So, you know how I only played about half an hour of WoW on Friday? Well, I haven’t really done anything except play it since then. If I didn’t have to log out once in a while so that Chris could play his undead warlock, I’d probably forget to sleep and eat. Everyone from #caoine thinks it’s high-larious that this is my first MMPORG and I’m already addicted, but whatever. My night elf hunter totally rules.

I’d be a lot farther along than I am except that I started over with a new character on a different server early this afternoon so that I could play with Zot. My new hunter’s only level 9, but I love her anyway.

I finally got around to picking up World of Warcraft, but it took so long to install and patch that I only played for about half an hour tonight. And of course I managed to die twice during that time, but I was still impressed by the graphics and gameplay. Tomorrow I’ll get into it more, I suspect, and then you’ll never hear from me again.

Every once in a while, someone emails me to remind me that I promised way back in April to post my senior thesis for those interested in reading it. I’ve since decided that I’m not actually going to post it on the web after all. It’s not that I’m shy about the paper, it’s just that the only other time I have posted a paper on the web, someone tried to turn it in as their own for a similar class less than a year later. This isn’t so surprising - I think people are probably much more likely to pass off another undergraduate’s work as their own than they are to try and pass off, say, something from Phil Studies. The paper itself is obviously a lot more plausible as student work because it is student work, and it’s also harder to track down because it isn’t really published anywhere and wasn’t bought from one of those paper sites.

But I’d still like to give friends and philosophers the chance to read my thesis, so the solution I’ve settled on is that interested folks should just email me and I’ll send out a PDF. I understand that interested slackers will probably find this post on Google and ask me for a copy at some point in the future, and that can’t really be helped. But it would be nice to have at least a general idea of who’s got the paper for the next time I get an email from a professor letting me know that someone else has turned it in. (It looks like obscurity of authentic undergrad work didn’t save the student in question this time - when it was still up, the post in which I linked to my paper was in fact the only result produced when Googling its first sentence.)

I don’t know which is the best part of my day: sitting down in front of our living room window with a cup of coffee in the morning to watch Manhattan go from grey to red and wait for my hair to dry, or stepping out of the train station at night and seeing the Queensboro bridge all lit up directly above the island and the city a few hundred feet across the river. It’s worth noting that both of these moments involve looking at the city, and neither of them were regular parts of my day before the move. I did have something analogous when I lived in Brooklyn - the train I took home would go over the Manhattan bridge, and there would be a few minutes where I could look out the window at the Brooklyn bridge and lower Manhattan. I don’t know why I like cityscapes so much, but I really do.

Incidentally, I guess the point at which I step off the train at night and look at the bridge while I wait for the bus is probably the best part of my day, because I’m done with work for the day and am five minutes from getting home and seeing Chris. In the morning I’m still too resentful about being up before it’s fully light out.

I know I’m supposed to be spending my evenings unpacking like a good little tenant, but it’s a lot more fun to make hot chocolate and play Pikmin 2. There’s nothing like delving deeper into the hole of beasts, after all.

I did a little more Christmas shopping on my way home from work today, and I think I’m more or less done, which is nice. I’ll probably place another small order from Amazon and that will be that. Now to get it wrapped and taken to Massachusetts (some of it, anyway).

Given that Christmas is a mere seventeen days away (and that my birthday is next month), is it too early to start discreetly pointing out my Amazon wish list? I sure hope not.

We are still living in a land of many boxes, but the rest of our furniture arrived from IKEA today so it’s are starting to look more like a real apartment around here. Also: I have a truly amazing number of books. I have more books than Chris does, and Chris has a lot of books. I didn’t quite realize how many I had before the move, because many of them were being stored in boxes since they couldn’t fit on our bookshelves. We bought two new bookcases from IKEA, though, so they’re all coming out now. Beware the many books.

It seems unfair that it’s December and it’s still raining. Where’s the god damned snow, already? By April, of course, I’ll be tired of seeing big black dirty heaps of it piled in the gutters, but it would be nice to have something other than drizzle between now and Christmas.

I’m still getting a trickle of cat-related email, so I thought I’d give you an update. (Nothing says “Internets” like WEBLOGS AND CATS.) He was pretty freaked out over the move, which we were expecting. The first day he didn’t do much except pace around and yowl - he even started hissing at us briefly, and we didn’t get much sleep that night. By now he’s pretty much back to normal, and his mysterious scratching problem from a couple weeks ago is gone as well. He’s eating normally and rubbing his head on the walls so we figure he’s fine. He likes to sit on the windowsill and watch the seagulls over the East river.

Unpacking is going slowly, mostly because we’re too busy enjoying the apartment. We still haven’t heard any music, and pretty much the loudest things in the apartment are Chris’s computer and the cat’s claws on the floor when he walks. I still can’t get over the view not only from our windows but from the entire east side of the island. The F station is almost directly beneath the Queensboro bridge, and at night it’s a really incredible sight. I’ll take pictures as soon as I can find the box my camera is in. I haven’t yet decided whether I like the F or the tram better. The F is how I’ll be getting to work during the week, but it’s nice that I can also just take the N/R or 4/5/6 to 59th and Lex and then take the tram home.

So yeah, life is good. Yesterday I went out for a couple of hours and finished my Christmas shopping, and today I just need to unpack enough clothes to get me through the work week. We’ll probably make a start on our many, many book boxes as well.

So we moved in to the new place and all is well, even if I still have to open five boxes every time I want to find one specific thing, and then moving those boxes around makes it so that I can’t find the right box the next time I go looking for a different specific thing.

The move itself was less than fun, as I guess most moves are. We hired movers this time around and there weren’t any knife-weilding crazies, but I did get stuck in accident-related traffic near the Triboro bridge for over an hour. I spent the entire time listening to the cat yowling in his carrier and trying not to think about how badly I had to pee (too much coffee, not enough breakfast), but we made it here safe and sound.

And now we even have our cable TV and net access, like normal civilized people. Of course, our new furniture doesn’t get delivered till Tuesday, so we’re playing GTA from a mattress on the floor until then, but it could be worse. We’re sitting in a totally silent apartment at 11pm on a Friday night, for one thing, and we’re looking at our (enormous, expansive) view of Manhattan from our living room windows. Over our balcony! Now, if only I could find the box that’s got my iPod dock in it.