Due primarily to our recent move, I'm behind on many things in life (chief among them a freelance writing gig that I stupidly undertook), so my main update at present is this: due to a fall deployment and other considerations, we now have a new month -- January of 2012. That gives me a good solid year to wrap things up here that need to be wrapped and submit my tenure file this fall. That said, I've been doing academic library stuff full-time since 2001, and I'm ready for something different. I've been ready for about a year and a half, and so when I land in North Carolina, I shall be delighted if I can get a non-library job. I'm so curious about the world outside of academe; I hear that it is a wondrous place full of small woodland creatures and fairies and pixie dust. I anticipate it with joy.
In other news, moving into a house (we moved into Allan's house, which is in Lacey and which sat on the market prior to this with zero enquiries) has been wonderful. It is so nice to have ample space and a large backyard. My roommate and I are already planning the summer's garden. On the practical front, getting a roommate last spring seriously accelerated the pace of my student loan progress, and moving into this house is accelerating the acceleration. The end result is that by the time we're married, I'll have almost all of Oberlin and UW paid off, and then we will march happily onward with only one debt between us, the mortgage this house. And we intend to keep the house as a rental, so it's all good.
Last, Friday night is our regular "Fringe" night with some friends, but one of them is quite sick at the moment. I really hope she gets better, because we want to do lumpia. And I finally figured out the core reason that I don't really like Fringe (I watch because everyone else does and I like to be social--I could just sit in my room but that would be stupid...they know how I feel, so it's all good). Speaking as someone who loved the X-Files, the reason that I don't like "Fringe" is that I perceive it as not crediting the audience (i.e. me) with the amount of intelligence that I think a show of its type should; this lack of respect is manifested in multiple ways (which, if I were a good essayist, I would now list but I'm actually fixing to go to bed). God knows, I love John Noble (Denethor in LOTR & Peter in Fringe), and he's pretty much the only reason I haven't poked my eye out with a stick yet. But the show itself sucks to me. Other sci-fi/fantasy geeks who are waaaay geekier than I love that show to death, and more power to them.