Author: cheerfulchaotic

Some highlights from the past week:

• Volunteered at sustainable convergence thursday of last week. Found out about the open house for thr environmental management program I’ve been thinking about.
• Went to “nick + job = yay” party on saturday evening. Met interesting peoples.
• attended the church young adult kick off meeting at second unitarian. Brain stormed ideas with ~30 other people of roughly my age.
• Ran botanica on sunday afternoon but didn’t get the key part because I wasn’t on the damn quest. Doh!.
• Finally got the dark portal open with my main on monday in a pick up group. 260 reputation points (maybe 10 minutes of group play, practically impossible solo), away from revered.
• Cooked two days of lunch on tuesday evening. And turned my nearly rotting bananas into banana bread.
• Took a half day off wednesday and …
  • got a used bike, with disintegrating foam padding on the handlebars, which will get upgraded a few different ways.
  • listened in on another union organizing meeting from millennium park.
  • hit the art institute (filled with pretty pretties and the art’s not bad either) for the first time ever.
  • attended the aforementioned open house at a business school (surreal)
  • grabbed sushi with nick, and . Ellen and I grabbed a beer afterwards.
  • I biked 14 miles in chicago traffic, part of it mildly intoxicated, much of it on clark st and escaped uninjured.
  • got over 8 hours of sleep, starting just before midnight.

I think I can get used to an eventful life.

The firewall function was blocking my DHCP. Only way around it? Disable the firewall. Microsoft, you are truly a class act. How have you come to dominate the market?

This was after I had to delete a random, registry key to allow a re-installation of WoW.

Lovely, truly lovely.

I have this cook book, called “the single vegan” or something like that. It has recipes grouped into a week’s worth of dinner recipes, plus a dessert and a lunch for sundays. (apparently, I’m supposed to have much higher caloric needs on Sunday).

I’ve been talking about how I should cook more often, so I ordered the stuff on peapod, and made the first meal of a week this evening: cauliflower and pea curry with brown rice. I should have pre-cooked the cauliflower more, but it still turned out pretty good. I’m skeptical of the recipe that calls for rutabaga (I’m substituting turnip) and brussel sprouts. I’ve had brussel sprouts before, and they did not appeal (ditto for turnips. For those not in the know, apparently a rutabaga is a kind of turnip, according to wikipedia). But I’m giving it a shot. Also, I need to find Aduki (or Azuki?) beans.

Having a honey weiss along with a meal I made myself this evening, after doing dishes and taking out the trash made me feel a bit like , in a good way. 😉

In terms of doing something other than healthcare finance programs analysis, I’m thinking I probably will end up taking some courses. Probably not go for a full ‘nother master’s degree. I’ve already got an impressive looking piece of paper (or 3). What I want is some knowledge. And truth be told, I may just pick up a couple syllabi and see what I can do with independent reading and research.

I sent in my 3 year service agreement yesterday (for the student loan repayment program). And today I find myself browsing sites about immigrating to canada (the us dollar is trending down, I expect canada to have the currency advantage by this time next year) while day dreaming about various environmental grad school options.

Really there is one option for enviro grad school that is compatible with my current job (nearby w/ night classes), but it’s spendy and rather sub-optimal in other ways.

My other options staying with gao involve moving to atlanta, dc, or seattle. Nowhere will I find a comparable managerial rapport to what I have here.

There’s nothing wrong with my life that moving will fix, or rather, the harm that moving does would far out weigh the good it would do. But the wanderlust it is strong within me.

We also just got a union. I am almost ambivalent about it, but not quite. It also seems that we’ll be tight on budget for the next year and the expansion of our organizational mission I’d hoped for is unlikely to happen any time soon. *ennui*

I spent like 30 minutes assembling an order. Then I noticed I wasn’t logged in. When I logged in, it erased my order. Not dealing with this now, but very grrrr.

less than $200 roundtrip to toronto for next weekend, hmm… =)

Saw the Petraeus testimony, was interesting to see how many protesters it drew. I don’t believe that’s typical. day to day life is same ol same ol. Heading out to DC on Friday. I should check with my sister, haven’t seen her much lately.

There is a war protest in DC on Saturday before ‘s bday party. I’ll probably attend part of it. I should get back from DC in time for board gaming with Tre, Spencer et al on Sunday. (though, given my luck with National-> chicago flights… maybe not).

Still need to figure out who I’m staying with Friday. Should do that soon…

My professional life the past two weeks has been like a giant version of the eat n park game. Fun times.

[ETA: The Eat ‘N Park game started at a chain of restaurants I’ve only seen around Pittsburgh, and mostly went to near CMU. The goal of the game was to have your waiter or waitress ask you as few questions as possible. Then the waitstaff caught on and started asking questions like “would you like that side of french fries on the same plate or a different plate?” I knew this reference would only make sense to few of my readers, but it was more for me.]