Where's My Compass?

So it's Saturday night, and I'm in Asheville, North Carolina, with a laptop in hand and a guinea pig running across the floor and in between my feet. What better time to post?

Life is an interesting, chaotic, disorganized mess for me at the moment. Oh, don't get me wrong--I'm quite happy with it--but I have really no idea what I'm doing from one day to the next. I can't decide what either my work or out-of-work priorities should be. I can't even decide which tiles to play in Scrabble. But I do have two things decided for sure: 1) I know who I'm living with for the rest of my life, and 2) I'm a heterosexual.

So where does one go from here? How do you choose five hobbies to focus on out of the 68 potential candidates that I'm interested in? How do you decide how much vacuuming is too little vacuuming? Where I can find Dobby the House Elf to help me with these things? How many questions I can ask in one post?

Well, I don't really know the answers. But for a general life update, which I haven't done in a while, here goes. :)

Kel and I are doing very well after the marriage! People love to ask this question, as in, "How's married life so far?" How do you answer this, really? Everything I think of is just sarcastic ("Well, you know how women steal the covers every night--so thus far I'd have to say my marriage is ass-to-the-wind cold"), but usually I just issue the standard "Everything is great!". Of course, it is great, but it's not any better or worse than it was before we got married! To dip into my great sea of romance-novel clichés, love crosses all boundaries of title. We are doing well.

For those that don't know, however, we're about to move again in four weeks (May 14), to a new apartment. I cannot wait to do this, because it greatly shortens my commute to work and lets us be much closer to our friends there! The bad side is that Kelly's classmates are all taking off for various parts of North Carolina, and we'll miss getting to see them as often. But our new place is extremely nice, and we'll consider it our first true marriage home--even though it will be another apartment. We likely have at least 18 months before any kind of homeowning discussion gets in the works, because we have to wait until: 1) Kel graduates and knows where she'll work, and 2) we have more than $8.95 for a down payment. Then I'll have to become the husband-type and mow the lawn, fix the front porch, flirt with the neighbors' wives, etc, etc, but I think I can do it. Just kidding on that last bit. :)

At work, things are rolling along as usual. We in the midst of our annual Performance Appraisal process, a time during which our managers boil down about 1,950 hours of work into a single 1-5 rating (I'm not kidding--I actually calculated the number of hours). Worse than that, the two grades we always get are either "2 - Exceeded Expectations" and "3 - Met Expectations". To me, I'm not even sure I'd want a "2" rating...something that could easily mean, "Wow, we really didn't see that coming from you! We thought you'd fall on your face, but somehow you made it through." But welcome to corporate life, where a little thing called "common sense" is always collecting dust.

At any rate, life is still rolling along, and I'm still running along on top of it--something like Frogger on a good day. I'm trying very hard to catch on tasks in the post-wedding era, so if I am behind in writing or e-mailing or anything of that sort, I apologize and offer you one beautifully wrapped package of PEZ candy in return. Please send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Kelly or I and we will mail your gift as soon as possible.

Lastly, for those interested, we'd love to have you come visit us at any time! I'd love for us to come visit you except Kelly is worked harder than an Indonesian kid making Nike shoes, and I used up a lot of my vacation with that whole marriage deal. We're busy filling up the 2006 calendar, though, putting together our very own reunion tour.

Thanks for listening! Coming next week: "How Wasteful Is Too Wasteful? Breaking Down the Life of an Average Georgia Tech Fan."