we're back from our mini-vacation. it was nice to be able to do one of those all-too-rare escapes that was attached to work for both of us and therefore had minimal transportation costs. hooray! and to have gone to a fun city where i had old friends to visit (ones i hadn't seen in far-too-long), well, that's just gravy, baby!

if it seems like i'm in a particularly good mood, you're right. i had a new employee in my group start today and i'm very excited about it. i can finally focus on the bigger projects and be all smarty-pants strategic. hooray!

tonight steve and i went for a walk. it was nice to get out (and to get him out!). we didn't really know where we were going, and originally our goal was to find an ice cream parlor. we didn't have any luck on that front, but it was still great to be out. it's kinda in that in-between-seasons season, so it was nicely chilly enough to be rejuvenated, but not cold.

have you noticed that dashes are today's punctuation mark-of-the-day?

did you hear about the artist who spray painted an iceberg off of greenland's west coast bright red? check it out -- any one of a number of sources will pull up the article (covered by the AP) and photos, but i kinda like the graphic design of artdaily.com the best.
http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=9714

oh yeah, one more thing i'm happy about tonight: no more big stress at work about assignments. nothing is changing at all. for those of you i've stressed out to, thanks for listening.

g'night.