Oww, my blisters. And my legs. And, weirdly, my shoulders. That’s right. I ran so much that my SHOULDERS hurt. But it was good.

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After many searches, we have purchased our Peru flights. Aug. 31 - Sept 18. Don’t cry too hard.

I’m freakin’ excited.

Occasionally, I get a spam comment, and I’m reminded I have one of these.

So what’s new? First, the trip to San Diego with Rachel was really great. Highlights include:

• I got to see Pure Yellow Colour not once, but twice, including a fantastic rendition of the St. Urho’s Day song that I requested be written, which also featured Josh on the toy accordion and Rachel, Robyn, and me on percussion. We rocked. Not as much as Pure Yel and Low Colour, but that’s not surprising.
• The conference’s opening night party was on the USS Midway, a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Diego harbor. There was food from the areas around the Midway’s old ports of call (Asia, Mediterranean Sea, and San Diego), and we were able to find a decent amount of veggie options, plus a far more extensive collection of desserts. When I was living in San Diego, I hadn’t been aware of the Midway’s existence, so it was a fun surprise.
• Conference amenities at the Hyatt were awesome. And not just because they were free (but of course that helped). The food was yummy. There was a bit of a problem with the staff not knowing the vegetarianity (shut up, that’s totally a word!) of the salad dressing and otherwise not recognizing our little vegetarian cards as meaning “don’t give us meat”, but otherwise the vegetarian entrees were great. It wasn’t just the meat dishes without the meat. Mmm, it makes me hungry just to think about it all. It also made for some interesting table conversation with the meat-eaters, ranging from looks of panic that came when they thought they’d have to eat what we were eating to people who had dated or been married to vegetarians in the past.
• Mmmm, yummy dining out. We had a fantastic dinner at Spread, who call their food “nouveau comfort food” (and don’t you dare ask me to explain “nouveau” to you). It’s all vegetarian/vegan food, made with fresh ingredients found at local farmer’s markets. We had a Thai pizza, vegetarian tacos, and yellow curry oatmeal. All delicious, but that oatmeal was just amazingly good. Mmmmm. Spread is known for their peanut butters (they have 100+ varieties), so the dessert was a chocolate peanut butter with fruit and bread to dip. And they have a bubble chair. San Diego people who are not afraid of non-standard foods, you must eat there. Which may have just ruled out anyone who might read this. Sad. We also went to Pokez, which has some cheap and tasty vegetarian Mexican food, and Royal India, which made us one of the few people eating Indian food on St. Patrick’s Day. Rachel is a pro at finding good places to eat.
• We also got to see a bunch of people who I hadn’t seen in a while (or, in the case of Sean, who I hadn’t seen in a while when I made the plans, but then saw two days before I left for San Diego), which is always fun.
• Pictures!

As for what else has been going on, I’ll tell you later, since this has been half-written for way too long. See, Kathy? An update.

Comings: Steph and Rachel came to play this weekend. I’m still too tired to elaborate on the details, but it was a fantastically fun weekend. We made some adventurous sushi, including PBJB sushi (peanut butter, blackberry preserves, and banana), and sushiritto (refried beans, raw onion, cilantro, and olives, then topped with a dollop of salsa and a leaf of cilantro). We went to Haight-Ashbury and shopped, and I think we all ended up with something we were excited about. Mine was the L.E.O. album I’ve been meaning to buy for a while, as well as the copy of the Pernice Brothers‘ “Yours, Mine, & Ours” which I have been listening to obsessively on Yahoo! Music and can now use to convert other people to the band, and also a couple of other CDs that I can’t remember right now. Thus is the curse of Amoeba, where I buy more than I can listen to immediately. All in all, an excellent weekend. 17 more days until Rachel and I invade San Diego. Mwahaha.

Goings: After it being a hypothetical plan for over a year, Rachel and I are making our Peru trip a reality. She and I both have the clearance for the vacation time. We’ve narrowed down which volunteer program we are interested in. We have a rough timeline of what we want to do while we’re there. Que excitante

For a while, I was doing so well with doing real updates, but now we’re back to the ol’ list of things I’ve been doing…

I survived Christmas with the two families. I think it was probably scarier for Allison’s family than for me, since a food fight cooperation broke up, due to a loophole in my mom’s attempt to stop me from shooting whipped cream across the room. She said that your partner had to be within 3 feet, which turns out to be greater than the distance a can of whipped cream can shoot horizontally. Incidentally, we did discover that holding a can of whipped cream three feet above someone’s head can get it pretty close to into their mouth. And in their hair, but that’s a small price to pay.

Allison and I rung in the new year with Rachel and her family in Minnesota, where Rachel scored us a last-minute snow storm after a couple of days of boring weather. We played Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls and Munchkin, went for a walk in the snow, ate at Al’s Breakfast (still home to the best omelet I’ve ever eaten), shopped at the Mall of America, had yummy Indian food, and had a jolly good time. Some photos from the trip. I’m counting the days until Rachel comes out again in February, which happens to be one day before Stephie to visit.

Work has been crazy busy, but still exciting. I spent a couple of days this week on Bangalore time, which was exhausting. I’m getting too old to work at midnight. So different from a few years ago when I did my best work after 10pm.

Speaking of exhausting, I’ve been going to Community Bootcamp 5 days a week, which has been kicking my ass (in a good way!). I’m also going to start running again, training for Bay To Breakers in May (although it sounds like Blake won’t be able to run with me this year) and The Relay in July, which I’ll be running as part of a Yahoo! team (and don’t think I won’t be hitting y’all up for donations for Organs R Us). I’m trying to get back to my fighting weight again, since I’ve been putting on a couple of pounds lately.

In less painful news, I bought myself a mandolin:

It just came on Friday, but I’m already getting the hang of it. Within an hour, I had a couple of chords down and could play the verse/chorus of Will Hoge’s “(Better Off) Now That You’re Gone” (first three chords in my book were C, G, and F) as well as Glen Phillips’ Duck and Cover (I suppose that having a lyric from a song tattooed on your body makes you more likely to play it each time you pick up an instrument). I’ve started learning Losing My Religion (well, what song do YOU think of when you think of a mandolin?), and that’s been going pretty well. Once I got the bridge height figured out, the hardest thing has been tuning (and retuning) it. With the pairs of strings, being even slightly out of tune really stands out. Who wants to jam?

Nothing says Christmas-time like my mom talking about having to explain to the kids in her class the reasoning behind not saying “cha cha cha” after every line of the song when they sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus (they’ve grasped that you don’t say “and many more…” at the end, because he doesn’t have any more). That never ceases to crack me up.

My last Christmas gift is on the truck for delivery, so all is well. Now I just need to do some wrapping. I feel like there’s a joke about old-school wrapping in here somewhere, but I’m too busy to try to dig it out.

Allison’s family is in town, and it’s T minus 26 hours until the families begin to meet. Scary.

That’s all I’ve got. Happy holidays to you and yours.

A bunch of things, since I’ve been forgetting to post lately:

• Vance Degeneres has joined Cowboy Mouth to replace the recently-departed Paul Sanchez. It sounds like the Mouth will be in California early next year. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen them, so I’m excited.
• Exercise last week was a complete success. So far, I’m also on track for this week. I’m contemplating training for either a marathon or a half-marathon. My joints and I need to have a long talk about whether or not it’s worth it.
• Yahoo! has announced a big reorganization. I don’t know much more than what’s in the press. I’m sure Valleywag knows more than I do (or at least thinks they do).
• So far, my holiday time has been booked with spending time with Allison’s family, running to the airport to meet Ashlee during her layover on Christmas Eve, then heading to Minneapolis for New Year’s. If anyone else wants to see me, book your time now. I’ve a very busy guy.
• Recent music purchases of Brian Vander Ark, Paul Sanchez, Pete Droge, and Minibar have all been pleasing on the ears.

This was written on the plane, but I just now got it off of my Treo, so the tense may be a bit off. Deal with it.

Another visit to Rachel and Minnesota come and gone. Too quick, as always. We did manage to pack it full of cooking, eating, concerts, a dancing toddler, furniture shopping, exercise at the gym across the street, Peru planning, and great conversation, so I have a hard time complaining too much.
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Wait, baby, stop yelling. I haven’t been seeing another blog, I swear! No, I’m not using my LiveJournal or MySpace. I haven’t even posted that much on MoreCooler! You know you’re the only one for me. Hey hey, put down that frying pan. Let’s talk about this. I promise I’ll come see you more. Once a week? Okay, I can do that. No, really, I can. Give me a chance. Okay, let me explain where I’ve been for the last couple of months.

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So I know I haven’t been updating much lately. And I feel bad. No, really, I do. Sure, not bad enough to do anything about it, but when I’m not sitting here writing for both of you to read, I’m feeling guilt. Despite that, I have found a scapegoat. Rachel. Now, hear me out. We send many an e-mail, and they’re quite detailed. This post is not an exaggeration of how specific our daily recaps are. It’s actually a bit of an understatement. So once I’ve told every mind-numbing detail of the last 2 hours of my day to Rachel, it seems wasteful to come over here and post the same details. I contemplate just cut and pasting from my e-mails to Rachel, but the archives of this site will make it apparent that I rarely do that. So what have I been up to? Well, let’s see.

• Work- Things have been busy. Our first partner, CamaroZ28.com has starting using our vBulletin-based event calendar plug-in. We spent a lot of time (and headaches) getting this working, and I’ve learned far more about the inner workings of VB than I ever wanted to. It’s really exciting to see it live, and I’m looking forward to seeing the new features rolled out soon on this and other sites. Also, I’m going to be working on another Autos project starting mid-September for a few weeks. It’ll be fun to get back to building new pages for a change after working in more of a maintenance mode lately.
• Travel- Earlier this month, Allison and I flew back east to her family reunion. So on top of meeting the parents, I met about 20 other people as well. I’m proud to say I even know who at least 40% of them are. There were kids to play with, which was fun. We also did the ever-popular Mentos and Diet Coke experiment, which led to my YouTube debut (more of a cameo, but I’ll take what I can get). I think they liked me, or at least pretended to. Allison says that, much like Kix cereal, I’m “kid tested, mother approved”.
• Poker- I’ve taken a liking to the game over the last few months (based on our weekly game after work) and have started playing regularly on UltimateBet.com because they had the best new player bonus (I’m MaskdAvenger on there, if you want to come play with me). I’m about even, but have seen some improvement in my playing lately. I still do stupid things, but it’s all in the name of learning.
• Other stuff- Yahoo! company picnic, where I won a stuffed monkey. AppSig company picnic at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where I ate horribly unhealthy food and went on rides. Helping Allison move, which could easily be confused with “Sitting on her couch using her laptop to write this post” to the untrained eye.

I think that’s the highlights. Now I’m just killing time till it’s time to pick up Rachel from the airport. I’m sure she’ll come defend herself before the 48-hour statute of limitations on “defending your honor on the Internet” ends. Otherwise my accusation of responsibility becomes fact. At least that’s how it works on The O’Reilly Factor.