I had a great time at my parents’ house this weekend. Sunday, my dad made a great dinner of grilled asparagus, scallops and salmon, with naan and whole wheat couscous on the side. We saw two movies over the course of my stay (The Hangover, awesome, and Land of the Lost, amazingly bad), and attended my sister’s 6th grade recognition ceremony. My MacBook Pro is working out extremely well, too; I’m a happy convert so far. Work is hectic but I had a good meeting with my boss today and I feel better about things. I’m still getting used to having my thesis finished and over with, it’s a crazy feeling to finally shed the last of the well-known grad student guilt. It didn’t lift all at once for me, and my mental habits from it are still hanging around a little.

I’ve finally made the switch to the dark side/light side (depending on your views) and acquired myself a MacBook Pro (15″), on which I type this very entry. I had the opportunity to request one as my work computer, and I just got it today (a serious perk of working for a software company.) Here it is on my dining room table — more on this furniture later, but this picture includes an Eames table and four side shell chairs and a Nelson saucer bubble lamp, all of which is vintage. All that’s left is to replace the art on the wall there; nebulas are nice but I think we can do better.

I live in central Illinois and work for an increasingly well-known mathematics/software development company called Wolfram Research. I program linguistics and parsing structures into the recently launched Wolfram|Alpha. When I’m not doing that, I’m usually at home in my mid-century ranch house full of mid-century furniture (an ever-growing collection). I have a cat and two fish. I make art, primarily photographs and ink drawings, and I’m slowly getting into cooking. I collect a lot of stuff, actually; a habit I get from my father. Some collections I have currently include Orla Kiely bags, shiva lingam stones, Playmobil sets, ammonite fossils, antique marbles, and sea shells.

That concludes my introductory post.