The weeks have been flying by a lot faster than I'd like. They've always gone somewhat faster, but this is getting redicuous. A big part of it is simply that I spend so much time at work. I spend 45 minutes to bike there, 10 hours working, and another 45 back. And for some reason I can't feel like getting out of bed until I've been sleeping at least 9 hours. I spend an hour in the morning just eating breakfast and taking the kitty out, so that leaves me with 2 hours of each weekday to take a shower, maybe watch a movie with YC, and stuff like that. This past Monday (or maybe it was Tuesday) I really wanted to do some work on my own project so I just stayed up all night and did it. But I think another reason time has pased so fast is that I haven't written in my journal much lately to remind myself of the things I have accomplished. I haven't gone through and organized all the pictures taken this month, either. So I'm planning to spend a big chunk of tonight doing those two things.

At work I just finally got finished with a lot of post-major-project work for our 2 big clients. Hopefully things will slow down just a bit and give me time to work on Junko. I'm going to feel pretty bad if we don't get that thing released in 2009. I have a couple other personal projects I'm seriously trying to find time to work on. One of them's additions to ContentCouch for storing metadata about files in a lucene index so I can generate pages of photos based on tags. The other is a DHTML-based (though ideally I'd be able to implement a different front-end if I wanted) game engine that I'd like to make a little D5.2-like adventure game with. In the longer term, I'd like to finish Crumpl and maybe work on some MIDI song-generator stuff that I've been thinking about for a long time.

This afternoon (before it started raining) YC and I walked to Dorn and got a bunch of tools and things. I got a wall box and a face plate and outlets to hook up to some dangly wires in the basement, and some other stuff to help with the bathroom fan I'm going to put in, though I didn't actually get the fan or any ducting because I wanted to see if they had something better at Home Despot first, and I don't know if I'm going to have a 3" or 4" duct. We also got a free trash bucket (using a 'welcome new neighbor' cupon that we got in the mail).

Yesterday we went to the library and picked up The Fountain, Premonition, and Munich DVDs, went to Woodman's for some cooking supplies (YC's been trying to make fancy lunches every day, which is cool except I think it's stressing her out), and then went to my folks' house for dinner, like we try to do every Saturday. For dinner we had tacos, which gave us very smelly gas. My dad gave me some more supplies for a little flashing LED project that I'm doing, and we ate the ice cream that YC and I had bought. We came home and watched Premonition. Afterwards, YC and I agreed that it was a pretty bad movie.

On Friday I went to work. We came home and watched Click, which I would have thought was really dumb, but I liked it a lot.

I don't recall anything notable happening on Thursday.

Wednesday night I spent up all late trying to get the front wheel off my bike so I could add a fender. The bolt must be all rusted into one piece or something, because I couldn't get it off. Eventually I just deflated the tire and jammed the new fender into place.

On Tuesday it rained in the morning, so we drove to work. After work we made french fries that turned out not that good because they were all either burnt or soggy.

Nothing special on Monday that I can remember or figure out by looking at the pictures on my camera.

Last weekend we went to the Treinen Farm Corn Maze and found all the secrets. As a reward we got a piece of candy and a certificate. The prizes there are lamer every year we go. That night we went to my folks' house for dinner, finally bringing one of the bottles of wine that I got from Dan Rooney and Adam. On Sunday we watched The Company and walked to Target and back in the rain. At Target we bought some florescent light bulbs and a few other things.

The week previous to that (which would have been the 14th to the 18th) we (YC and I) went to Schweser for 3 days, and didn't do much besides go to work the other 2 days. We did some overnight driving on some highways coming into La Crosse from the southeast, which I've never done before, making it pretty exciting (and tiring). I got up super early on Thursday to help make sure the new and improved kfeducation.com that I had just helped deploy was working properly. For the most part it was, so this was a big relief, as it marked the end of one of the 2 major projects that had been keeping me at work so much.

The other project that had been keeping me busy at work was the new metric calculator for WIPFLI. I spent most of the previous weekend (September 12th and 13th) getting that working at the last minute before it was due (I was very surprised when I came in to work Thursday, back from Schweser, to hear that the thing seemed to be actually working without issues). But I did find time to bike to Elver park with YC and wander around on the ski trails in the northwest (during this time I thought about my game engine, but this was about a week before I actually got around to doing the SceneGraph rewrite which is what I stayed up all late one Tuesday working on), and go to dinner at Lao Laan Xang with her puppet troop friends.

The 4-day week before that (8th-11th) Corey and I set up a new Linux server ('Robert') at EarthIT. I don't see any pictures of anything else, so I'll leave it at that.

The 3-day weekend preceding that 4-day week, YC and I did a lot of things. On Saturday we drove out to some park north of Spring Green to camp. After we had paid for things and picked out some firewood, we drove to the House on the Rock, where we wandered around and looked at stuff and smelled the weird House on the Rock air. Then we went back to our campsite, stopping at a gas station along the way to get some chips and Sobe because there were no grocery stores open. Back at our campsite, we found that someone had stolen our campsite and all our wood. So we stole some of it back, but not enough to make a really good fire at night and in the morning. We cooked some zuchini and green peppers and tofurkey brats wrapped in foil in the fire, and those things all turned out really nice. I also ate some marshmallows. I was thirsty, but the camp water tasted like soap. I tossed and turned all night because it was cold and I was having an existential crisis (I hate existential crises, especially when I'm trying to sleep). We got up in the morning and YC had already scavenged for some firewood and we made a nice new fire and I made some more marshmallows over it. Then we went for a walk around the park, and I dug a canal in the sand by the lake. After getting packed up and talking to some friendly neighbor campers with kitties we drove back to Madison and took showers and headed to Woody's party, which supposedly would start at 3. Adam had said he would show up at 4, so that's when we tried to show up. In order to get there on time we drove instead of biking, but we turned out being the first ones there. We visited around inside Woody's house and with the neighbors for a few hours before my other EIT-mates actually came. There was lots of good food. I got full. We probably watched some movie that night, but I forgot which one.

On Monday we biked to Belleville and had a picnic of tuna sandwiches and strawberries and watermelon. We had to bike through all sortsof brush, and climb over a fallen tree (with our bikes). For me, that was the most fun part of the weekend. I was thinking about redesigning my GWT game engine to be more scenegraph-ey.

Other things that we did sporadically thoughout the month:

• Take pictures of mushrooms.
• Pick apples at the golf course.
• Eat custom veggie pizzas.
• Eat YC's dishes for lunch.
• Talk to my dad about PIC programming.
• Bike home in the dark, our path lit only with our battery-powered headlights of ever-decreasing brightness (until this weekend when we changed the batteries).