Saturday morning (the 14th) I had and eye doctor appointment. To catch you up: I had LASIK three months ago and it worked out great however they said they could improve my left eye even more (it hadn’t quite been corrected to 20/20). So two weeks ago I went in for the “enhancement” on my left eye. But then I came home and 30 minutes after the surgery was sitting down on my bed and accidentally fell asleep… without wearing the guard on my eyes. I probably rolled onto my side while sleeping because when I went in the next morning there were a bunch of little wrinkles called “striae” and I couldn’t really see much through the left eye. The doctor immediately scheduled a surgery and a few days later he went in to try to fix them. Now you’re caught up. Saturday I found out that the corrective surgery had dramatically improved my vision. However it is still not 20/20… and it is difficult to say at this point whether it ever will (or even can) be. It’s not too bad - I can see out of my left eye - things are just a bit blurry.

Saturday night I boarded an airplane for Charleston, South Carolina and spent four days with my sister Joy and her husband Brad!! We had an awesome time… it was nice to get away from the unseasonally cold Chicago weather. We even spent all Sunday afternoon playing volleyball on the beach wiht Brad’s AWESOME family. (Brad has 7 brothers and sisters… over time his parents have adopted 5 kids from the phillipines!)

Soooo… then I flew back to Chicago on Tuesday night. I had barely gotten off the plane when my cell rings and it’s my roommate telling me that my truck is missing from it’s parking spot at the apartment. And then, while he’s on the phone with me, my landlord calls - freaking out - to tell me that the resident maintainance guy, Barry, saw three people who looked “like crackheads” (and could have been since my place is down the street from a shelter) going into my apartment Monday afternoon. Donna (my landlord) was understandably very concerned about what these people were doing in her building and even mentioned possibly starting the eviction process.

So I spend hours making phone calls and talking to Barry and my roommate and his cousin (who had been hanging around quite a bit for the past week)… and finally figure a few things out. My car was towed because Donna forgot to tell me that I needed a sticker and give one to me. Luckily she was very graceous and payed to get the car back for me; and luckily LTS didn’t damage the truck in the process of towing it. As for these three random people… Barry claimed that my roommate’s cousin was one of them but the cousin said that he didn’t bring anyone up to the apartment while Isiah was at work Monday… so Barry possibly just mistook someone else for him. At any rate he’d sortof overstayed his welcome anyway [he had been sleeping there and hanging around all day while Isiah was working for like a week and a half - I saw more of him than Isiah] so I asked him to leave that night and not come around at all for awhile, at least until things cooled off with Donna and Barry. This seemed to appease Donna.

In the meantime I had my forth phone interview with IT Convergence, where I’m hoping to join a team of Oracle RAC experts in their consulting practice. It must have gone well since I’ve been asked to do in-person interviews next Monday. Also, I’ve been continuing to work on the new metabolomics project at IBG and am also getting involved in another project to setup a new grid interface to our 20-node computation cluster. And still finishing up that article I’m writing about male prostitution and my experiences working with it over the summer. Hope to finish that this week.

And of course I’ve still been doing a little swing dancing… in fact my friend (and partner at Emmaus) Kaylyn is totally getting hooked now! Check out this awesome post on her blog about dancing. Oh yeah, and I’ve been doing church stuff too… in fact I played guitar in the band again this past Sunday morning and led bible study Sunday night. Oops, didn’t have time to prepare for that… and had to totally wing it - but I think it turned out alright!

And last but not least, Aris is finally moving in. I spent all day Saturday and some more time Sunday afternoon with him, getting furniture and stuff for the new apartment. This place is going to ROCK when we finish getting it setup! Everyone in Chicago: look forward to our housewarming party. It’s going to be a blast.

And of course this week is already totally filled up with plans… this is just how my life has been lately. But on the upside, I just got an AMAZING letter from Italy.

Ok, don’t have any more time to write… gotta run!