Well, I guess I'll start from the beginning.

Following my update in August of last year, I ended up succeeding at buying a house (picasaweb.google.com). I now live by myself, midtown Anchorage, near a mega-church, two top-soil plants, and Sara's Sandwich Shop. Living here now nearly a year, I'm still enjoying it quite a bit. With a lot of help from friends and family, I'm slowly making the place into a normal home, and not just walls and surfaces with peeling paint and silly electronics.

As mentioned previously, my sister had a son in November: Khalil Makai (picasaweb.google.com), and married (picasaweb.google.com) his father, Dante, in December. Khalil's a happy baby despite having more allergies than I can count, and looked a little bit like one of the alien characters in Star Wars when he was first born. My sister didn't appreciate me informing her of the latter fact.

I tried this last winter to get outside as much as I could. In addition to family snowmachine trips, I played a weekly outdoor pickup hockey game, and further bullied others (picasaweb.google.com) to try it as well. I kept busy otherwise with weekly movie nights and book clubs and a short-lived indoor soccer season. I think at some point I even went to a dinner theater in Eagle River. Sometimes you just have to get out.

In May, I went down to North Carolina to see my friend Paul Kukes get married (picasaweb.google.com). He married his now-wife Abby on May 1st on the Biltmore Estate near Asheville, NC. It was my first time being to any Carolina, and I would definitely recommend visiting the North one if you have the opportunity. It was also my first time being in a wedding. Being a groomsman isn't so bad. Just be nice to the bride's dog, and move anything they ask you to. It's cake besides that.

This summer has been pretty standard. Ultimate frisbee a few evenings a week and biking around town (466 miles so far this summer). Just returned from a trip to my family's cabin, taking friends along with the grim purpose of fixing the cabin's failing foundation. We managed to fix it (picasaweb.google.com).

The common denominator of all these events has, of course, been work. I'm still employed, and employed at AT&T. Working for a big corporation is pretty consistently strange, and I'll leave it at that. In my dwindling free time (after I started rewriting idkfa), I also started a personal business (intersectionthereof.com) doing computer / programming for folks around town. So far, I've had one customer. I'll have to get back to you on that.

I can say, however, that rebuilding idkfa has at least reminded me that I do still have a passion for new and interesting projects, even if they're old ideas. It is good to know that I can still program recreationally and not be burnt out by having to work at the same time.

I'm not sure how I feel about this last year. I feel like I've done and accomplished a lot, but that I haven't really solved very much. I'm not sure what problem I should be solving, but it weighs on me just the same. I try to place importance on the normal things in life, things that seem to bring others happiness, and while I can appreciate them, I can't suspend my own disbelief. There's just too much about life I don't understand. And probably too much I've forgotten about while I was putting my life into systems.

I don't know what I'll be up to this next year. I'll venture a guess that home improvement will probably be part of it.