I meant to post the exciting events of URBANA 06, which I attended from Dec. 27 through the turn of the year, but I’m not very reliable when it comes to posting here (you probably have not noticed) so I decided just to say it was awesome and i’m sure I will talk about it later as events warrant. To summarize, I was in St. Louis over the change of the year with a few other people (or should I say a tens of thousands). I spent the St. Louis New Year in the Edward Jones Dome and I spent the Missoula New Year in my hotel hallway sitting beneath this window and talking with the most wonderful woman I have been blessed to know (she’s the blurry one in the picture).

Since then, i’ve been getting back into the ol’ swing o’ things. Perhaps i’ll let you know how that goes. Wait expectantly. Or don’t.

tracks in the air
declare the passing
triumph of spirit

who sought to struggle on
turning inward gaze toward hope
brought by the morning light

As a sidenote, I am now fairly recovered from the sickness that was harassing me during the past fortnight, and per Beth’s suggestion I have decided on a name for my bear-shaped companion containing Grade A Clover Honey. This bottle shall henceforth be know as “Molly“.
This past weekend witnessed the recurrence of the InterVarsity Christmas Formal. As such, there was some standing around, some dancing, and a playlist that was, to quote my own category, “Decidedly Random”.

I, of course, proceeded to post copious quantities of pictures on flickr to relieve the weight of my compulsion. I think it helped. And since there are no videos, you cannot tell how poorly I dance…or, to put it another way, how poorly the word “dancing” applies to what it is that I do. I think we can all be thankful that we don’t have to see that.

Wow. This post turned into a weird conglomeration of random thoughts. I’m going to post it, but I’m blaming its quality on the fact that I am sick and my brain is working in the same way that a rusting old Chevy on blocks in the front yard is considered to be in mint condition. I’m going to add the fact that I just lost “the game”, and I’m going to qualify that by saying that I will do my best to avoid inside jokes from here on out, and I will replace them with references to obscure science fiction works and classical literature with occasional forays into the use of semicolons and arcane sentence structures.

To continue the molodrama, here I present two of my constant companions in these days of illness.

Speaking of monkeys, if you have not seen me recently then you are probably not aware of my current participation in the informal No-Shave November. As a consequence of my participation, I am experiencing my annual facial hair annoyance and (in my opinion) generally scuzzy appearance. We shall see how long I can keep this up…I bet I break down and trim it in less than a week.

On an aesthetic note, I have decided to use a modified version of the Connections Reloaded theme by Ajay D’Souza. This theme is itself a variant of the beautiful Connections theme by Patricia Müller. I will be continuing modifications of the theme as I have the time.

I have decided that I simply do not have the time to fully rewrite a new version of my Small Common Module System (SCMS) upon which this site used to be based (for an active example, see umtiv.org). Now that I have decided that, it remains to be seen what I will do with this site. My friend Steve has inspired me to do something useful with it, so I look forward to seeing what form that will take.