It's pretty pathetic when your first instinct when writing a blog post is to say "Yes, I'm still here." Then again, that's probably the content of 9 in 10 blogs, so here's to the lowest common denominator.

Life has been a weird mix of busy and repetitive. Work feels like "Groundhog Day" most days - I'll let you figure out what I mean. Consecutive days each week are taken up with small groups from different churches, and it's a little much at times, though I like them and don't plan to leave. The big problem is that I miss both nights of Pizzeria Paradiso's half-priced drafts, but it's not easy to tell your friends "I'm choosing hard-to-find microbrews and Neapolitan pizza over you," and sounds a little desperate to my own ears. One of my groups made it over to Pizzeria this week, late after a campus lecture by a "hot" New York pastor at Georgetown - half of them had never been, and though nothing was on special, we enjoyed the Oskar Blues Old Chubb, Rogue Anniversary Charlie and others. And argued theology, or something, though as usual I was mostly distracted by my draft and share of the pie.

In a last gasp of beer-centricity before a sort-of break coinciding with Lent, I hosted a Sweet Sixteen-style beer-tasting and pizza-making tournament with S and T (yes folks, this is a new name-abbreviation) over the weekend, and it was hugely successful - roughly 50 people came, half RSVPed the first day - and only slightly messy. Ommegang Abbey Ale beat the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA in the final round, out of 18 entries, if you were wondering. We learned that it takes a lot of stamina to keep drinking, even when it's only a jigger for each matchup.

Not much else to report that I feel like making public just yet. S and I are going to Costa Rica in April - she did a family-paid cruise over Christmas but I haven't been anywhere but Canada since I was 18, when I went to Chile on a feel-good mission (let's be honest). I'm not hoping for anything particularly "authentic," though it could be nice to practice my Spanish a little again (5 on the Spanish Language AP test, yeah!). Mostly I just want to lay on the beach, buy some knickknacks for family and friends, and take home a monkey butler. Two roommates are leaving soon, one for marriage and the other for a solitary and more mature existence than a house with a basement lounge called the Super Cool Bonus Room. I need to get a new bike tire so I can give back T his bike, which I've been using for a year without shame. With all the cold and little interest in recreational exercise (though today I did two hours of trail-walking), I've gained a few pounds, and my emo-boy t-shirts are fitting a bit snugly.

Also, one of these days Jeremiah and I will launch our much-discussed, little-populated all-things-culture site, for which we constantly text and e-mail each other with suggestions that eventually we'll search for in our inboxes and phones so we can put it all together. Oh, and S and I have thrown together a Christian dating site, Ecclesiator (trademark pending), that we're hoping people will use to set up their friends from different churches, because if there's one thing conducive to long-lasting relationships, it's putting your friends in the role of your obnoxious aunt. We haven't promoted it much yet because, like most things I do, it's nowhere near complete. I would love to say that it's even in alpha, much less beta - it's more like the formless earth before creation.

So that's it to some extent.