My wife kicked me out of the kitchen while she's making dinner for St. Patrick's Day (her family likes to celebrate it, and is Irish far enough back). I'm taking this opportunity to drink (appropriately enough) and watch Funhaus get drunk and play 1-2-Switch. As an aside, that game looks like it'd be fun a couple of times at least if you had enough people. Anyway, I realized I hadn't done a blog post, so it seemed like the time to update everyone.

To get the most important thing out of the way, I'm drinking a bottle of Hardywood Raspberry Stout. Hardywood was the first craft brewer to come to Richmond (other than Legend, which sucks), and they have some good stuff. Their raspberry stout is simply amazeballs--imagine raspberry-chocolate cookie that will get you drunk.

Since the news is insufferable, I've been listening to lots of audio books in the car. First was Azincourt by Bernard Cornwall, which is a neat historical fiction novel about a guy who's an archer who ends up at the eponymous battle. After that was a lecture from a Lutheran seminary professor on the meaning behind the Book of Revalation (tl,dr: it's sort of like a political cartoon but with more emphasis on faith and morality, and is surprisingly optimistic).

In the meantime, I'm still doing the Greek thing. I've stopped reading new chapters in my book in the interest of going back over some fundamentals. I also found a very good site for reading, which gives you the Greek text of the New Testament (plus the option to do various Engish versions in parallel). But the nicest part is the fact that you can click on a Greek word and it'll give you the part of speech, case (or tense and mood for a verb), and definition. It's helping me to build my vocabulary a decent amount, since I learn much better with context than just route memorization. I will say, though, that prepositions are the devil.

On a related note, I've started doing a basic "textbook" for Greek, as I have at least one person in my life that are trying to learn too. It's over here, and feedback is of course welcome.

Anyway, life goes on. I'm putting myself out there in terms of taking my own kung fu students, which is great, and lets me feel like I'm making progress in a broader sense more than I have in awhile. I do have a bit of a conundrum upcoming: it's been suggested that if I want a middle management position that'll be coming up within the next few months it's basically mine. It'd be a pay bump, so there's that, but would also likely mean more hours working and would definitely mean no working from home. I'm really not sure it's worth it, but haven't decided for sure. On the kung fu front, I've had a couple intros who seemed into it (but couldn't sign up just yet), so there's some progress too.

Tomorrow I'm off to a funeral. One of my aunts (my mom's sister) died rather suddenly late last month (due to a fall). The dynamics on that side of the family are complicated at best. The aunt who died was one of the "fun" aunts, although honestly I didn't know her that well. She lived farthest out of just about anyone in my family, and since my grandparents (her parents) hated the guy she was married to for most of my life, we tended not to see her very often. Her life was kind of a mess after they got divorced, although her company was still enjoyable. What I most remember is that she was hilarious and irreverent. That and she was there for my first real concert (the Rolling Stones) back in '96. We're doing the funeral in the town where my grandparents live, and to be honest I think it's more about what they want than what she would've preferred. So I expect tomorrow to be a combination of other people's grief and varying degrees of self-centeredness from relatives. And that's before we get into potential issues like the fact that I don't plan on taking communion (the service is Episcopalian), and I'm not sure if my grandparents realize this. Thankfully it's a day trip, being only a short drive away, so the plan is to come back home ASAP. I'll also be taking a flask.

It's been weird. It does remind me not to take people for granted. Surprisingly, it hasn't really made me think of my own mortality more than I have been. It does come at a time that I'm trying to hit the reset button my own religious life, and am trying to figure out what beliefs and practices are right and what I need to discard.

Anyway, I need to crash, so I'll not ramble any further. Have a good evening, hubski.