I am listening to: trip-hop on Pandora Radio.

I've been in the middle of my preliminary/qualifying essays to become a dissertator. The basic gist is that I receive two questions from a given prof., pick one, and write a 20 page paper with references on it. Except for a 2 week period of going to conferences and a few hang-out days, I've been doing them back to back. Thankfully the binary sojourn hasn't adversely affected my social life; that pretty much consists of just Emily now. Everyone I knew from here is either long gone or really long gone, and I've lost touch with almost all of my physical world friends. I don't particularly mind since my girlfriend's social life is effectively mine, and that works for me just fine.

At first I thought these essays were going to be an utter waste of time, since each of the profs. on my committee know that I can write competently enough to get published in journals. But as time went on, I was able to learn about stuff I was interested in, due to the broad flavor of the questions.

Besides that, I'm still working on the same game project as several years ago. I had several photography shows around Madison too; even sold some stuff.

As I mentioned previously, Emily and I are going up to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior at the end of June, followed by hiking in the Porcupine Mountains.

Per the usual, too much happens in too short a period of time to relate it effectively--and I've largely lost interest in regularly updating this thing. Beyond a few readers, it's just me who'd be reading this thing. I still do occasionally do that. It'd sure as hell help to remember one week to the next.

Before I forget, I had the best steak of my life at the Tornado Room with Emily for my birthday. It was storming fiercely outside, but amazingly there were quite a few people at the place. It was hell of such as expensive, but it was a moan-inducing tenderloin. We split the check and headed to my favorite bar, Maduro, for the best high alcohol dark beer in Madison.

Emily also got me hiking boots for our upcoming trip.

Yesterday we went out to our mutually favorite mexican place, El Pastor, and had margaritas with our chimichangas. We walked out to the Union and were somehow amazed that ye gods gaggles of people were sitting and milling and drinking. We stood by the water for a little while before she proclaimed that it was couch time. Given that we've gone through all of Battlestar Gallactica up to the first few episodes of season 4, we've somehow started on the Sopranos, season 5. I don't know who most of the characters are, but it's roughly like watching Goodfellas over and over again with those signature HBO touches of forced poignancy.

Nothing else of note to really note that I can note here.

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