I had a lot of trouble with my external hard drive. I ended up tearing it apart and sticking the drive in another enclosure. At one point I was sure I'd lost the only living copy of the database containing all of my journals since age 10. It continued to flake out in scary ways, so I eventually used my hardware budget from work to buy a Time Capsule. All is well.

At the grocery store, trying to believe how many dollars Gillette wanted from me for a pack of cartridges, I finally got fed up and declared that there must be a better way to shave. It seemed like that for every other product I used, there was some kind of non-sleazy-seeming choice; the same must be true of razors. The Mach 3 and Fusion systems always struck me as kind of cheap and cartoony, a caricature of manliness that comes from the same fantasy land as the late-80's G.I. Joe toys. The marketing uses the same dull, generically attractive women as beer commercials, and has the same insulting swoopy chrome branding as a cut-rate PC manufacturer.

I did some exploratory Googling and came up with the legendary How to get that perfect shave article; that led me to the whole traditional shaving revival that's going on around the internet these days. The line about safety razors being the way Cary Grant shaved sold me right away. :D

It wasn't much longer that I was ordering my own Merkur handle and blades. Doesn't it look orders of magnitude classier than the others?

I'm kind of scared. For the first time since I started this photo-log, I have a dearth of interesting photographs. I think it's because my life has settled into a routine of relative predictability, occurring within a limited set of environments. There must be something interesting to photograph around here...

One day at lunch, our CEO announced that we should stop working for the day and take the afternoon to relax, play games, eat delicious hors d'oeuvres, and be proud of recently releasing a major update to our most popular product. Several of us played a game of Kingmaker, a board game from 1975 which is probably the most gratuitously complicated game I've ever played. I think most of the players found it tedious, but with its Song-of-Ice-and-Fire-esque War of the Roses theme and its classic feel, I was pretty thrilled.

I bought some clothes. Sometimes I don't look like such a slob anymore.

We spent what seems like all of our waking time together discussing how to get out of that apartment, researching the law, talking to helpful friends and volunteers and friends of friends, starting our apartment search all over again, and despairing. Eventually we left, and hoped that a judge would agree that we were justified in using the Seattle law that says tenants can move out if the landlord refuses to remedy a "defective condition."

The judge did agree, and I walked out of the courtroom feeling similar to the way I did when I tried riding a bike for half an hour in the St. Louis summer first thing in the morning without eating or drinking anything.

So we went to Chicago for Christmas. It was, as always, a lovely time to see everyone, slide back into Midwestern mode, and feel really cold.

We made our regular visit to the Art Institute. Aside from my regular favorites like Alberto Pasini, the most interesting thing was this little info panel that goes up when a painting gets moved, just because it wasn't really intended for me to read. I love getting a peek at the workings of such an organization.

Some streets in Seattle are not streets at all, but stairs.

As bad as the apartment was, it was in a colorful neighborhood with plenty of fun stuff to see.

It took me a while to realize that this price was for the gallon of "suede" paint below the sign, not the photo of the suede-wearing gal above it.

So after months of throwing ourselves at the apartments for rent section of craigslist, we found a place that I thought would be fine. With nobody living upstairs, and only sharing one wall, there would probably be minimal noise. It was spacious, and in the up-and-coming Madison Valley neighborhood.

Andrew offered to help us move, and it became an all-day event, what with all of the stuff we've accumulated since coming to Seattle in two carloads. By the time we got the last truckload there, it was dark out. Piroko set up a contraption involving our futon frame and some lamps, so that we could see where we were dropping our boxes.

Of course, this apartment ended up causing what may be the worst three months I've ever had. The very, very short version of the story is that the previous tenants were not tidy people; the landlord didn't clean up after them at all, and even denied that their dog left its territorial mark on our carpet.

I am grateful that this situation coincided with the busiest period I've ever had at work; nearly all of my waking time was dedicated to plowing through writing and design tasks that kept me somewhat distracted from the abysmal nature of my daily surroundings.