Much, MUCH better!

As some of you may know, the internet provided by our apartment is pretty crappy.  Where crappy is defined as sometimes it's incredibly slow just to check email in the evenings.  Well now that I have a job (technically, I will soon have a job), we've decided it's time to fix this problem.  A little bit of research and a little bit of "just going for it", has pointed me to choosing Time Warner Cable (Road Runner).  Decent enough prices, no contract, and hopefully good speeds.  Here's the results of a speed test, pretty much exactly as advertised:

Being cable, it is expected that it won't have peak speed during the evenings (aka, heavy usage times), but still it should be nearly infinitely better than what we had.  Video chatting, movie/music streaming, torrenting, and doing this all at the same time, here we come!

Shawl and Duvet: Hurray!

For Christmas Branwen (my lil' sister) gave me some lovely red beads and some beautiful peach coloured yarn to make a shawl! Well, I finished this beauty today and now it is blocking. The colours are just perfect (the edging is even a little darker) and the shawl looks like it will be a great size!

The shawl design is called Aeolian and the motifs are supposed to resemble Joshua tree yuccas, agaves and cactus flowers. I think the peach yarn and red beads look just like some of the beautiful flowers of the deserts out here!

One of our gifts from Serena was a new duvet for our bed. We were in dire need of something as it is a little too cool here in the winter to sleep with only a sheet, and as such we've been forced to use our sleeping bag from camping as a comforter. The new duvet looks fantastic and we look forward to testing it out tonight. One very useful feature is that there are two different insides to the duvet, which are used to control how much thermal insulation it provides. Should be wonderful here in LA, where the "winter" nights are cool, but during the summer only a light sheet is needed. Also take a look at our snazzy new bedside table... now there is one on each side of the bed!

"At long last" or "The weekend and other updates"

I'm rather poor at telling good stories, but maybe that's just because my memory is terrible and I can't usually remember any of the exciting stuff or the details. Anyways, I don't think anything too exciting has happened since my last post. That is, except that Rowan and I rented a car to get some much needed stuff. Some items much needed and others just because they would be great to have. The most exciting of these (in my opinion) was a glass display case to show off Rowan's rock and mineral collection (and a few items of my own). It looks amazing and does its job wonderfully. Hopefully these photos capture the sparkle and beauty on display. Also of note, previously I wrote about a bump on Ong-Bak's face. Well, it's pretty much all better now. No more puss, just a hardly detectable bump that is getting better each day. Hurray! I'll probably post more stuff later if I think about it, but that's all for now.