For all my grumbling, this month has passed extremely quickly. And it's warm out! By which I mean: it's occasionally been at or near freezing. Tomorrow is the big day, when maybe the solid inch of ice on my steps will have a chance to melt.

I did nothing tonight, wonderful nothing, and I've had a lot of days like that this week. I worked overtime this weekend, so I suppose this was my attempt to compensate for the missed downtime.

The only day of any note was Wednesday, when I went to Buffalo Wild Wings' trivia night with Rae and Noble Joshua. Our team won, albeit with minimal assistance from me.

(After Lawrence's contest, I'll always be a computer trivia guy — for us it's not about knowing stuff, it's about knowing how to find out what you don't know. In less than three minutes, preferably.)

Trivia was definitely a highlight, all the more so because I had a few setbacks these past few days.

Once again, despite hours of research on the IRS website — I ran through their withholding calculator at least twice! — I think I've messed up my taxes. We'll see how everything shakes out once I get my W-2, etc. but I started investigating this week for any early filing and it does look like I still owe the feds money. Bah.

I have to say, I preferred last year — can't I get thousands of dollars for buying a house again? That was pretty cool.

I also lost my ipod, or it was stolen, who knows. I thought I brought it home from work on Wednesday but there's only so many places something like that could be and I've already torn the place apart. It'll probably turn up, but in the meantime I almost went a little crazy on Thursday without 8 hours of podcasts to listen to.

So. I bought a new ipod. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it seems to get the job done. And since I had a few Best Buy gift certificates left and my old ipod hadn't been working so great lately, I don't feel too guilty.

And that's the end of me; I'm exhausted. Further updates later/soon.

It was very cold last week, to the point where I actually bothered to keep my giant gloves on when fumbling for my keys. It's supposed to warm up this week, but I still hate January.

Oh how I hate it. December has so much excitement, and February has that big circle around my birthday — warmer weather too, some years — but January. January.

New Year's Day, with a mess everywhere and a suspicious new year staring you down with its full 3-65. Snow, the certainty of snow. And cold. January isn't the start of winter, but it's the month where you realize what exactly you've gotten yourself into, the month of the hangover.

I usually get a bit of cabin fever by the end of January, and of course that's mainly my fault for never getting into skiing or snowmobiling or ice-fishing or any of the other winter stuff I've tried. As I'm sure I've written at some point while talking about deer hunting, ultimately I'd just prefer to be warm.

My first floor has a-lot-a-lot of green so fingers crossed. I'm still mulling over what color to paint the basement, a green called Painted Turtle was the frontrunner last time I looked at the samples... but now that Ben and Nora are gone and I'm not expecting houseguests for a while again, the impetus to dive into another large project has faded.

I've been hunkering down. Continuing to hunker down. Last week I finished season 2 of a Doctor Who spinoff called Torchwood. Yesterday I watched a surprisingly good horror movie called Broken.

Mostly I've been playing a lot of Modern Warfare II.

It's another one of those games where you shoot strangers online. But I'm also gaining experience and leveling up, like in an RPG. And my guns are gaining experience and the individual attachments for the guns are also gaining experience and there are so so many unlockables.

That game is downright dangerous. On a few occasions I've played until my left hand developed an uncomfortable malady I've taken to calling Modern War Fingers.

Even if I get sick of that game (unlikely from where I'm sitting) I have so many to get to yet that I don't expect to be bored this winter. But I do wish it were over.

I don't want to bore anyone with a tech troubleshooting story but suffice it to say that in the last week or so I finally figured out how to use my keyboard from the comfort of my couch. Apologies to anyone who isn't using an RSS reader like Netvibes to follow this site — I know sporadic blogs can be frustrating when you're checking them the old-fashioned way.

I'll probably be blogging more, not because it's a resolution but because I prettymuch couldn't before and I can now.

Anyways, I'm still doing website quality assurance at a large corporation, still working on the house whenever I get motivated, still watching movies and playing videogames and all that.

I lucked into a good New Year's Eve last night, despite my own laziness. I refuse to go to the bars on New Year's Eve, so I'd planned to stay in and have a quiet night, but Nick and Shelley were interested in the same sort of thing, and then Barry, Jenna and special guest Kevin decided to come too rather than go to Minneapolis like they'd originally planned. Good times.

It was prettymuch 90% King's Cup, but we were a good group for it. Oof, can't do that too often though.

On Wednesday I stayed up well past my bedtime to see off Nora and Ben, who stayed in my attic this week while they were in town for the Christmas, on Tuesday I went out to Sweeney's with my mom and my brother Josh, and on Monday I went over to Nick's to watch the night football game only to see it go into overtime.

I'm a little wiped from all of this excitement actually, but not nearly as exhausted as I'd expect to be. Really looking forward to trying to sleep in tomorrow. I plan on being totally dull all day.

It must be the right phase of the moon tonight, because my wireless keyboard is actually working as intended — which means the triumphant return of living room blogging!

I've felt a bit guilty about not blogging for those of you who actually read this occasionally. Moreover, I think it's bad for me personally to take such a long break from writing. My brain needs to write, and my life seems like it needs more pauses for writing and reading lately.

That's probably the main reason why I'm tired this weekend, although last night at Markie's annual Fall Festivus party I said that it's because I'm coming into work a half hour earlier this month or because I didn't have any heat in the house Friday night. Both of which are true, obviously. I don't know why anyone would lie about facts of this size.

Getting the furnace checked out for winter was a bit of an adventure. I called the guys Xcel uses over to do some preventative maintenance — it doesn't look like a professional has looked at the thing since 2003 — but after taking some readings the furnace man said he couldn't do anything for me and that I should get a new one.

Perhaps understandably, the home warranty people did not buy that line when I contacted them, and they sent out their own subcontractor to inspect the furnace all official-like. To my uninformed eye he seemed to do a much more thorough inspection than the first guy did.

Sometimes I'm perversely proud of this house, like when the electrician saw the ad hoc basement wiring they'd called out on the Truth in Housing, or whenever I show new visitors the hilarious upstairs staircase. I have to admit, when flames shot out a foot from the furnace panel during this guy's inspection... that was one of those times.

There was no CO2 in the air, but the CO2 readings from inside the furnace were really really high, and so the second guy shut it down for liability reasons. I spent Friday night buried in a mound of blankets, but the house only got down to the mid-50's so it wasn't bad.

I'll be far more miserable on the hunting stand in a few weeks, I promise.

Lucky for me that same company was able to send some people out to clean the furnace on Saturday, on my dime still, and I'm told everything is fine now. I'm not sure if I'd rather have the furnace break sometime this winter while it has a clean bill of health and is still covered by my home warranty, or have it shamble on for a few more years so I can save up to replace it with a super-efficient model without putting all my plants in danger.

It's nice to think that I might be able to go at least a year now without having to leave work to let some stranger into my house. Once I actually get the curtains done (I know! I'm getting closer!) I might even go a month without spending over $100 on home improvement.

Yesterday night I was talking to one of Markie and her-Matt's hippie friends — hippie being just about my favorite dysphemism in the world these days — about his buying a house, and I still think it's worth it, despite everything.

(I also really do recommend the 203(k) loan, no matter who you're going through to get it. Kick some ass with that repair money.)

Maybe this is me and my paranoia or maybe it's something very primal, but at night in my various apartments I used to feel like I was surrounded by darkness, and these days I feel like my boundaries are the walls of my house. I'm in my little fortress on the hill, and any trouble that wants to find me has got to come up all of those surprisingly uneven stairs.

Which reminds me. A few days go I watched Tooth and Nail, a post-apocalyptic defend-yourself-against-the-cannibals movie notable mainly for #1. The humanity-runs-of-gas-early apocalypse, still a fresh one as apocalypses go and #2. The casting of Rider Strong (Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World) as one of the survivors. It was terrible, but that's the sort of nonsense I get up to on my instant queue.

More importantly, I finally watched Little Miss Sunshine this Friday, after having had the disc out for two weeks. (You're welcome Netflix!)

I had such a grudge against that movie, and it didn't help its case by showing me a preview for Sideways and some other movie I hated but can't remember beforehand.

But it won me over. It's amazing now to think of how much I liked American Beauty at the time, when I've seen probably a dozen better movies since then that have the same essential message.

I suppose I should go to bed though; I barely woke up at all today and I'd like to have better odds tomorrow.

As a sop to the poor, housebound thing I'll be in a few months when Minnesota starts to become cold and awful again, I've been biking a fair amount lately. Not a lot — I haven't biked to work yet because I dread going up and down the ramps on Snelling — but prettymuch whenever I'm going to Minneapolis. Where at most it's about 30 minutes to anywhere I'm going.

I've had a few inconsequential, not-entirely-sober falls, and I've gotten pretty turned around in that strange city to the west when coming back at night, but for the most part it's been positive. I can get to Markie's or Town Hall or Cari's, and back again, without getting lost. Basically that's all I ever need to do, though there are rumblings about a more ambitious bike ride in the coming weeks. As long as it's not down that hill in St. Paul. I've pushed my bike back up that enough for one lifetime.

This was a busy week. I pulled out the carpet downstairs, which was dubious even if it wasn't visibly covered with the dread black mold, and I've pulled out what I can of the waterstained particle boards underneath. On Monday I have what I hope is my final code inspection, checking some work on my water heater vent that's been completed for months now.

I also got a letter this week telling me that I'm officially off of St. Paul's vacant house list, which saves me from a $1,000 monitoring fee.

I bought a PS3 Slim, or rather Barry floated the purchase for me for a month so I could play Borderlands co-op with him and Nick on the platform of his choice. Pretty excited about that, since I was planning to purchase one later this year but didn't expect to have the money for a while yet.

I'm sending back the Season 2, Disc 2 DVD of Pushing Daisies as soon as I get it on Monday, so that I can finish watching the (fantastic) series on Blu-ray.

I bought curtains, yes, the expensive curtains from Sears that I was complaining about on Facebook if you saw that, after pricing similar curtains elsewhere. It turns out decent pleated curtains are expensive, outrageously so if you don't get buy readymade from a chain store, and I refuse to get blinds.

(As everyone I've ever lived with has at some point or other noticed, I cannot operate blinds correctly. But I also prefer the look of curtains in any case.)

On Thursday a few of us got together at Cari's for Project Runway, which so far has been enjoyable, the terrible ads we have to watch now that it's on Lifetime notwithstanding. I pre-partied with a homemade and thus way too strong gin-and-tonic before I left, which I'm guessing was my downfall, as Jenna would say.

Downfall because even though I felt fine all night, I woke up at 2 in the morning, startled to find myself throwing up Girl's Night red wine all over my white sheets. I have to say, I'm really, really impressed by the effectiveness of Shout Gel Advanced. They should do a viral marketing campaign featuring twenty-somethings who make bad decisions.

On Friday on the way home from work, I realized I had a flat tire. Like really flat, either because I ran over a nail in the alley that morning or (I can't resist a paranoid twinge) because someone had let the air out. I filled it up again and drove home; it'll be interesting to see if the air has leaked out while it's been in my garage this weekend.

I should mention that when I was walking to my house that night I saw a squirrel, a rabbit, and several birds all fleeing in separate directions from the same spot. Another secret conspiracy against me!

Rather than deal with my car I biked to a coworker's housewarming that night, which was a good time. I don't know those people too well so I got a bit too quippy, which was unfortunate albeit expected.

Everything stayed low-key, but at one point one of his housemates was on my case for occasionally (and legally) biking on the sidewalk, claiming I could kill a pedestrian, which I think is far less likely to happen than my getting hit by a car.

(I can't remember who I was talking to about this a week or so ago, but I don't understand why some bikers insist that we all act like traffic, when casual riders like myself appreciate having the sidewalk as an option. There aren't too many pedestrians to yield to around here at 10 at night, and I don't count on drunk drivers noticing my LED taillight.)

Since I was still a little hungover from Thursday night's debacle, I biked home early, after three hours and three beers. And of course after assuring everyone that three lager beers over that timeframe is not enough to get me drunk, and it isn't, I immediately crashed my bike in a hidden sinkhole in my coworker's front lawn. I'm guessing that no one in the backyard saw that, because how could you not laugh?

Also happening this week: my littlest brother, Josh, is engaged now, which I found out on Thursday at Cari's (same place I found out about Matt, as I recall) so yesterday I had those guys (plus Paul, my brother-in-law once removed) over for pizza and videogames. Which is to say, the usual. I'm sure there will be grander festivities sometime next spring.

The walls are painted, the dining room furniture has been placed although I'm already starting to rethink the arrangement, and right now I'm sitting at the computer (which I've set up here in the living room, using the rather large t.v. as a monitor: yes!) eating some of the copious leftovers from last night's visit to Senor Wong. I am apparently the only one in my family who wants to deal with restaurant leftovers. Ridiculous and fortuitous.

It was my parent's anniversary weekend, so after hitting Wong last night we walked over to Cirque de Solei, where the eight of us had seats in the second row.

What I saw of the show was pretty cool, but unfortunately about halfway through we heard sirens in the background... and they had to evacuate everyone to a nearby parking garage to wait out the tornado warning. Picture white pillars everywhere, paint peeling off the ceiling in envelope-sized chunks. I resigned myself to not seeing the rest of the show basically immediately, and after about an hour they made it official and we headed back to Wong to retrieve our cars.

There were some seats available this morning, but not together and not in the second row, so we ended up accepting the refund. I guess that's a free hour of Cirque de Solei then?

For my own entertainment I've been playing Red Faction Guerrilla a.k.a. Explosions on Mars, but I've also been reading a fair amount, most recently God is Dead — the August selection for Noble Joshua's book club. It had some good bits.

I checked out China Mieville's The City and the City a few weeks back — I think he may be my favorite author these days — but it wasn't quite what I expected. I wanted a hundred little ideas, but as far as I could tell there was just one big one.

I'm reading a Tim Powers book at the moment, since he's apparently one of Mieville's influences. It's been slow-going so far though, not because it's bad but because there's been so much to make sense of. Crossing my fingers.

Well, I suppose I should go look at curtains. One of the houses across the street doesn't have any either, and I'd like to be able to look out at the street occasionally without creeping out the neighbors.

When we last left Our Bold Hero...

I didn't mean to go dark for quite that long, but blogging does eat up a fair amount of mindshare and I had — still probably have — plenty of more important stuff to think about.

The house continues to be expensive, just less so now than during that fateful month when I had to buy all the major appliances.

I've made a lot of progress: I have a nicely furnished living room now, and I'm sleeping in the bedroom of all places!

(It was only after my brother Matt's wedding that I realized sleeping in my then-damp basement was probably the source of the mild "flu" I'd had for the previous week, but fortunately I never got seriously ill while I was living down there.)

My dad and two of my uncles spent two days here last week helping with some of the stuff I couldn't do, e.g. installing new kitchen stairs, so at this point I'm just a dozen curtains and two gallons of Weeping Willow away from having this place up and running. Then the remainder of my chores will be minor enhancements.

I'm dreading painting the living room though, in part because I used three different colors in my bedroom and it took almost an entire week for me to anal-retentive my way to the end of that project. My hope is that since this green stuff is the only color I'm using, with any luck by the end of the week I should be done painting for a while.

More on what you've missed later, probably-maybe. I need to get through this last push before I add another way to slack off back into my repertoire.