So, as I mentioned, I quit my job in the first part of February. Less than a week later, my wife and I flew to New Zealand to attend the wedding of two dear friends who emigrated there some years back. Needless to say, we had a blast, The pictures are ready to go online, as soon as I find time to post them – I’ve been pretty busy, almost non-stop: stuff around the house, helping to run FOGCon 3, more house stuff, replacing our bloody washer and my wife’s PC (with mine, leaving me to build another for my current VMWare experiments). I’ve been busy enough that I really didn’t start seriously looking for work until last week; that seems to be on track. Another interesting thing that happened, is that even though I voluntarily quit my job, I decided to put in for unemployment. And I got it. I was surprised – the EDD did have me go through an interview process, and presumably talked to my ex-VP about the situation (they said they would). It’s very surprising, as I wasn’t expecting to get that.

Book stuff: I’ve recently read both of Seanan McGuire‘s newest novels, Ashes of Honor and Midnight Blue-light Special (both awesome), as well as Rick Dakan‘s first novel, G33k Mafia (very different and very good – I’ll be reading both of the other books in the series), Ben Macallan’s new book Pandaemonium (a great sequel to Desdaemona), and the latest novel from Jay Lake, Kalimpura – which I think is the best thing he’s written so far (I like the series even more than his Mainspring trilogy), and is also a great finale for the story of Green. Right now I’m reading Cherie Priest’s The Inexplicables, the 4th novel in her “Clockwork Century” series.

Art stuff: I do have some almost-finished work that will be scanned and posted to the gallery, once I’ve decided they’re actually done. New photos for Flickr will go up eventually (see above). I’ve not submitted work for any shows yet this year, though I do expect to.

And that’s really about it from an update POV.