I think this has been the longest stretch of no diary entries. Not that I'm going to feel all guilty over it, but this is certainly going to a be a busy month.

I gotta get my car squared away. The lease ends next month and I'm certainly going to buy it. I actually do have enough saved up to pay for it in full, but my father made a good point when he said that, in his opinion, I should just get a loan from a bank and pay it off at least over a year or too. That way I'll have enough left over in savings, just to be safe. The fact he's a professional financial consultant has really spoiled me over the years, because he's walked me through all that stuff whenever it happens. But ONE of these days, I'd like to learn how to do my own taxes.

Then I also have the living situation, which is tied in with the job. After searching for so long, with different potential roommates coming and going, and coming so close but never getting anywhere, I said "fuck it" to finding a house with other people. Actually, I recently said "fuck it" to finding a house or condo all together. I have the money, but given the location of where the company is moving to in a few weeks, there just isn't any permanent dwelling in the area that's affordable (even for just me) and withing reasonable driving distance. I do have to move out, because the commute would be even longer than it is now. That would fucking kill me.

So it looks like I'll be grabbing an apartent. And I have to do that really soon. But it's going to be great when I get it all done. Even when I was actively looking for houses before, part of me just wanted to live in the city. Ideally, I kind of wanted to live in that setting: close enough to the T, and not only a parking spot for myself, but enough places on the street where a friend could drive up to visit me without having to park 1/2 a mile away.

I was at work until 1:00 AM last night, working on a program in Perl. Did I have to? No. I'm not even a programmer; I'm in QA. But it was a programming language I picked up at my last job, and I was just on a roll creating something. Besides, I eventually want to learn how to do those CGI scripts, maybe for my own webpages. I have a big idea at this point. But anyway, back to the one I'm working on now. At work, we might be asked to test databases with thousands and thousands of records, like the ones the clients are using in real life. When we do get thousands of lines given to us, they're crap. This script I'm making is going to randomly generate all the ones we want, with the special paramters we want. I even got some special census data to make it look real (no more of these garbage alphabet names).

Some parts are crudely made, but hey, I'm not a programmer. If it turns out to be helpful, it will flatter the team. Then I can further tell them that I did it on my own time. If it turns out to be a waste, then I'll say the same thing: I was working on it on my own time. No loss to the company! Then I'll have a program that's all mine, that I can use for something else. In any case, it looks like I'll be replacing "C" with "Perl" in that list at the bottom of my next resume. But hopefully even that won't be for quite a while.