We went Christmas shopping with (e:mike) at the Galleria. I think it approaches what I'd consider hell.





(e:terry) and I got to go see the animals at the pet store while Mike and Paul went to the craft store. If anyone was struggling to find a calender of guinea pigs playing sports, they sell one.

Friday my family came over along with (e:yesthatcasey) and and Masumi to celebrate Festivus.

We had calzones, salad, a giant snickers, and baked apples.



The best part is probably the airing of grievances, where basically everyone gets
to yell at each other for minor issues. I feel like it's a real family bonding experience.







Masumi inspecting some of our Squeaky Wheel prizes.

Do the Scientologists not find anything weird about having a christmas tree in their window?

I was surprised no one came out to chase me about taking a picture here.

We eat at Cafe 59 almost twice a week lately. I am so obsessed with the Moraccan Spiced chickpeas. It's almost the only thing I ever order there - spiced chickpeas, on warm greek yogurt, with a salad.

Most of the times the portions are huge enough to make my stomach hurt. If you consider I've been working at Roswell for 23 weeks, at at least two cups of chickpeas a serving, probably averaging 1.5 times a week - it's too many chickpeas (69) or 25000 calories worth of them. I also think I'm the only person who ever orders them. The waitress knows I'm going to order it when I get in.



This week at work I've started orientation. The classes are not very useful at all and it'd probably be much more worth it if I was programming during them, but I did meet a researcher from Germany who I want to try out my German on.

After work (e:paul) and I went to (e:terry)'s new office to help straighten out the networking situation. We wanted to move the office off of using their desktop Windows server as a DNS and on to openDNS, but we couldn't figure out to log into the switch, only the firewall. Eventually Paul found the switches address over nmap and surprise, it was the default password. Success though!


Terry made a freaking delicious soup for us by the time we got home.

Sunday was a lot of errands. (e:paul) and (e:terry) went to go help Paul's parents with setting up their Chrismas tree, and I went to be IT at my parents.



Before we set off we stopped for lunch at the new Balkan Dining restaurant on Kenmore Avenue. The portion sizes were ridiculously huge and cheap. We had leftovers for everything except for my vegetable mousaka.


Sleepy Mid - wiped out from a walk

Ferrets are so freaking cute

After Paul and Terry came back and picked me up, we went to Markham Pets to get Basra hay. The last time I was there in 2003, I was getting a guinea pig and it was disgusting. i remember bugs and fleas everywhere in the rodent cages.

This time it was much cleaner.

Basra's smaller counterpart if he weren't such a dirrrty tortoise. He also had way less space.

Little Meerschweinchen hiding in their house. I wanted to pick one up so bad.


We went to Feel Rite after to use up Paul's scam insurance card. Why can't they just lower the premiums by $250? Anyway,we a got a lot of granola bars and questionable brain supplements. I don't really trust much in the store with the amount of woo - like the homeopathy and steroids. I don't put much stock in these pills except they may give you a little buzz.



The tour finished with Terry getting the Note 4 before we went home. Paul and I brogrammed the rest of the night.