I haven't posted in a few weeks, but not for lack of content. Quite the opposite ... i keep wanting to sit down and write down all the thoughts shooting through me head, but when i find myself in front of a keyboard i'm intimidated by the volume of things i want to convey. Well, it's a new year, so on to the resolutions ... #1, write more in this journal. Check.

My winter holiday begun with a trip to exchange gifts with my parents on December 17. I got my mom a nice set of kashmere gloves and a scarf, and my dad a handheld GPS unit (we're both gadget freaks). We then had dinner at the ever-delicious Kan Zeman in Palo Alto. The next day Naomi's boyfriend Geoff and i begun a one day jaunt down to LA to pick up Veronica and Naomi's grandmother. We hopped in the Jetta around 1pm on a Sunday afternoon and headed down the 101 to the 152 to the 5. We made good time as Geoff and i swapped stories of motorcycle racing and paintballing, and compared and contrasted the twenty/thirtysomething generation of de la Moras. We arrived around 6pm and had dinner with Kevin and his girlfriend Kelly, then headed over to spend the night at Matthew's after first getting some gaming in with FIFA 2005, James Bond: Agent Under Fire, and the quite impressive Stars Wars Battlefront. The latter would've kept Geoff and i up all night had i not been fearful of passing out during our return voyage the next day. Monday morning we saw off Matthew and Dionne, then had a quick bite at Denny's before picking up V & N's grandmother and heading back up the 5.

Our midwestern holiday commenced the next day as V, her grandmother, and i flew to Kansas City where we were picked up by V's mom Arlene. After the 3.5 hour drive to Ames, we arrived to a warm welcome from Alan and Ana. The frozen weather kept us huddled inside for most of the week, where Ana kept us busy playing all manner of games. Christmas was very nice for everyone ... V had given me an early gift of a Nintendo DS, which i had fun with on the plane. Christmas morning i got to open a nice biochemistry text from AAA, a Kenneth Cole Black cologne set from V, and the pièce de résistance, the kickass 60GB color iPod photo that i had been bugging Veronica about for the past six weeks. Booyakasha. I didn't get a chance to put music on it until we came home, but it was worth the wait. Unfortunately my batteries (my body, not the iPod or Nintendo DS) seemed to continue to drain over our stay, until i was more or less a zombie on the last day. I fought with Ana for nap time and watched a documentary on hell through the ages on the History Channel in the basement while more or less catatonic.

We trekked home on the 28th, enduring a horrific 12 hours of travel including multiple airline delays and some nasty turbulence. Collapsing shortly after passing our threshold at 2am, i made the command decision to take the rest of the week off from work. I got some good housework in over the next few pre-new year days, most notably removing the autumn's worth of leaves from our front lawn and tidying the kitchen into a semi-workable state. An exhausting evening trip to and from Sacramento in driving rain to take Veronica's grandmother to stay with her uncle convinced us that New Year's Eve may be better spent relaxing than out clubbing, so we invited Naomi and Geoff over for pizza, pie, movies, and video games. Marcus and Javier ended up coming by as well as they confused our New Year's Day party with a New Year's Eve one, so the six of us watched a few flicks and lazily sipped booze. Our New Year's Day was even less productive, spent with the girls (V and N) and boys (T and G) fighting over control of the TV to play either Animal Crossing or Halo 2. I'll leave it to you to figure out who wanted what. We ended up compromising on Mario Kart, after which Geoff and i continued our Stars Wars campaign on Battlefront. After arising on January 2 to find ants marching around our kitchen, Geoff and Naomi returned to SF and their lonely cat Una while V and i cleaned the house. We spent the rest of the day shopping for a new stove (any comments on Amana?), with me growing increasingly depressed with the thought of returning to work today.

The political baloney that i have to deal with daily at Stanford is part of my frustration, but there's something else that i can't quite put my finger on. I feel dangerously unmotivated at the moment. The three year old kid in me (the one that doesn't get along with Ana) wants to pick up my ball and go home when i run into static of whatever nature from my colleagues. I don't have an answer for why that is. My experiences at UCSF and MGH were definitely more positive than this, but then i encountered my share of dickheads there too. So why do the ones here bug me so much? It may come down to my 12 month rule, the warmup period i've noted in previous jobs during which i feel alternately helpless, useless, and pointless. Got to keep my chin up and keep making progress. Part of me just wants to take two months and sleep late, play video games, and write perl and html all day long. No two ways about it, i'm due a serious vacation. And none of this travelling vacation, i'm talking a complete mental shutdown vacation. I feel so overloaded when a problem arises anywhere in life ... work, home, whatever.

Buyer's remorse is bad enough when it's a $50 video game or $100 gadget, but extrapolate that out to the price of a house and you can get an idea of what i'm going through at the moment. Every time something goes wrong ... ants, doors not fitting in bowed doorframes ... i find myself sucked into a hell of "what did i get myself into?" Hopefully some more familiarity with home repairs will assuage my nerves and give me more confidence on maintaining a home.

I ended up seeing a buttload of movies over the holidays. Bad(der) Santa (totally hilarious), A Christmas Story (a real holiday classic with so many great lines, only slightly dulled after watching it 3.5 times during the 24 hour marathon on TNT), Garden State (wasn't too keen to see it, but it really hit a note 40 minutes in and held me fascinated thereafter), Napoleon Dynamite (even with Veronica's buildup, it was really funny), Eurotrip (an unexpected gem on late night cable), Scary Movie 3 (this time with the Airplane director instead of the Wayans, but still good for a few belly laughs), The Bourne Supremacy (a worthy successor to the original, again with lots of beautiful shots of Europe). Maybe some others that i just can't recall at the moment.

I'm still listening to tons upon tons of music, although mostly drawn from the cult classic section rather than new releases. The new iPod is sweet, particularly with the new "Now Playing" display that shows off album artwork embedded in the mp3s. I didn't spend countless hours adding those pics for nothing. Lately i've been reconnecting with my high school metal roots ... Anthrax, Ratt, etc etc.

I find myself thinking of Cobi quite a lot these days. Some wistful nostalgia, some genuine sadness. Veronica's found two dogs at our local rescue mission that she wants to adopt, but i don't think i'm ready. Partly because of Cobi, and partly because i fear the potential stress they could bring into our new home.

So far blue is the color of the new year, both for good (Chelsea is playing excellent at the top of the Premiership table) and the obvious bad. We'll see how each blue thread fares as the months pass.