I'm blogging from a new room after some redecorating last month, because this September my friend Adam's little brother David came to stay with me while he looked for a house. He's there now, renting out the place (which is ridiculously close to the Blue Door, my local bar) while they sort out the paperwork.

Unless you count Ned, our mostly theoretical junior year roommate, David was easily the most unobtrusive person I've ever lived with — but it was odd having another person in my space again after over a year in this house alone.

It was nice to have someone around to play Halo with after dinner, mind you, but I'm used to being the only living thing here larger than a nickel. (Spiders or centipedes any bigger than that are killed on sight.) Even though it was no inconvenience at all having someone up in the attic I never use, it is nice to have the place to my self again.

With the warm weather I've been trying to have more campfires, which is harder to do than you'd think when no one I know likes having a fire quite as much as I do, they'd all rather hang out inside or at a bar for the most part.

I succeeded on Friday though, texting my friend Pete supposedly mere moments before he was about to text me, proposing the same thing at his place. Since the other coworkers from our little company drinking society couldn't make it, and I knew already that all my friends would be gone, cloistered or busy, we had him bring his crew.

Which worked out fine, although since they were more-or-less complete strangers to me, I ran into trouble when we migrated inside and I needed to come up with an appropriate after-party activity.

If I can get two or three more fires in before it gets too cold for that sort of thing, I'll be pretty satisfied; I'd be further along on that front but for the nasty flu I had earlier this month. Hopefully my last! I got a flu shot this year for the first time ever, so maybe I won't be sick all winter for once.

On Saturday, slightly hungover (there was a flask of good whiskey at the fire on Friday), Our Bold Hero drove Barry and Jenna down to 'kato, where we met up with Brooke and Kevin for lots of drinks, a round of the zombie boardgame I've been foisting on everyone, and what turned out to be a pretty good concert. I took many mostly terrible pictures.

(I'm hoping that someone else managed to get a good picture of me, but I guess we'll see: I hate most pictures of myself, but I can't use the photo from my brother's wedding on Facebook for too much longer.)

Today despite our grand plans to leave 'kato early (or should it be 'Kato? Not sure what the rule would be for an abbreviated proper noun...), the three of us limped home after noon and I basically wasted the rest of the day recovering, when I should've been mowing or any number of other chores.

This could have been a really bad week for me, and maybe it was. There were lot of intermittent irritations that I don't want to get into here, but I've resisted the urge to deliver some sort of verdict. Right now it's just a collection of events, some of which were good times. Why do I feel the need to label a bad day or a bad week like that anyways? No one is keeping track.

So yeah, what have I been up to more generally? I've got two things going in the brewery downstairs: some hard cider and an as-yet unnamed Dunkelweizen (a proper weizen this time, not a pretend one like my Dangerweizen). I've been baking bread as usual, that good stuff that takes like 20-odd hours from start to finish.

I've also started to cook myself stir-fry, which means my fridge actually has vegetables in it fairly regularly these days, amazing. Forgot to wash my hands after I chopped up the Scotch Bonnets for the last batch though — that was a big mistake.

I've been trying to get together with my Lost buddies Markie and Matt more, but until they catch up on Fringe we don't have a good replacement show. Last time they were over we watched Pontypool instead.

I really, really recommend that movie, but I'm also trying to tell people as little as possible because if I hadn't known what I knew about it going in, if I hadn't even known what kind of movie it was, it might have been one of my favorite movies of all time. I've been assuring people I've recommended it to that I'm not trying to trick them into seeing something they'd find offensive.

(Ideally you'd take some sort of test to see if you'd like it, and then a man would come deliver an unmarked DVD to your door and start the movie for you so you don't get any spoilers from the Main Menu by accident. Any trailer or review for that movie is far too much information.)

My brothers have been around more since Halo: Reach came out; I think we're going to eventually settle back into our winter routine of seeing each other at least once a week for videogames or a movie. I like Reach, although I haven't really played it by myself since I beat the (difficult) single player campaign.

Without going into specifics, work has been crazy. I'm on a different project from the other quality assurance people right now and it makes me a bit nervous not to have my fingers in the usual pies. I just know that someone, somewhere, is doing something incorrectly and no one is going to catch it.

There are many things as-yet undone in the house, some of it stupid little stuff, but I've either been unmotivated or exhausted whenever I'd had the time to get to anything.

I'll try to get to this again soon; one of the perks of this new room setup is that the keyboard always plays nice with the computer now, so blogging isn't the chore it used to be.