I've been wasting lots of time surfing through ebay since the hard drive experience. There's a lot of weird and wacky stuff on there and its amazing what kinds of things you come up with when you punch in a keyword. One of the tamer ones: I punched in "narrative" looking for a book on narrative theory, and got Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, which makes some sense I suppose, but really wasn't what I was expecting.

Spring has yet to emerge here - it's gotten nasty over the last few weeks...snow, cold, windy... feels a bit like home. The spring was feeling really nice a couple of weeks ago. I remember driving Sandy back from her wrestling tournament (three hour drive away - she won third place - yeah!) thinking about how much nicer this place looks in the spring. But that's gone now. It just looks and feels like home in March and that makes me miss home all over again. My homesickness is not near as acute as it was, and I think some of my missing home could be alleviated by at least being able to visit, but all the same, I still don't feel really comfortable here.

I'm sure my ongoing interactions with INS have something to do with that as well - their bureaucracy seems to be designed to make you feel like a carbuncle on Uncle Sam's bottom.