A New Start

So, this is going to be the new home for my personal blog. Did you see what I did with the name there? Yeah. That's "George" backwards. I'm a snarky 24 year old! At least I didn't give and name it something stupid and abstract like "soliloquy" or "sassafras" or even "Muzzlewumpus," although come to think of it, that last one isn't half bad.

I will speak no more of the new location of this blog because the intention of this place is just be a vessel for digital updates. So here is an update from Obie-land for those of you who have checked A Separate Piece Recently:

Summer has been kicking arse. The weather has been hot and humid, which is great. Whoa is it great. Nick, Scott and I have been ultra-busy for a number of reasons.

First, we have two summer interns that are working for us. Oliver and Maksym both hail from Harvey Mudd in Cali-forny-way and are staying in Oberlin and making code go for us. To a degree, we've had to switch our roles from "people who get stuff done all the time" to "people who manage other people who get stuff done all the time." At first it felt really inefficient, it was all managing and no doing, but I suppose that's what happens when you grow a company.

We said goodbye to two of our good friends here in Oberlin earlier in the summer. Ben Reitz, who has been working part time for Skritter for several months left for a summer job in Massachusetts in early June and will be working full time at Yale University this coming fall. He will continue his interest in Chinese by helping the Yale University Press design Chinese software supplements for their new textbook.

Our other friend, coincidentally also named Ben, moved away to Ann Arbor Michigan where he is getting his MBA on at Michigan University. He's got career prospects that he's developing or something, the thing that we're gonna miss is smacking him around in Smash Brothers several times a week and shooting the shit in the overly hot kitchen.

Then, in mid-June Nick became ill with something poorly defined and face-based. At first, he just had really bad pain behind his right eye, and then later it developed into a rash. He was out of commission for a week before, after two visits to the Cleveland Clinic in Elyria, the doctors determined he had somehow contract shingles. It's pretty rare for someone so young to get it, but that's what he had. Shortly after the diagnosis, he got the characteristic rashes which apparently itch like hell and don't really help you appearance. It was another week before he could productively do anything. It was pretty hard on morale around the office, but he's over it now and has made a full recovery (if you don't count the fact that one of his eyes still looks a little puffy relative to the other un-infected one).

Then, 10 days ago, right as my girlfriend's Oberlin visit was drawing to a close, we discovered that we had bedbugs in our house. For those of you who don't know about bedbugs, I sincerely hope you remain blissfully ignorant. Bedbugs are these really tiny parasites that infest houses and bite you while you are asleep. About 70% of people react to the bites, and I happen to be among the reactors. It didn't help that they had apparently infested the wall directly behind my bed. By the time I figured out what was biting me, I had about 24 bites all over my body. After making the discovery, we spent 5 days all three cleaning, dejunking, and disinfecting the entire house. Then, this last Tuesday we had an exterminator over and he did a first spraying of the premises. I say first spraying because it will probably be necessary for him to come back 1-2 more time and repeat the procedure before we can be reasonably sure we got them all. Bedbugs are almost supernaturally resilient, they can live without food for 18 months, they can only be killed by special chemicals, they adapt so fast to insecticides that treatments that work now probably won't in only a few years, when full grown they are about 2mm across, they birth 5 eggs a day, and a single egg can create an infestation. Anyways, that's been harrowing.

In between the two bad experiences we've had a lot of fun:

We've been blueberry picking at a local farm.
Becca and I went hot air ballooning (awesome).
We fired the potato cannon several times to great success.
We tried to build the wiremap again (that failed).
We went to a local swimming hole and had a nice afternoon enjoying nature.
We went to the July 4th blossom music festival.
I played with fire on the 4th.
The hideous couch upstairs was destroyed in the bedbug war.
I swapped cars with my parents.
Becca and I visited Logan for the Saines family Christmas in June.
We watched the Good, the Bad, and the Weird again (great movie that).

I would add photos to this post, but the only computer with the photos is the netbook, and its in quarantine in the bedbug room (yes, they will hide in laptops or any other electronics that have seems or holes).

So that's the update. I will try to upload some shots of the potato cannon doing its thing soon so everyone can witness the might of it's launching power.