I'm back

First and foremost, sorry about the long delay between posts. Thanksgiving took it's tole and I was pretty lazy last weekend. Now, I'm working and I'm getting back to a relatively normal lifestyle. I'll wrap up and the last few weeks and look toward the future.

The rest of our time in Chicago was great. We went to the Bears-Panthers game courtesy of a good friend of mine who lives in Chicago and has season tickets. Much as I expected, the Bears put the smackdown on a very suspect Panthers offense. That was my first live Pro football game and it was awesome. Fortunately, it wasn't too cold or unpleasant. Ms. Colombia went with us which I found quite endearing. A woman must really love a man to willinging sit in the cold and wind watching a game she knows nothing about simply because she wants to know about the things that he does. Especially when she's from the tropics and hates cold weather more than I do.

Our time in DC was very nice as well, but entirely busy. There was family in town from the Seattle area and my Dad and stepmom drove down from Rhode Island. The week was essentially one giant smorgashboard of excess and overabundance. Apparently I lost 15 pounds while living in London. I probably gained half that back in a week. We feasted on the traditional turkey, wild salmon, king crabs and dungeoness crabs, as well as two roast leg of lambs. We still have leftovers in the freezer.

The visits from family were great but didn't leave much room for rest or personal time. By the end of it, Ms. Colombia and I were just exhausted. We did pretty much nothing for a day or so before moving on to do some wedding planning. There was a lot of planning and budgeting to do and we had to get that done before she left as it becomes much more difficult when you're over the phone and out of the country. Consequently, we didn't do much in town. In fact, we only went down into DC once and that was to see the Holocaust Musuem (difficult) and have lunch with Crazy Ivan. I showed her a bit of the area as well (Washington Monument) but there really wasn't much time for anything else. Finally, I took Ms. Colombia to the airport (National) last Thursday for her flight back to Chicago. She flew to Bogota on Saturday.

I spent Friday and Saturday moping and killing (simulated). Ok, I also did some chores around the house, but I was quite ill on Friday so I had a legitimate excuse for doing nothing. I was either experiencing Ms. Colombia withdrawal symptoms (much like the heroin addict fresh off the smack), had an extremely severe migraine, or had food poisoning. (I doubt the latter. I had dinner with my best friend on Thursday night and it was a great meal at a nice restaurant. Not the kind of place you expect a little E. Coli in with the pasta sauce.)

I started work at a law firm yesterday. It's a decent sort of job with tons of perks (dinner, cab rides home, free gym, etc) but the work is mindnumbingly dull. I can deal with it though, as it's only for a few months and there's a serious and legitimate goal that I'm after.

Finally, I wanted to discuss the future of the blog. Obviously, this blog started more as a travelogue and evolved from there. I can't see myself stopping writing here anytime soon. But the kinds of posts I put in today are pretty much the ones I hate writing the most. Synapsis from the last two weeks doesn't exactly thrill me. So, the future will continue along these lines: More politics, more cultural observations. There will still be regular updates on my life and happenings, but that is becoming less of a feature of the blog.

Anyway, topics that I will be looking at in the near future: the fragile ego of American troops abroad, the Yin-Yang presidency, and the great Catholic indoctrination process known as Confirmation (only because I've got to share the pain of this one).