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It’s that time again (yes, go ahead, make the joke about posting frequency). Christmas is now officially in the air, and the age old question burns in the minds of my friends and family; what to get the guy who doesn’t know what he wants?

I suppose in an ideal situation, potential gift givers would spend all year studying my personality, habits, needs, and desires in order to deduce the perfect gift that even I didn’t realize I couldn’t live without. This is hampered somewhat by most of my potential gift givers living at least a few hundred miles away. That and having lives that don’t revolve around me. So for the convenience of busy Christmas shoppers this season I have actually managed to work up a short list of things that I feel I might like to have. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of things I might like, but it’s a place to start (or end, if you shop anything like me).

It is true, I have returned from my long adventures abroad to my home turf here in Santa Cruz. Well, abroad is a bit of an overstatement seeing as I barely left the state, but I was on the move alot and I think I can count the number of nights slept in an actual bed without running out of fingers. All in all I’d say it was a succes. Now I have to get used to everyday life again. Seems even slower and more mundane than when I left it, but I imagine that will change once everyone gets back from Summer and things start rolling again.

I think the Barbarians at my virtual gates wont be put off of their destructive rampage until I make some mention of the fact that for one of the weeks I was away on vacation I was at Burning Man. For those of you who don’t know much about it; it’s in Nevada not SoCal, and it is not a hippy music festival (I still get people asking me, “oh, you went to Burning Man? Who was playing?”). What it is, is epic. It is too big and too complex to be described in one sitting or by one person. You can get an idea of what it’s like by listening to stories of what we did or what we saw, but to really know you have to be there and feel it. I think all I will say here for the moment is that this year was a scouting mission. Next year we go for real.

Alright, think I’m feeling the urge to rant into the interwebz. Also the barbarians at the gates seem to be getting restless.

Some of you may already know this (word travels fast sometimes) but I recently bought a new bike. I feel I’ve been getting impulsive of late, though it came about after having ridden a friends road bike and being surprised at finding we’d gone almost twenty miles on a casual evening ride, and then spending several days researching and discussing what type of bike would be good. After a bit of looking, I decided on this bike:

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My plans to continue exercising today were thwarted by the simple fact that my legs are too sore to walk fast, let alone run. Not the usual bike riding muscles though. No, I decided that my side to side muscles needed to get some action and apparently those guys haven’t been used in quite some time.

The trouble now is the next two days are booked pretty solid. I suppose I could go tomorrow after lab, but I’m usually pretty tired/hungry/crazy at that point so it doesn’t seem to likely. I suppose if I eat a late lunch and have a snack I could have enough blood sugar left for a run…

Anyway, enough stalling. Time to get back to grading labs.