Leap years! We keep having them. (They are, I would argue, the only good thing about election years. Especially when the greater evils win.)
...and as long as there are leap years, there will be leap year posts. From me. Brandon. A human who definitely still exists. Exists and enjoys typing into the void every four years. I've had some beer, so why not.

Life? Life is fine. Jacque is back in Tanzania (the Pandemic broke her.) Oh! We had a pandemic! Yeah, a cute lil' mini-apocalypse. That was... interesting. (Shit started getting real EXACTLY one Xanga blog post AKA four years ago!) So a disease called Covid is just a 2nd flu that kills people every year. It got politicized, and then normalized, VERY fast. Which reminds me, I should burn down the world at some point. Busy though. Maybe next Leap Year.

I'm dating Kat now. She's a baker. She's great.

My 2nd anniversary at Avitide is also great. Well, acceptable. I had Paul (one of my favorite coworkers) bake me a cake. I outlasted Scott, and can celebrate the fact that work is that much more chill. I've survived 8 years (and two anniversaries) at Avitide; stagnation and career non-growth is the name of this game. But as a job? Great! Good enough! Fine! Acceptable, I guess!

The housing market got so-bad-it's-funny; you either have a house (in which case: you have golden handcuffs and can never move, but are technically rich) or you don't (you are generationally fucked). Due to the uncertainty re. continued employment at Avitide, I'm a "don't". Whoopsie. But I did buy land - 127 acres of beautiful slutty forest - so I'm actually in some strange middle quality. Renting forever, but I have equity and I can fuck off into the woods (MY woods) if shit gets apocalyptically bad. (Again.)

I could afford the land because: Avitide sold! We are a subsidiary of Repligen now! Nom nom nom corporate digestion. Certain scenes from "Mortal Engines" come to mind. (But I will not post them here. Because I am lazy and forgot how to add images and genuinely do not care; this entire exercise in futility is mere product of ethanol and nostalgic inertia, not some desire to make interesting content. Fuck "content".)

Short-term slice-of-life updates! I am:
-post-Salt-Hill tipsy
-Still cold (unseasonably warm Winter, but unseasonably COLD today)
-a week off a Canada trip with Christa, where I tried cross-country skiing for the first time! (She continues to be pretty rad. During the pandemic I had a brief crush. I cured myself years ago. Still jealous of her muscles, though. I tried lifting, then got Covid and lost ~6 months of decent gains, and gave up. Still keeping up with push-ups and occasional curls though. And running, of course. Gotta run through the woods. WAIT this is a tangent and I'm still trapped in brackets HELP HELP I NEED TO ESCAPE THESE BRA)CKETS AHA! I am free! Okay, carrying on.
-Typing in a browser window in Xanga (a very NARROW slice of life, that.)
-capitalizing every 2nd heading.
-Enjoying Baldur's Gate Three, although holy hot DAMN everyone wants to fuck me, despite the fact that I am a clown-haired Dwarf. I just want to date Karlach, all the rest of y'all fantasy fuckers can fuck right off. Anyway, it's an enjoyable video game despite the Sahara-Desert-Level Thirsty NPCs.
-clearing an acre of land (of my 127) to plant trees not quite native to New Hampshire, but a few states south. Global warming is changing their optimal ranges, and I'm helping them migrate north, like the good Ent (tree-herder) that I am. I have been strangely obsessed with this. I wouldn't be surprised if this was some Eldrich or Fey geas; a compulsion laid on me by Old Powers. But I'm having a satisfying time in the forest, and have yet to maim myself with my chainsaw. I also insulated & fixed up a tiny cabin. Hopefully by next February 29th I'll have a positive update re. Potato Hill (my land) but there's a lot of weird ways all of this can go wrong. We'll see! Watch this space.

Well, my attention span is gone. Time to play video games and/or nap. Until next quadrennium!

Hey again Xanga. What's all this Xanga 2.0 nonsense? Gorram newfangled malarkey. Back in my day, we had REGULAR Xanga, no fancy numbers added, and it was uphill both ways through a foot of snow, and we LIKED it. Now excuse me while I continue to yell at this cloud.

...anyway. Let's see. Today is my first work anniversary at Avitide! A company that started with such promise. A company that has devolved into a game of Musical Chairs for its dwindling employees. Well, I've avoided losing the game for four years now - but Musical Chairs ins't exactly known for producing a lot of winners, in the end. Point is, long term prospects here are down - but resume' padding is up! (Four years industry experience, baby! No more chicken-and-egg can't-get-job-until-you-get-experience-which-you-can't-get-until-you-have-a-job-which-oh-boy-this-is-a-lot-of-unnecessary-dashes-now-okay-I'll-stop.)

Oh. Also. I be married again! Yay! Dr. Jacqueline Mtage Kihwele is my lovely wife. We are officially* (*Totally unofficially, nobody changed names) House Kiki. Kihwele and Kier. It's very Katchy I MEAN CATCHY OOPS TOO MANY Ks THREE Ks IN A ROW ARE BAD. We were going to get married for mostly immigration reasons... and then her H1B visa worked out and she technically didn't need me, but we were like... fuck it, we're in love, why let the government dictate what we do? I mean, fuck the current US government in particular. Fuck it right in the face.
...but I digress. Married! Yay! So apparently there are still good people left in the world. Holy fuck she's amazing. Let's check back in four years and see how I feel. (Jacque if you're reading this: of course I'll still be in love with you, you're amazing.) Life throws a lot of curveballs but I have a very good feeling about all parts of my life outside of short-term career prospects. And Jacque is the reason for that.

Eh, what else... some miscellaneous drama related to a woman I very briefly dated three years ago, who broke up with me three times (fascinating since we were never formally a couple) and has had this weird passive aggressive on-again off-again friendship with me ever since. Yeah, I might just avoid her forever now. Especially since Jacque doesn't like her. Too bad, she was a decent friend.

Other friends: good. Surprising level of drama for mid-30-somethings. But otherwise a solid group of geeks and gamers. Oh..I'm pretty much all cut off from any Seattle people by now, which is perfectly fine. (Only even thinking about them now because I discovered old blog posts.) Still some good people there... but meh. Far away. Relationship maintenance is hard. So nah.

The last four years! Lots of treadmills and Switch games and map art and coffee and trail running and Ingress and board games and random geek shit and beer and science and snacks and sex and socks. And hundreds of other normal life things. Yup. Nothing to report, except for everything.

It's that time of year again: Cheap Chocolates Day! Only I already have enough chocolate and also don't feel like going out shopping tonight. Additionally, experience has taught me that only the low-quality shit gets poured into heart-shaped molds, wrapped in red & pink foil, and sold to equally low-quality saps. No, MY chocolate, the GOOD chocolate, does not go on sale merely for the aftermath of some consumerist pseudo-love-fest. It takes something truly auspicious to get the good stuff to go down in price. Like, to cite a recent example: Lebanon's incredible brewing supply store clearing out shelves of chocolate to make room for more and better beer. Now THAT'S an occasion. (Mmmm... dry hopped.)

Oh, check this out, achievement unlocked: unfriended and blocked on Facebook by my wife. And no, the divorce isn't final yet, so she's still technically my wife. Managing to get unfriended and blocked by my wife seems... impressive, somehow? Or maybe just weird and unsettling? Probably more that last one.
Though to be clear, she's fundamentally not worth my time. I have joined the ranks of noble (and numerous!) souls who see no value in interacting with her. Even her considerable creativity - her only asset of note - is being grossly misapplied. (She's doubled down on the whole "my blog is a career" thing HAHAHAHA wow. It was cute before it destroyed our marriage, I guess? Now it's just sad. Watching it go nowhere continues to be satisfying.) Anyway, point is: this is no great loss. And I didn't earn this rebuke from some drama or argument with her; I just posted an honest Valentines Day request of my friends to talk at length about boundaries, and contingency plans for when someone stumbles into an emotional affair. A legitimate request that could potentially save someone's relationship. Nothing to stir up drama, barely even any shade thrown between the lines. Only a smidgen.
Are changelings burned by truth and wisdom, like demons are burned by holy water and vampires by crosses? Something to ponder.
Facebook is my go-to acquaintance-management tool, so I suppose I'll have to email the changeling to finalize the logistics of our taxes and divorce. Annoying.

I vowed to relax obligation-free and play video games yesterday - V-day - but that mostly didn't happen. I stayed late setting up two big syntheses at work, then I went to the gym to run on a treadmill like some rodent because fuck Winter. (No but really, fuck Winter. I don't care how beautiful she is - she's trying to trap me, fatten me up, and then kill me.) When I finally got a few hours of gaming in, my fiancee died and my friends abandoned me. Okay technically this happened to King Noctis and not Brandon Kier, but it was still a depressing end to the day. But at least I (Noctis) can kill a bunch of monsters tonight to relieve stress.
All my real-life monsters are technically people, so to avoid jail time (and to avoid being a horrible person) I will of course confine the killing to video games, where it belongs.

(President-thing Trump is too stupid to be a villain; he's just a monster. The changeling and the betrayer are merely monsters as well. They have far less control over their lives than they realize - victims of their tangled web of justifications, frightfully narrow parameters for achieving happiness, and income-free Alternative Careers(TM). Bannon and Pence might be legit villains, though.)

Hmm, Valentines Day was supposed to inspire me to keep writing my book, which is set in a world stuck on the day before Valentines Day. It's a long story - literally - which is why I've taken a break. Well, I can get back into it once I finish up with FFXV. Someday King Noctis and his entourage of capable prettyboys will defeat the Empire of Niflheim and... oh wait, it's a Final Fantasy game, it's going to have at least three layers of surprise villain twists. Maybe my unnaturally pretty friends were the evil masterminds THE WHOLE TIME and they were also figments of my imagination and also a dragon god with insanely high HP for some reason! Anyway, good game, would recommend. Just don't play the depressing part on Valentines Day after having been betrayed and abandoned by a shitty spouse. Would not recommend.

Time to wrap up this Ramblevomit wordspew with...
with nothing? It's the end. That's all. This is the end of the post.

Well hello again.
My tradition has been to post only every February 29th. It's a manageable posting schedule. Very... hipster?

Anyway, in light of recent changes: it's time to break the schedule.

The recent changes I'm referring to are really just the one, huge, shitty change: My Wife, my Love of 11 years, Christine Winckler, left me for her unemployed, poly writing assistant. It happened over the Thanksgiving (Thankstaking?) weekend. I decided not to write about it until the evil, sentient 2016 was dead. I didn't want it overhearing anything.

So you know how most people in a serious, committed relationship have the wisdom and the will to take action to preserve that relationship if they recognize that they're in the middle of a serious emotional affair?

Yeah, not Christine the Changeling. She decided to justify it instead, with the help of her increasingly narrow group of friends. A friend group winnowed down to a small rotten core of like-minded people that also happens to be a polyamorous clique. Her justification? You guessed it: she feels like she's polyamorous and enlightened now!

I'd been going through hell for months as I explain to her that we're not poly. That she's always been very anti-poly - so what the hell is with this 180? Then explaining that, okay, we can be poly, but poly involves boundaries and here's your one boundary: you can't date your writing assistant.
Yeah, she wasn't okay with that. And we never really became poly, because she clearly only wanted her writing assistant, and I clearly only wanted her. She kept complaining that she was in a cage. I couldn't force her to feel differently, but a cage isn't the best analogy. She was in the Garden of Eden, and her young writing assistant was the one, the only forbidden fruit.

There's a bizarre twist. I can't decide whether this makes me feel worse, or better: he is in no way successful or attractive, and she practically admitted to that. So what was he? He was around a lot. That's pretty much what it boiled down to: proximity. And not even physical proximity, for the most part. They spent almost all their time online, working on Christine's blog. (Which she laughably believes to be a career? It would be amusing if it wasn't so sad. More on that in a later rant.) I've taken enough psych and human sexuality courses to know that proximity is the number one catalyst for emotional attachment. I couldn't compete with Christine's writing assistant, because I had to spend long hours working. Y'know, supporting us and building our future.
Well, MY future, now. I'll have more money now that I'm not subsidizing an unfaithful spouse's affair. Silver linings and all that.

I literally and figuratively set 2016 in fire and stomped it to death. Well, semi-literally; I had to make do with an effigy. Some Seattle friends hooked me up. Good times. Well, cathartic times. Legit good times won't be back for a while.

I'll bitch about this more later, because this shit's cheaper than therapy. In the mean-time, I'm just happy that this hell-year is over.

Life update: I have a new job now! This isn't a "this happened sometime over the course of the past four years while I was waiting for another February 29th" scenario. I started a new job TODAY. It's my first new job in 12 years. I transplanted myself 0.98 continents to the east for this gig. The first day went... okay? I'm going to have to learn a looottt of new instrumentation, but I know my science, so: confidence!

Okay my wife wants to watch Crash Course US History now, so it's time to do that! See you next leap-year, zombie Xanga site!

So writing a blog post is "adding a weblog" now?  Huh.  Interesting.  Maybe it was always like that?  It's been a while.

So... it's February 29th again!  The day we all celebrate the fact that God is such a shitty clockmaker, he can't even make the Earth's orbital period a multiple of its axial rotation.  And let's not even get started on the lunar hand of the clock, or the fact that the arbitrary seven-day week has no celestial timepiece whatsoever...

Unless there was originally a second moon.  That would have been awesome enough that I'd let god off with a warning, and a promise that he wouldn't repeat such shoddy craftsmanship (craftsgodship?) in the future.   More likely, the solar system coalesced via natural processes and god doesn't deserve any blame for our less-than-stellar celestial timepieces.  Or maybe we're just blaming the wrong god?  Maybe it's Brahma's fault.

Oh, right - my life.  Let's see... I defended my thesis and earned my PhD in chemistry, got LASER EYES, got married, started Enforcing at PAX, moved to a vastly superior apartment, and co-wrote a successful R01 grant application.  An application about circular permutants of proteins that FINALLY, after over a year of bureaucracy and languishing and general government inefficiency, got funded.  Sort-of.  It may be another month or so before we see any actual money.

The novelty of being "Dr. Kier" has worn off long ago... yet I still have "Dr." on my debit card, and feel somewhat awkward about that.  (Removing it when the card expires, so I don't feel like a cheap tipper.  Especially since my take-home pay is maybe a few percent more than it was when I was in grad school.)

Also, I've designed a number of games, like Succession, which is kind-of like chess + stratego + go + warhammer + your mom.  I also finally beat NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) in that I've written >50k words for a (proto-)novel(-type-thing) called "Worldjackers".  It's kind of like Firefly + Super Mario Galaxy + Cowboy Bebop + your m... anyway, it needs significant revision, or possibly a trash can.  I have not been making custom liqueurs and blends so often as before, but I am still hosting Game Night with Christine; it is still generally awesome, though we've recently discontinued forcing newbies to drink Hot Burning Death as an initiation shot, since too many people were vomiting, wailing in pain, and swearing never to return.  (I discovered that my Hot Burning Death - aka ghost chili extract - is very close to pepper spray on the Scoville scale.  I swear it tastes better, though!  Pepper spray just tastes like oppression and police brutality.)

Well, until next time our 365-day solar calendar fails us, this is Dr. Kier signing off.

(Okay, so the novelty hasn't completely worn off yet...)

Wow, I haven't been here in years.  Feels like visiting an old friend - who is now married and lives in a different country and has kids and doesn't like any of the same stuff and barely remembers my name.

So, the occasion: February 29!  Nobody is doing a damn thing to make this day special (it's not a holiday, not a half-day , not a weekend... it's just a few bonus dollars if you pay monthly bills but get paid hourly/daily/weekly.)
SO - to make this day special, or... more accurately, to NOT make this day special, but have some written record that I actually DID something on this rare day, I'm writing in my old Xanga Blog.  (I'd make a joke about internet dust... but no.  Meta instead.)

My life?  I can sum it up in two words: Grad School.  Yep.  That's about it.  Well, that and Christine.  My life is good, and has been mostly good for the past three years (definitely some stressful times, but they come at lesser intervals than they did in College.  Unfortunately, one is coming up very soon: I have a 30 minute research presentation to give this Wednesday, and I haven't made my slides yet.  Also, a paper of mine got rejected, so I have to reformat it for days - literally - before I can send it to a different journal.  Lame.)

So... oh yeah, was I dating Christine when I stopped posting?  Hmm, I think so.  Anyway, it's been almost three years and we're still doing well.

I have a website now, some short stories (3 are here) and beginnings of novels, a bunch of random artwork, some fabric-painted shirts, and - most importantly - homemade liqueurs.  (Bubblegum liqueur, anyone?)  I also had my golden birthday (my family gave me 25... everythings.) and grew out my hair again, for some reason.  (Avoiding barbers, just like I avoid dentists and eye doctors.)  My research is going well; I've designed a capping motif for beta hairpins!  Woot!  Nobody cares!  (Certain biochemists will care, as it is interesting from a protein-design perspective, but most people have no idea what "beta hairpin cap" even means.)

Yeah, that's about it.  Nothing meaningful or philosophical (a happy, complacent lifestyle lends little inspiration for philosophy) - just a life update. 

See you again next February 29th!  May the February Extension Fairy bring you a bounty of February-29th-related goodness!

  So here's why I've had less interest in journaling lately: 
(Not that I feel any particular need to justify myself, but still...)

1.  I don't really need to write down what I'm thinking/doing to
"get it out of my system", since I have a girlfriend for that
now.  (Well, have had for the past year-plus.)

2.  I have a real-life journal, which I write in my homemade
phenotype - not for secrecy's sake (my life is still essentially
secret-free... how boring) but because if people can't read it, they'll
assume it's interesting.  In truth, it's more pathetic than the
journal I kept in 1st grade: included are meaningful entries such as
"got off work early today, boss was out of town" and "I think I'll go
to the Ave for lunch today.  I ran out of good food."

  On a related note, I've been using my phenotype to write in a
common notebook at the Chai Lounge.  Every week or so is open mic
night, and people read random passages from this common notebook. 
I'm attending tonight's open mic night (in about an hour) because I'm
curious to see if anyone tries to read my seemingly nonsensical string
of symbols

  Oh - I got a grant!  Yay!  I'm now a Molecular
Biophysics Research Grant Trainee.  Which means... Niels (my boss)
saves money, and I go to a bunch of extra mandatory ethics classes and
seminars.  I guess it'll look good on my resume, or
something.  (I sound less grateful than I am; this is me
practicing cynicism.)

  Yeah... so I might give in and transfer my online journaling
(what pathetically little I still do) to Myspace.  There's just...
more people there I know.  Not that I particularly care about
people (in general), but it doesn't hurt to keep in touch with old
friends.  Y'know, some sort of minimal online contact to keep old
friendships just barely alive, yet comatose.

  I go now.  Blarg.

  Damn - it's June already?  Ugh.  Oh well, at least school is out!  Which... oh yeah... means nothing to grad students.  I'll be doing even more TA work in the summer, since the NSF (or was it NIH?) grant didn't come through.  Good times.

  Let's see... Cassondra visited for a few weeks, that was cool (hmm... I still need to mail her books back to her.  That girl is crazy, but I'll save that rant for another time, I guess.  Definitely a fun guest... though near the end, Christine and I were going a bit crazy from sheer lack of, y'know, private time.)

  Um... passed my 2nd-year exam... did I mention that?  Yeah, that was cool.  Um... what else... oh, got some apartment issues solved and Christine will be moving in with me by July 1st (Anje moving back home, I guess.  I hope her commute doesn't suck too bad - I'll have to offer to let her stay over whenever she needs to...)  Um... yeah, that's about it.  Oh, and I'm in the process of designing a morpheme based language.  It's very tedious.  I'm planning on giving up.

  My advisor is out of town, so I've been reading a lot of these at work lately.  Grad school comics... fun times.

  Next time I think of something interesting to rant about, I'll be back.  Until then: Xanga neglect continues!  Hooray!

  Vomited for the first time in 16 years.  The first time in the latter two-thirds of my life.  Eck.  Feel better now, though.  Might've been food poisoning; don't know for sure.  So much for my Mighty Stomach of Steel...

  In other news, I need to chew more.