Christmas came and went. For the most part it was a good year. Normally I’m not into the holidays; I hate to go shopping during the holidays, I hate the Santa commercials and Polar Bear Coke CMs, etc. But I like that “it’s cold outside but it’s warm inside” feeling, and this year we played it up.

Basically, last year I worked through the holidays (as I usually do), but Xmas came and went without any pause. The bad thing is that the holiday work ended up being pretty rough. Everyone else in my workplace got to refresh and relax, and came back to the office ready and renewed: And I was strung out. This year (well, 2006), it was similar, but this time I had a lovely Christmas tree (with equal parts Hello Kitty, Star Wars, and Fist of the North Star decorations), Christmas lights, and was able to go through the whole experience of being in a warm, warmly lit living room while it was cold (NC cold, but cold) outside. I worked through the holidays again, but it really wasn’t as bad this time around, as I had that nostalgic “warmly lit, comfortable home” thing to return to.

Christmas rocked. Got a gift certificate, an Avatar the Last Airbender LEGO set (I’ve never seen this cartoon, but have been told by friends I must. Did I mention I’m 31?). I also got myself an “All-Ett“, which is an awesome invention. I quickly adapted to it, and it’s the best wallet ever. Got one for my dad, even. I also managed to snag a 320gb external USB bookcase drive by Western Digital from www.buy.com for $100, which is an incredible steal (even for buy.com). It now only has 1.2 gb free, as it stores .
For my far-away friends and family, I drafted up “The Best of 2006″ holiday letters. I’ll convert them to PDF and put them up here later. Just a quick newsletter summary of the major events of 2006.

So it’s coming up on my B-Day, heading to the 30 + 2. Interesting thing I just realized: I’ve now lived in this same house for two years, plus a week or two.

This is the longest I have ever lived in one single place since 1991. Seriously. I haven’t lived in any place longer than two years for over fifteen years. It actually feels weird to settle into one area. I constantly have that thought that I need to be ready to pull up roots and move at any given second. But I think I’m pretty much over most of that.

Weight loss: I’m making it a resolution to lose 20 pounds this year and keep it off, basically the stress weight gained over the past two years. I haven’t really taken it too seriously. Now, realizing that I’m 50 pounds bigger than I was when I graduated, it’s time to put on the breaks, back the fuck up, and get healthy again. I can honestly say 10 of those 50 pounds are muscle, because I can press and lift more than I could back then, and have been doing a lot of strength training on and off recently. But I’m not fooling myself with the other 40. Time to cut back.

Writing: My other goal this year is to finally finish and release the Tenra Bansho game I’ve been working on for the past three years. I’ve been lazily going through the motions as I hadn’t set hard limits. Now I have, and these past few weeks/months have been a blur of movement towards that goal. It’s falling together, but still kinda far. But this year it will be out in stores.

Langauges: After the above, all my other goals fall into a distant second place. But I’ve been playing with the idea of getting back into languages. Brushing up on Japanese, perhaps finally taking the 1-kkyu test (the highest general language test). Also, I want to start slowly and learn a third language to at least the “where is the bathroom?” level. I’m waffling on returning to Russian (which I haven’t taken since high school) and Polish, which for some reason I’ve been thinking about lately.

Work: Is cool. I’ve been picking up a mad amount of new skills. We recently made #6 on the “Fortune Magazine Top 100 Places to Work”, which I dunno if it’s accurate, but it’s nice to be recognized. This year I’m digging hardcore into fiber channel, linux, nfs performance, and network engineering. We’ll see how far I can get. Most likely looking towards a promotion this year as well.

I got off the weekend shift and went back to 8-5 a few months back. One problem with that was that I noticed that I stayed until 6:00 anyway. I don’t know what it is about this place, but because of the workload and other random factors I found myself working 9, 10 or more hour days regularly, working for several hours on the weekend, then crashing for most of the weekend (as I would run on 5-6 hours of sleep a night).  Last week I changed back to my old regular 9-6 shift, and damn my work schedule snapped back to regular mode. I’m still working 9 or more hours a day regularly, but it’s not as out-of-control as it was for the past few months.

Trying to think of what else is going on… I’ll post this for now and return later if I think of anything.

-Andy