Happy birthday

Today’s my birthday. I’m sitting in the apartment on Hutchinson Ave I’ve occupied the last two years. My girlfriend is working in the next room. I’m quite happy.

This is the last semester of my master’s degree. I’m applying to PhD programs in computer science. My personal statement is in a draft, but I have a strong outline, notes, and previous drafts. Put that way it sounds like I have nothing at all, doesn’t it? I have a few professors who have offered to recommend me — I need to send one of them a draft recommendation letter, which I have written but am not yet happy with.

I restructured this blog, once again. The basic change was that I broke the single large org file that had all the posts in it into many small files with one post each. The simplest way to justify this change is to point out that most static site generators expect one post per file. I think this is because the file provides a natural container for the information and metadata of a post. I’ve started generating the site with org-static-blog, which demands this format. It also uses the tags to seperate the blogs, a behavior I’ve wanted for a while.

The image above is too big, so I apologize for the slowness with which it loads. It shows my significant other Anne and me at a park near our apartment building. We met in our apartment building: she lives one floor up and one unit over from me. She has a cat, is from Muncie, Indiana, and is the oldest of four.

It’s difficult to introduce people: what can I say? I enjoy spending time with her. We get along well. She doesn’t always give me what I want, which is for the better. Sometimes I’m in a bad mood, or she’s in a bad mood, and that’s also for the better. Neither of us knows what we want to be when we grow up, and we’re both making the most of the lives we have. She loves to travel and is a monolingual English speaker.

I visited her hometown for her sister’s wedding two weeks ago. I shouldn’t say her “hometown”: she lived outside Muncie on her mother’s parents’ property until she started middle school, when she and her family moved into the town of Muncie proper. We stayed at her father’s house, which the family has occupied since the move. The house in the country was sold along with the land and is now in disrepair, though the adjacent house formerly occupied by Anne’s maternal grandparents is tenanted by the land’s new owners.

My apartment is still a mess. Formerly I’ve posted about struggling with having too much stuff while travelling. I didn’t blog much during the move in to this apartment, but it’s been rough. After my mother died everything got pretty hectic. My step-father insisted on selling the house, behavior in line with his causing me to pay for Cody’s funeral. I don’t want to asperge him: he just panicked. I don’t have any regret about it any more, because things have mostly worked out. I still have too much stuff, though.

I’ve been combing through the things I got and selecting what I really want. I don’t always get it right, but that’s alright. I like having less stuff: it makes the place easier to inhabit. I’ve got to get better at putting things away, but what I really want to do is rearrange the furniture. I loved rearranging the furniture in my dorm rooms and college apartments, but the furniture here is heavier than the furniture I had there.

But now I have someone who might help! I think I know what I’ll ask for for my birthday…