Bethesda

Color me surprised, Bethesda doesn’t suck nearly as much as I remember it sucking! There’s a Rock Bottom brewery around the corner from my hotel, plus six or seven really yummy smelling Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. Plus, the streets are populated with semi-drunken 30-year-old fratboys. This means that it’s totally safe out there, as long as I present a less appealing target for molestation than a drunken fratboy. I had the Barley Wine, which was remarkably similar to the one I made. Stopped at one, lest I become one of the herd. Also, crabcakes. Can’t come to MD and fail to get the crabcakes.

Class today was fun. My colleague taught, and he’s entertaining. He kept saying things like “fundamentally, computers are boring unless they’re doing something cool for someone smart” and “grid computing is mostly hysterical lies backed up by misleading press releases.” I hope to be so inspiring for my bit tomorrow.

Excitement is in the air: I ordered two beer kits (plus a new bottling wand and a new capper to replace the ones that finally crapped out). We’re making cherry stout and the “tongue splitter” west coast ale. After the kits arrive (supposedly the 9th, according to UPS) all are welcome to a day of wort boiling debauchery!

As part of my “not really a resolution, but it seems like a good idea to try to stay in good shape” for the new years, I busted out the Navy Seals Workout DVD. I have fallen far. I had that damn thing well in hand. Now I struggled to even get through each section doing some of the exercises from each set, much less keep up. I am, to put it lightly, quite sore.

I will return to peak form. I’m not going to get in shape only to let it slip away. Dogs of maniacal working out, to me!

Oh yeah, looks like I get to be an author again, provided that I can slap about 40 pages of well intentioned but poorly worded text into a presentable form in the next week. Hooray for collaborators who see that I can write and that I know the topic and are all like “this is way behind schedule, wanna fix it and be my co-author?”