The rest of August has been busy busy busy so far. At work, we're in the "Let's get all our system updates done before the new term starts" mode, and there is a LOT to get done. Combined with the humidity at night leading to some restless sleep, I've been getting a bit run down and tired.

This Friday was a particularly nasty day at work. Edit: I probably shouldn't be blogging to much about stuff that really is an internal work thing. Let's just leave it at the fact that it was a tense afternoon.

I haven't climbed in a couple weeks now. I was starting to feel it at the beginning of the week, and I mentioned it to D&R, and the suggested that I come to one of the boxing training sessions that was part of their boxing gym's open house yesterday. So I got talked into going to a one hour technical boxing class, yesterday afternoon. I was in pain by the end of the class. And I possibly over exerted myself punching. My left shoulder is still a bit sore. And I've got that day-later muscle ache that invariably sets in if I work out muscles that aren't used to it. I've been talked into signing up for a four-week session, two evening classes a week. We'll see how that goes.

The painting is pretty much done. I still have some very minor touch ups to do, but it seemed more important to regain some living space at the time, and so I'm slowly getting things back into place.

The beach was fabulous, as one might expect. I had a whole bunch of days just doing nothing important, which is pretty much the perfect vacation. Then I immediately trundled off to Toronto for an evening to watch Jonathan Coulton at the Lula Lounge. The opening act, Paul and Storm was also really good, and I think all the performers were having as much fun as the audience was. Plus, JoCo signed my Softies, which is a bit of a story in and of itself.

The weather has been quite variable. Hot, cold, sunny, wet, off, on. But we've had a couple of really nice days this week, and the weekend looks equally awesome. I'm off to visit friends at the beach that I hardly ever get to see, and I'm very much looking forward to it. I'm just getting my gear ready now to head out.

In the meantime, I've finally got around to doing something about making the place I live in a little brighter. The person I'd bought it from had chosen some really nice warm colours for all the rooms, so I hadn't ever bothered to really worry about it, but the main room's main wall is this deep red which, especially in the winter, makes everything seem that much darker. Plus, a recent shopping trip to Ikea netted me some rather nice shelving, all in a dark mahogany colour. It's a bit much. So it's time to paint!

What you're seeing is a reasonable facsimile of my colour selections (unless you've overridden the CSS, in which case I have no idea what you're seeing). The furniture I have is the orange and dark brown, and I can't do much about that. The deep red wall is going to be painted the same light beige as the rest of the walls in the main area, and I have a much smaller wall that's going to be painted that "Soaring Eagle" blue.

I'll post some before and after photos when I get farther along in the process! For now though, I'm off to the beach!

Once the exam's done, I'm going to have over four whole months without all that book learnin'. I'm not sure what to do with my time. I've actually considered picking up WoW again, for kicks. I'm told there's a referral program where active players can get a free month if they bring back an inactive player to the fold. Aptly titled the Scroll of Resurrection

So I'm going to assume that someone out there who reads this (though I really don't know how big my audience is, to be honest) is a WoW player. If you want a free month, send me an e-mail, and I'll give you my WoW account name or the e-mail address I used to sign up, or whatever it is that's needed to make this thing work.

Classes are done for the term now, and I handed in my last assignment for the term on Monday. Now there are no obligations remaining until my final exam on the 22nd.

Oh, there's that work thing, I suppose...

I actually took a week's vacation from work in February. Reading week was the week of the 18th, and since I didn't have any classes, I thought it would be a good opportunity to just not come in to school at all. What did I do all week? Nothing. I read a bit. Had coffee. Played some video games. It was fantastic.

One of those video games was the North American release of Professor Layton and the Curious Village. That's right. I wussed out. I gave up trying to translate the import version and just played the English one. It's a fun game though. Played it for two days straight, and zipped through the whole thing. Decent story, logic puzzles galore, smooth animation and interface. Zero replay value though.

I think that over the Christmas break, someone must have buried a giant supermagnet underneath the Math building. Since I've come back, I've been dealing with five systems that have had hard drive issues of one sort or another. It's been a little frustrating.

My network flows course has been pretty straight-forward so far. The lecturer hasn't taught before, and is sticking pretty closely to the course notes, and in that respect, she's doing well enough. The material isn't terribly challenging so far, but we'll see how things progress.

Life otherwise is pretty quiet. I've been trying to save up some money by not eating out for lunch (maybe only once a week, instead of every day), and not buying bus tickets. That's been working reasonably well so far. Those two things will save me about $50 a week. I've been making far too many big purchases recently (and am thinking about one more) so this will certainly help. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of staying in, and watching DVDs. I probably should get out more.