A bit of catch-up
So! Here's a bit of what happened during my extended posting hiatus. Long-winded post behind the cut.
I had a great time living with my roommates in Arizona. They were great people, and I still keep in contact with Kevin... partly because he frequently asks me computer-related questions.
I moved back to Washington State. I think the job at T-Mobile was the last one I had before moving. Considering I didn't move until August (if memory serves), I wonder how I survived until then. When I moved, I didn't have enough money to rent a truck or anything along those lines; I crammed as much as I could into my Nissan Sentra (including the big not-bean-bag chair), and packed away the rest - some of which my parents mailed to me later, the rest of which is in storage.
There were two reasons I moved... One, I had a potential job with Microsoft Game Studios bug-testing for new games, an occupation which I rather enjoyed back when I worked for Nintendo. Two, Sarah was there. (To tell the truth, this was the -only- reason I moved.) I missed the Northwest, I'll admit. The twenty-hour drive by myself was quite uncomfortable, though, and is not the sort of thing I intend to repeat any time soon (i.e. ever).
Eventually, the job at Microsoft ended (when the game I was working on was released), leaving me unemployed once again. However, there was a position in the IT department of the company Sarah's parents work for, and my résumé was enough to get me an interview - which went well enough to land me a job there. That was... March of last year? April? Something like that.
My car finally died, after leaking power steering fluid like a sieve for entirely too long. I'd never bothered to replace the Arizona plates on the thing anyways. For a while, I was at the mercy of Sarah's whims for transportation (aided by the fact that I was carpooling with her parents to get to work)... but eventually I ran across a '92 Nissan 240SX being sold by the owner for $1500. With a manual transmission. If you aren't familiar with that model, it's the sort of car that only has back seats to keep down the cost of insuring it. Every time Katie tries to sit back there, she hits her head on the ceiling. But I've managed to get up to 100MPH on the freeway, and the car hardly seems to notice. And it has a manual transmission. I like it.
I found the car at a garage sale last summer. There were other people looking it over, and very interested in buying it. I was the first person to come up with cash-in-hand. I haven't regretted it since; the previous owner took good care of it.
Last Christmas I became formally engaged to Sarah. We were already working with a custom jeweller to make her wedding ring - a gorgeous piece of work, white-gold, with filigree and a sapphire flanked by a pair of diamonds taken from her grandmother's ring. (The diamonds only, not the sapphire.) I managed to get an inexpensive presentation ring for the sapphire, and used that to propose. After some digging around for a location for the wedding, we set the date for March 28th.
It was pretty hectic getting everything ready in time for the wedding (and frankly, some things still weren't entirely ready when the date came around, but we made do). The wedding itself was awesome. Practically everyone said it was the best wedding they'd been to - especially those who recognized the music we played during the cake cutting (Jonathan Coulton's 'Still Alive', from the game Portal.) The bridesmaids had shoulder dragons, two of the groomsmen weren't male, the cake (which was done up to look like a mountain with a castle on top) had D&D miniatures fighting a colossal blue dragon next to some dice, and one of the -requirements- for the wedding was a chocolate fondue fountain. And it snowed.
Pictures can be found at http://www.chess64.us/ketchup/WeddingPics/ and will probably stay there until the coworker lending me the space removes it.
So now I've been married four-and-a-half months. Haven't regretted it yet!
In the meantime, I was promoted to programmer at the request of two of the other programmers at work. I still wind up tearing apart computer cases once in a while, but nowhere near as frequently as when I was in the hardware department. And I get to code! Whee! (And the pay raise doesn't hurt, though frankly, that had no actual bearing on my choice to take the position.)
So that's all the major things that happened, as far as I can remember. I'll save the other points of interest for later posts.
I had a great time living with my roommates in Arizona. They were great people, and I still keep in contact with Kevin... partly because he frequently asks me computer-related questions.
I moved back to Washington State. I think the job at T-Mobile was the last one I had before moving. Considering I didn't move until August (if memory serves), I wonder how I survived until then. When I moved, I didn't have enough money to rent a truck or anything along those lines; I crammed as much as I could into my Nissan Sentra (including the big not-bean-bag chair), and packed away the rest - some of which my parents mailed to me later, the rest of which is in storage.
There were two reasons I moved... One, I had a potential job with Microsoft Game Studios bug-testing for new games, an occupation which I rather enjoyed back when I worked for Nintendo. Two, Sarah was there. (To tell the truth, this was the -only- reason I moved.) I missed the Northwest, I'll admit. The twenty-hour drive by myself was quite uncomfortable, though, and is not the sort of thing I intend to repeat any time soon (i.e. ever).
Eventually, the job at Microsoft ended (when the game I was working on was released), leaving me unemployed once again. However, there was a position in the IT department of the company Sarah's parents work for, and my résumé was enough to get me an interview - which went well enough to land me a job there. That was... March of last year? April? Something like that.
My car finally died, after leaking power steering fluid like a sieve for entirely too long. I'd never bothered to replace the Arizona plates on the thing anyways. For a while, I was at the mercy of Sarah's whims for transportation (aided by the fact that I was carpooling with her parents to get to work)... but eventually I ran across a '92 Nissan 240SX being sold by the owner for $1500. With a manual transmission. If you aren't familiar with that model, it's the sort of car that only has back seats to keep down the cost of insuring it. Every time Katie tries to sit back there, she hits her head on the ceiling. But I've managed to get up to 100MPH on the freeway, and the car hardly seems to notice. And it has a manual transmission. I like it.
I found the car at a garage sale last summer. There were other people looking it over, and very interested in buying it. I was the first person to come up with cash-in-hand. I haven't regretted it since; the previous owner took good care of it.
Last Christmas I became formally engaged to Sarah. We were already working with a custom jeweller to make her wedding ring - a gorgeous piece of work, white-gold, with filigree and a sapphire flanked by a pair of diamonds taken from her grandmother's ring. (The diamonds only, not the sapphire.) I managed to get an inexpensive presentation ring for the sapphire, and used that to propose. After some digging around for a location for the wedding, we set the date for March 28th.
It was pretty hectic getting everything ready in time for the wedding (and frankly, some things still weren't entirely ready when the date came around, but we made do). The wedding itself was awesome. Practically everyone said it was the best wedding they'd been to - especially those who recognized the music we played during the cake cutting (Jonathan Coulton's 'Still Alive', from the game Portal.) The bridesmaids had shoulder dragons, two of the groomsmen weren't male, the cake (which was done up to look like a mountain with a castle on top) had D&D miniatures fighting a colossal blue dragon next to some dice, and one of the -requirements- for the wedding was a chocolate fondue fountain. And it snowed.
Pictures can be found at http://www.chess64.us/ketchup/WeddingPics/ and will probably stay there until the coworker lending me the space removes it.
So now I've been married four-and-a-half months. Haven't regretted it yet!
In the meantime, I was promoted to programmer at the request of two of the other programmers at work. I still wind up tearing apart computer cases once in a while, but nowhere near as frequently as when I was in the hardware department. And I get to code! Whee! (And the pay raise doesn't hurt, though frankly, that had no actual bearing on my choice to take the position.)
So that's all the major things that happened, as far as I can remember. I'll save the other points of interest for later posts.