It's been a heck of a week. There are a couple of things that have happened that are pretty amazing.

First off, I heard from some people at work that Shane (my friend who was sent back to South Africa due to some problem with his visa) has a lawyer in S.A. finally. The lawyer went in to meet with some people at the consulate and they were very nice. They told the lawyer that they don't see anything wrong with his visa or his records, so all Shane has to do is come in for a meeting and they should be able to clear everything up. That...is weird. Shane, the lawyers involved, and everyone who's been involved is very confused by this turn of events, but it looks like he'll be able to return after he has his meeting -- the soonest he could get one was next month. I hope everything goes well and he makes it back soon after.

We had our distributor meeting at work this week, so I spent a lot of time preparing for that and having everyone in the department clean up our work area so that it looked a bit more presentable. I even, finally, managed to get all the comics we've been receiving from DC separated into "useful" and "not-so-useful" piles and then placed in boxes that look a lot nicer on the bookshelves than the brown boxes they came in. I still have some organizing to do on them, but it was a good start. The distributor meeting itself went very well. There's more to say, but this isn't really the place for it.

The other big news for the week, definitely the biggest for me, is that I have a girlfriend. Her name's Jen and I like her pretty well. She's a lot of fun, 25, lives on Mercer Island, just a little ways from Bellevue, and she's trying to become a back-up singer -- so of course, she's working as a choir teacher and restaurant hostess now. She's making some progress though, and will likely start singing with a local band soon. She had a disk of their stuff and they're very good.

It's very strange to be in a -- hmm, I have a hard time calling it a relationship since it's only four days into it, but I guess that's appropriate. I haven't been seeing anyone since I left Madison in late September of 2001. It's very odd, but everything is going well and we've been having a good time. Her mom got her some tickets to Carmen which is playing in Seattle right now. I've never been to an opera, but it looks like I may be going on Monday evening. That should be interesting.

Other than that, well, I've been trying to get my apartment in order. Before the distributor meeting I had to get some cases of product out of work (the free sets I get of our releases), so I took the opportunity to get a larger storage space. I moved everything from my old space over and I still have some room to move some things out of my overstuffed closets. It will be nice to have a bit more space to organize things.

I mentioned going to Ikea last weekend and I found a great desk that I think I'm going to buy. The table I'm using for a computer desk isn't doing it for me and it makes my wrists and arm hurt if I work for long.

Since I set the computer up and had a cable Internet connection installed, I haven't watched any DVDs. It's weird. Like I only have time for one thing in my freetime. Right now it's the computer. Actually, now that I think about it, it's probably because I was editing that project and now I've been busy with other things. Once I'm back into a more normal schedule I'm sure I'll go back to watching some of my DVDs. I look forward to it, actually, I still have a number of new ones from Christmas to watch, plus the Buffy season five disks.

Okay, I'm going to read some comics and relax a bit. Tomorrow will be spent at the gym and at work trying to get some things done for the week.