Slacker Me!

So yea... totally slacking again... but now I am inspired. I have a friend who just recently started blogging and I just noticed she became a follower of mine. Also with a few dears friends having moved east to Albany I feel that updating my blog would be one good way to keep the abreast of happenings in my life. Somebody doesn't use Facebook! :-P

So what's happened since I last posted in May 2009. A lot of things... some noteworthy and some not so much. In June I went on a 2 week vacation, the first real vacation I've had in oh so long. I spent a week out in Portland Oregon visiting my friends Jonathan and Jennifer. Jonathan is a best friend from college days and Jennifer is his girlfriend, though I did know Jennifer from college as well. Portland is a great city which I wouldn't mind at all living in. I sampled some of the local beer joints. One of my favorite's was a place called The Green Dragon. It was a big open place with tables supplied with chalk that you could draw upon. Free games were up front that you could grab and play and there were a handful of pinball machines. I visited the Japanese Garden, Portland Rose Garden, Oregon Zoo, Multnomah Falls and Columbia River Gorge. I plan in going back out there again...

After 1 week in Portland I headed south to LA, to visit my college buddy Jeff. I hadn't seen him since our college days, some 18 years ago. I met his wife Auttie and their daughter Kaylie. I stayed there for 3 days before going to Las Vegas for 3 days. In Vegas I walked the strip, did a bit of gambling. The highlights of Vegas though were seeing Penn and Teller and going out to Red Rock Canyon. I took literally thousands of pictures on my vacation, which are posted on Facebook. I will have to find a site that I can dump pictures onto so that non Facebook people can see them. Oh yeah I have a new digital camera... well I never had one before. It's an very nice Canon SX10. I bought it because I was going on vacation and wanted something good for taking scenic shots with. It has 10.1 MP, 20x zoom and a ton of features that I am still figuring out...

In November I finished up the last of my student loan payments! What a huge relief. So not long after that I started thinking about buying a house. I'm still a little ways from doing so, needing to save up for a down-payment and wanting to pay down my credit card that I used on my vacation before my 0 % introductory APR rate goes away.