Good stuph, bad stuff. Late to the party but I'm in a sharing mood. And procrastinating, but more on that later.

On the good side: I booked my tickets to go see kleinbl00, blackbootz and ButterflyEffect in May. Which is a few days after demure visits here. Already stoked.

Speaking of tickets - I'm gonna see Andrew Bird. It's been a bucket list kinda thing ever since thenewgreen (I think it was you?) raved about his live shows here.

May also has Ascension Day, which marks the one year anniversary of the first date with my now-girlfriend. I couldn't be happier about how things are going between us. Part of me was worried that things would be petering out by now, that it would become stale or boring. I feel blessed that it's anything but. Which goes to show that there's always a part of myself worrying, and that that's not a part that I need to listen to all the time. Anyway, tomorrow we're going on a double date with a friend of hers, and on Sunday we're gonna visit her grandpa together. Last week we went to the Efteling with her ex-roommates/bffs, which was a lot of fun.

Met up with one of the professors who's coauthoring my academic paper. We went over it together, deciding what to do where. Now I just need to rewrite some parts and get my LaTeX up to snuff and it's close to being submitted. Slow burn, that one, but it's still going.

D&D was a lot of fun this week; we did a small campaign with someone else DMing as my regular DM takes some time off to focus on his internship. Everyone made new, fun characters, and I just love how creative and enthusiastic our group is. Our party has a were-raccoon, a judge and I play a deep gnome portal/rift janitor.

There's some cool things coming up at work. I have a call this Monday about potentially doing some consulting about / research into electric vehicles for Cape Verde. I'm working on a new data analysis tool for municipal transportation services, and we've already sold it twice on the promise alone.

On the bad side: I'm working my ass off and have to deliver an online, interactive tool by Monday. Because that's when it'll be presented at the Dutch Consulate in NYC by my colleagues. Despite us hiring someone local to do the data acquisition, they didn't do their job properly until last week, which meant that I could only start yesterday morning on something that we usually plan at least three weeks for. So here I am, on a Friday fuckin' evening, working on this thing and writing while PostGIS is doing it's thing. Which was also a bitch, because apparently it's 1996 and the default working memory is 4MB, which I only realized this afternoon, after it struggled to run geo-analysis on half a million parcel points and another half million footprints for 19 hours while ArcGIS did the same thing in 2 goddamn minutes.

It's also been too busy for our datateam for too long. The good news is that we're finally adding someone to the team specifically to alleviate us, but I wish they would be here already, dammit. On the upside; I've never made more money for the company than in the past month or two, so I have proof that I can be highly profitable if need be. But I'd rather focus on my strenghts, which are decidedly more in product development, which doesn't happen when a dozen or so projects call for my attention.

Another thing that's been gnawing at me is that my dad recently fell and broke his arm. In the first week that he started his new job, which after years of temporary gigs seemed to finally be something where he could stay until retirement. He's on a lot of pain meds and doesn't sleep well, and I just have not been able to clear a weekend to travel over there and visit him. Easter will be the next time to visit, but that feels so far away. Ugh.

My weight's been going down - I've lost 4 lbs since Christmas literally without trying, and with not a lot of physical exercise too. Hit a new, semi-worrying low today. Any tips to gain weight?