Bwaaaaggghh

I've got either some sort of stomach bug or I picked up happy fun food poisoning someplace. We won't go into details, but for the past day or so my stomach has insisted on a lot of "alone time".

Hopefully I'll feel well enough to make the trip to Atlanta tomorrow, but at the moment it's not looking so good. =(

One stick, two stick, red stick... uh...

I just got back from Baton Rouge late last night. I had what I think was a very good interview down there, and I expect to hear either an offer or a "fuck off" sometime in the next day or two.

During the trip, I remembered once again why I hate flying. The security checkpoints are still a colossal pain in the ass -- especially when they had to run my backpack (which had absolutely nothing in it other than a day's worth of clothes) through the X-ray machine three times. Three out of four of my flights were delayed. The other was eventually cancelled, but not before I transferred my flight to another airline.

Of course, I know a little less than nothing about Baton Rouge. It probably wouldn't have been near the top of my list of "Places I want to live" a month or two ago. One of the main reasons I wanted to move back from Idaho was that we wanted to be closer to friends and family. So even though Baton Rouge isn't that far (7 hours to Huntsville, 5 or so to Birmingham), it still defeats one of the primary reasons to move to Alabama.

Unfortunately, I had very little time to experience local flavor while I was in Louisiana. I spent less than 24 hours between airport visits, and the weather was so nasty that I wasn't inspired to do a large amount of driving. I did get food delivered to my hotel room from a local seafood place called Ralph & Kacoo's -- their menu included such delicacies as fried alligator and seven different crawfish dishes. Tasty. I guess. I don't know; I got the shrimp.

Anyway, I'll keep the blog updated as I know more. If the company comes through with an offer, Hillary and I may drive down so we can see the area and what housing prices are like. Can't be any worse than Sandpoint, eh?

Hoopy Noo Yoor

Hopefully 2007 is treating everyone well so far.

We had a pretty great weekend. We met up with Alex and family at Cheeburger Cheeburger (nevermind the gimmick, their shakes kick ass) and gorged ourselves. It was good getting to see the kids -- Caitbug (who I still remember as the tiny infant at our infamous Monte Sano Easter Egg Hunt) is solidly into the "young adult" category, and little Bunbun is walking and talking and doing all the things that munchkins do. I'm very happy we're back in Alabama so we can see them once in a while. We also exchanged slightly belated Christmas presents; the gift card we recived put us over the top, should we be Wii-inclined in the next few weeks.

I'm still trying to decide -- the Wii is a fun console by all accounts, but I'm not sure how well it'll work on my HDTV (which has a bit of display lag when using non-HD signals). If nothing else, we still have the old Sony downstairs and I'm willing to sacrifice a few back muscles lugging it up the stairs into the computer room.

Last night we had a Battlestar Galactica mini-marathon with Bill and Dawn. Hillary and I had seen the first half of the season already, but they're some of the best of the entire series, so we had a good time. The Adama Maneuver (as it has come to be called) is quite possibly the coolest and most insane combat strategy ever depicted in film or television. Hopefully we can all get back together and watch the rest of the episodes before the new ones start up again.

Hillary and I spent the last couple of weeks catching up on our Netflix and DVD collection. A few micro-reviews:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Not bad. I don't read the books, so the storyline was "new" to me. They need to pick up the pace on the films, though -- pretty soon those kids are going to be thirty and still in high school.

Serenity - Pretty much the best film that could possibly be made for Firefly fans. I also understand why it didn't do too well in theaters: there aren't that many Firefly fans. A casual viewer wouldn't really understand the backstory of any of the characters, and all of the development that went on throughout the TV series would be lost on someone who hadn't seen it. It was a hell of a way to end the series, though; too bad it fell so soon into the Fox Wrecking Machine for Good but Misunderstood Shows. See also: Wonderfalls.

X-Men III: The Last Stand - Bad movies make me a little bit sad that I wasted my time watching them. This movie pissed me off. They basically ruined the entire X-Men storyline (such that it was, given the liberties taken in the first two movies), inserted a stupid plot full of people doing stupid things for no good reason, and somehow managed to make the Dark Phoenix storyline (arguably one of the best in comic book history) retarded and boring. Beyond that, they more or less killed any chance for a sequel that [i]doesn't[/i] suck. So, uh, save your two hours and just pretend X-Men III never happened.

Kind of like Star Control 3.