Huzzah, I’m not dead after all! I’m sorry if anybody has been anxiously awaiting a new blog post here; I tell you, I get my evenings entirely free of homework because school’s out and I blog less than when the semester is in swing. I think it’s because during the school year I have little breaks at random times—including during class, sometimes, ahem—whereas while I’m at work (which is what I’ve been doing this summer), I can’t just post a blog entry while I’m there. Then when I get off work, I just want to laze around, play Paper Mario, or work out. Well, maybe I don’t want to work out, but I do want to not be fat, so I work out anyway.

Let’s see, let’s see… I went home this past weekend (as in, to my parents’ house) and got to visit with the kittens again. They’ve grown a bit but are still small enough to melt your heart at 50 paces. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding picture:

There! Are you more appeased about me not blogging in… 2 weeks?!… because I posted kitten photos? They apparently like salty things, because that’s the only reason I can think of that they all were so keen on licking/nibbling my fingers. Or maybe my fingertips remind them of their mother’s nipples, though those are some pretty giant cat nipples…

Work has been interesting this time around. I’m doing another internship at Lexmark but I’m in a different area this time. I was initially hired to work on a project involving Google Gadgets, which was cool, but then I got switched off of that to working on a Lexmark Firefox toolbar (the new version with my changes isn’t up yet), which I also enjoyed. Then I wrapped up work on that and got put on another project, which is my current one, and it’s hairy. The code itself is in XML, XSL, CSS, Javascript, and C++, and somehow, these things talk amongst each other. For the first few days of this project, I was doing nothing but reading hundred-page-plus specification files, which was boring as all get out and, I felt, didn’t do much good. Now I’ve gotten into actually programming it and I’m enjoying it, after a few setbacks where I felt things weren’t working just to spite me.

I finished Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and, while I liked it, I didn’t think it was Pratchett’s best work¹. I haven’t finished American Gods by Gaiman yet because he just hasn’t kept me spellbound, so I don’t know as how he’s that great of an author to begin with. I’m currently reading The Color of Magic by Pratchett because it’s the first Discworld novel and, omigosh *fangirl squee*, it has The Luggage. After that, I’ll probably reread Reaper Man because Death is an awesome Pratchett character.

Now, that’s about enough blog posting—Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on Nintendo Gamecube (as played on my Wii) beckons.

¹ In my opinion, Reaper Man is his best work, and this is because it’s my favorite book of his. Sourcery is also good.