the inaugural post

it's 9:30 p.m. of the day i just turned thirty.

i have:

• eaten a meal of corned beef and cold rice;
• snuck out to the local 7-Eleven for some soda, bottled water, and a handy-dandy tube of epoxy steel putty;
• on the much-abused coffee table my new diagonal holder slowly takes shape as the epoxy putty hardens around the threaded rod;
• sorted and hung out to dry a boatload of laundry;
• rattled the windows cutting aluminum with my jigsaw;
• driven back and forth to the new apartment

lalai, the woman whom i love dearly and who will soon be my wife, is asleep on the sofa. i assume she will not be pleased at the prospect of eating corned beef and cold rice. well, there's no more cold rice because i ate it all, but i did cook some more.. (oops, forgot to turn on the rice cooker..)

it hasn't been a very eventful day. most birthdays ought to be "better" than this. but even as uneventful as this day has been, amazingly, i am content.

it's also my last day at Mosaic Communications, Inc. i'm no longer an "assistant vice president for software development." which may sound minorly impressive but actually is rather meaningless in an organization where there are like five people doing software development.

still, i shall miss the office. it's been almost ten years since i first set foot in The Peak Tower as an on-the-job trainee. life at mozcom has been almost entirely good, with almost no bad.

tomorrow lalai and i shall go to our new apartment. the apartment that has just about beggared us. still, i should feel extremely lucky. my parents didn't get to have a house of their own till they were past forty. i've got a ten-year lead. of course, lalai and i are up to our noses in the mortgage. but i have a good feeling things will work out.

i'm rushing finishing my telescope. because we're on the fourth (and top) floor of the apartment building, and the rooftop is a clothes drying area. it also has an unobstructed view of the sky. in a few days Mars will be at opposition. i won't miss it this time. in 2003, during the great opposition, all i had was a 60mm (2.4-inch) short refractor. mars was nothing more than a formless blob.

i'm now rebuilding my 250mm (10-inch) reflector, with which lalai and i have seen various amazing wonders like Omega Centauri, the Humpback Whale Galaxy, the Southern Pleiades.. i'm gonna get mars this time!