December 2007 Archives

I don't get to travel all that often, but come January that will change. I have two trips planned almost back to back to one another. The first trip is to Las Vegas to visit my dad for about four days. My dad moved to Vegas a little less than a year ago in an attempt to find a job. I'm not sure how well his attempt has paid off since he's now laid off from the job he had, but I think he would agree that he wouldn't be doing better in Toledo if he were still there. At any rate, I found some cheap plane tickets from Detroit to Vegas the other night and called him to see if he was up for a visit. After my phone conversation I felt a little bad, however, because I realized that having Alex and I visit when he currently has no money could be a bit of a burden. I gave it some serious thought though, and I decided that I would go by myself because I really did want to see my dad, and he's also in a place where he doesn't know anybody so he probably also wants to see me. As much as I would love to take Alex along, I think it'll be easier on my dad if it's just one visitor this time. What made my day yesterday was when I called my dad to tell him I would definitely be coming. He said he was excited, looking forward to it, and I made his day. I know I made the right decision to visit.

Then a few days after I get back from Vegas, Alex and I will be driving to Toronto for about four days. I'm really psyched about this trip too! Alex is sort of being recruited to a lab at University of Toronto for a post-doc, and he'll be visiting that lab next month to check out what they do. Since there's about a 90% chance that we'll be living there I thought I should really go along and check out the city. I've never been to Toronto, let alone Canada, but I've only heard wonderful things about the city. Last night I started making a list of the places I wanted to go, I'm totally in the tourist mode at the moment. I don't mind either; we don't do the tourist thing much. We'll get some geocaching in, probably on the drive there; we definitely need to add a new country to our list. One day Alex and I will sightsee together and then the day that Alex is visiting the lab, I'll be on my own. I personally love roaming around new cities by myself so I'm going to take full advantage of the opportunity. I didn't see a whole bunch of shows that looked interesting (can somebody please produce an original musical and not repurpose old rock songs) so I think we'll go to Second City one night instead. Our main day there together is on a Sunday too, so I don't expect a lot going on that day. I'm also amazed that it's only a four hour drive. Compared to the seven or so hours it usually takes us to get to Wisconsin, four hours will be a breeze! Now I just have to find our passports, they're buried in my office somewhere (eek!)

As usual the time after the end of a semester seems to fly by too fast to do anything you want, but here's an attempt at a to do list:

1. My blog needs some serious help. I want to redesign, I want to actually post more (but I'll settle for a redesign if posting more falls through). I realized that del.icio.us posts have overtaken the blog. I've stopped them from posting to my blog, but moved them to my FeedBurner so you can still get them through there if you really like them. If you don't like them then you can still subscribe to the normal feed, I think it's somewhere on my blog. I love FeedBurner though so I encourage you to use it. Other improvements to the blog include adding a blogroll that will be updated through Google Reader and maybe even an about me page (although that one has been in the works since I started a blog eons ago).
2. I have a bunch of photos that need to be uploaded on Flickr. I have some on my camera, my new computer, and my old computer. This will continue to be an ongoing process, although I'm happy to say that I have a suitable organizational method for my pictures now. It's not as painful as a process that it used to be.
3. This weekend, Alex got all gung ho about getting our music collection to stream through our computers to the PS3 (it's actually pretty cool). That was easy, but now he's all gung ho about getting our music to our backup server so we can access all of our CDs from any computer at any time (we're not using a lot of space on the server so we might as well do something with it). I started a similar project using Rhapsody, but I'm the only one who uses it and apparently Rhapsody is not compatible with the PS3 (even though it finds my Rhapsody music, the PS3 won't read the files). At any rate, we're working together to reorganize our music, and I'm still trying to get the CDs out of the cases and into a CD binder instead of on shelves. I'm on a mission to downsize our possessions.
4. I want to do some networky type stuff with my old computer. Right now the computer is gathering dust, I think we can set it up so that we can print wirelessly and Alex wants to be able to access our music through it. He doesn't always bring his computer home and my computer usually kills the internet when I'm on the wireless. Oh yeah, if anybody has any idea why my wireless network dies every time I visit a profile on Facebook or Google Maps, please clue me in. I can sit on the Facebook news feed fine, or any other app page, but once I open a profile my internet dies. It drives me nuts!
5. I need to clean the apartment. I hate my apartment right now, but I think I hate cleaning more. It's a vicious cycle.
6. I stopped playing around in SecondLife because I got busy with school. I would like to play around with it more, I've still been reading through a couple of SL books that I got from the library.
7. We need to start planning a trip to Toronto in January. I can't wait for this trip because even though I've lived less than 2 hours from Canada most of my life, I've never been there. We're driving there, and we'll try to geocache along the way. We'll have one day together for sightseeing and then I will have one day by myself while Alex visits his potential future lab. I'm looking forward to all of those things. I'm also looking forward to the idea of living there someday. I have not talked to a single person who said they hated Toronto. Actually most people I've talked to said they were jealous that we're thinking of moving there.

This is hardly a complete to-do list. I seriously don't know when we're going to get anything done either. We're leaving for Illinois/Indiana this weekend, and I work all the rest of the days. I might have some time over New Year's but I will need to visit my family in Toledo since I won't be around for Christmas. All this holiday cheer stuff really puts me in a bad mood sometimes. What I really want to do is stay home, not visit anybody, not buy anything, and not go anywhere.