I hadn't really planned to visit Ireland this year, but then my sister Michelle phoned the other day to say that her boyfriend, David Bowles, had just proposed to her. Not a big surprise. They had moved in together earlier this year, and we were all assuming that it was a question of when, not if.

They plan to get married quite soon, as his father has been given six-to-nine months to live, and they want him to be at the wedding. I don't know if the date is firm yet, but the latest that I'm hearing is November-11th.

In May, I pounded out a record 31 blog posts. June draws to a close and this is only my third post.

In brief, here's some of the highlights of June.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses on June 16th. I read a part and I was also the script wrangler and webmaster.

My profile on my Windows XP laptop got corrupted. I decided that I would make flatten it and turn it into a dual-boot system. I'm now on my third week of running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). Quite easy to get going. Not so easy to get everything that I …continue.

I've been sporting a goatee for the last two months, instead of my usual full beard. This has ne­ces­si­tat­ed shaving, and I've been using those disposable Bic razors. I haven't been very happy with them. They left my face feeling like I had been making out with a cheese grater.

I bought one of those new five-bladed Fusion razors yesterday and shaved with it this morning. Oh my! Very smooth!

I'm convinced that five blades is marketing hokum and that five blades is probably not really better than four blades. Or three blades. But five blades is certainly better than one.

Today (May 6th) was our sixth wedding an­niver­sary. In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. In others, it feels like we've been together forever.

Six pretty good years. Lots of good memories. Quiet times. Happy times. Travel together. Staying home together. Going out together. Mixing with our friends.

Not perfect years. I'd change a few things if I could, like Emma's health and her two long periods of un­em­ploy­ment. I should have quit Microsoft months before I did in 2004.

We celebrated by having some friends over for dinner. Raven came with Mr. Raven. Muhsin and Banu, newly back from a long trip to Turkey, came too. I made Afghan Chicken. It …continue.

Emma now has a personal blog.

I often complain about being busy, no doubt because I have a talent for com­pli­cat­ing my life. Things were relatively quiet for a while, but that's not true anymore.

At work, we're close to releasing the first version of our product. Happily, crunch time at Atlas isn't nearly as bad as it was at Microsoft. Instead of working eight-ish hours a day, it's more like nine or maybe ten. The pressure level has risen, of course, but it's far from in­tol­er­a­ble.

The real busyness is in my ex­tracur­ric­u­lar life. I'm the president of BiNet Seattle, a bisexual community group, and have been for the last three years. I also …continue.

I was born 41 years ago today. (Tech­ni­cal­ly, yesterday, as it's now the early hours of March 16th.) I was to have been called Vincent after my father, but my mother's father, George Victor Clery, had died just 12 days before. I was baptised George Vincent Reilly on March 17th, St. Patrick's Day.

Beware the Ides of March, I tell people: You might have to buy George a present. Better a birthday present than the reception that Julius Caesar received on March 15th, 44BC.

I've never liked the name George all that much, but I've never disliked it enough to do anything about it. (Emma legally changed her entire name about ten years …continue.

This ap­pli­ca­tion to join the Republican National Committee arrived in the mail the other day. Hell hasn't frozen over yet, so I won't be joining the Republican party.

I don't know how the RNC came up with my name, though I got another so­lic­i­ta­tion from them a few years ago. Usually, I get so­lic­i­ta­tions from the Dems and from a variety of pro­gres­sive causes, but then I have a track record of supporting them.

The previous owner of our house, Harry Korrell, is a Republican lawyer. He was a member of Dino Rossi's team when Rossi was trying to overturn the last gu­ber­na­to­r­i­al election in Washington state. Feh!

On Tuesday night, I felt like Imelda Marcos. I conducted a long-overdue purge of my closet, leaving me with two large boxes of clothes, mostly shirts and t-shirts. I probably got rid of 80% of my collection of Microsoft shirts. All in all, I had 63 empty hangars in the closet when I was done. Yikes!

Lately, I've been dressing a little better. More button-down shirts, fewer t-shirts. Not that there's been any pressure to do so at work -- the geeks at Atlas are just as badly, er, informally dressed as at any other software company that I've worked at.

I was looking up the credits of In­ter­mis­sion on IMDB, then decided to look up my brother, David Reilly, the actor of the family. I found him.

I couldn't find any IMDB listing for my other brother, Mark Reilly, the filmmaker.

Then I looked up my own name. I wasn't there, of course, but I did find Der Spleen des George Riley, a German TV production of a Tom Stoppard play, Enter a Free Man.

I did quite a bit of work for Irish television in the mid-to-late Eighties, but it was all behind the scenes computer graphics work for such timeless gems as Murphy's Micro Quiz'M, Rapid Roulette, the Carroll's Irish Open, …continue.