of countries. So, plenty of back-up plans and things I can do… just a wait and see game, figuring out my next piece for the Japanese one right now.

Anyway, the window guys came back and finished up and I must say the new windows are way better than the old ones. Very slick. I guess that was the whole point, but still, it’s impressive. The bed actually broke the day after we set it up, I needed to turn into DIY-man (for those of you with incredulous looks on your faces, yes, I can actually be handy from time to time). It involved measuring, drilling and screwing in screws. Either way, I fixed the bed and it’s all rather lovely now. ^^ In a fit of handiness, I also put together the filing cabinet, a little set of drawers on wheels for files… took a few hours, but wasn’t nearly as bad as putting together the damn desk.

Anastasia’s mother got delayed as it turns out, so she didn’t arrive until Friday. She has subsequently been ill and spent most of her time sleeping on the couch. Looks like she’ll be here at least until tomorrow (she thought she would be leaving today), basically when she gets better.

The television is still busted, as I spent most of an afternoon ringing every TV-repair place in town. It’s looking like unless we can get someone who knows how to fix TVs to do us a deal, it’ll cost us more to fix the damn thing than what we paid for it. I guess this is part of buying second-hand stuff when there’s no warranty and all that jazz but still… we didn’t have a lot of help or guidance, so we did the best we could. Seems like we got kinda burned and now we’ll need to figure something out… we might end up selling it to a repair place for scrap or something, if that’s something they do here. Ah well.

On the work front, I’ve been getting back into it, which has been good. I really need to figure out how many hours of admin it takes me per billable hour, or some other such useful metrics. I’m struggling with the idea that some days I just end up writing a whole lot of (very productive) emails back and forth with people, but don’t get a lot of solid, billable time done. Anyway, I’m back doing work for Dave again in addition to the work I’m doing for Dad’s company, and I finally have a monitor that Elicia brought up with her so I can use the laptop with the busted screen and get some of the work for Roger done. Shouldn’t take too long to do I don’t think, but I kinda need to be able to see what I’m doing! Anyway, I’ll be getting to that once I get that all set up on the desk. In the mean time I’ve been doing work-work for Dave and Dad, and a couple of personal projects on the side, which has been fun. I’ll post more about them when I’m done.

I also got introduced to Battle for Wesnoth recently. The whole thing is open-source and there’s some interesting things that I could do in terms of providing some web-interfaces to some of the unit stuff, or the development to-do list, that kind of thing. So, I’m thinking I might pursue working on some of that… still a bit up in the air though. It would be a good way to get a little experience in doing game development, or at least development related to games.

Anyway, things are still happening, so I’ll still keep writing about them. I’ve had a few comments about my cracks that only three people read this, so I’m thinking of compiling a list on my computer of people I know bother to check this… I’m not picking it will be a long list, but hey, I could be pleasantly surprised.