Last Days of Disco

I have no interesting frame for this at this time so this will go here as a placeholder. I will not be surprised if I either can't think of anything better or just plain forget about this opening statement. Anyway, the following are recent things going on and changes; the aggregate being uncharacteristically significant (though some listed are still minor):

• I am back to working 7am - 3:30pm: I had worked 10:30am - 7pm since the start of the year; that schedule was my idea... and I was shocked when it lasted more than a few weeks. We were busy at work and this effectively made the lab I work in bigger by staggering shifts. I wholly got used to sleeping in until 9:30am... to the extent that if my alarm didn't go off I wouldn't wake until around 11am (which only happened twice.) I was never very good at waking up early and getting things done before work; I was good at staying up past 2am. Getting home at 7:30pm (or, more often, after 8 or even 9pm as I usually work OT) makes for a short "normal folks evening" but it was nice for shows that started at 8 or 9pm and went past midnight.
• I got a new cell phone: I went from the default Nokia to a newer Samsung. OK, this one isn't all that exciting. My original service contract wasn't up until August but Sprint lets you get the same new signup discount on a phone if you wait 18 months... plus I got to change my plan to one where I'll save around $10 a month... which will pay for the phone upgrade in 8 months.
• I am flying to Michigan in July: I technically am only flying to Illinois and Arizona... but most of the trip will be spent in Michigan. Almost all of the extended family lives in Michigan somewhere. The itinerary thus far: flying into Chicago (Saturday),taking either a train or a rental car to western Michigan ... and then slowly making our way to near North Canton, OH for a wedding on the following Saturday (and the rehersal dinner the night before.) The return flight is out of Cleveland on that Monday. Oddly the Detroit roundtrip flight was more expensive as well as more driving.
  
• I traded in my Trooper and got a Civic: I utterly despise the car search process. My Trooper was a '93 and I had recently went over 160k, it had been a while since I had used it as a 4WD... and the projected repair budget to keep it running was unacceptable. I will get better gas mileage, my insurance should drop and... I lose my CD player. I'm back on cassettes for general commuting (short trip anyway) and my Creative with a tape adapter when I want something more. Hmm, let's go into this a little more: I hate looking for cars. There are either far, far too many options or far too few. I have never paid attention to cars, I can't tell make/model much of the time without seeing the bits on the back that give it away, I have never cared about car racing of any stripe... you could not call me a car lover. This is approximately the only area of my life where I'd love to have a product simply assigned to me by the government. I don't care about the differences between cars, I just want something that runs, isn't tiny and is efficient. I like that I got something so common, so generic, so boring. I am not a bumper/band sticker person so there probably won't be anything unique about the car. The only break in this is that the car is a forest green rather than silver/grey.
  
• I am currently blogging about personal shit: I am much happier to have personal details be included not as an end unto themselves but because they come out naturally as a part of other discussions. Enough is revealed necessarily and incidentally; I want stuff about me to be implicit rather than explicit, generally. It won't happen again, I promise.
  

That's all to report currently.