I'm not an extrovert. A number of people have disagreed with me here, most notably Jeff and my mother, both of whom have legitimate claim to knowing me pretty well, if in somewhat different ways. They point to my social ability and overall willingness to look silly in public as evidence.
Alas, introversion is not a question of being shy (call it social willingness, which I'm largely not; nor is it a lack of social skills, which I have. No, the distinction lies in a lack of social energy: that is, do you feel mentally recharged by spending time alone, or by spending time with other people? Is it more comfortable for you to focus on the world inside or outside of your head? Interacting with other people, while I really like it for the most part, tires me out...during my first cocktail party here at Houseness, back in January 2000, I was fiercely social for seven straight hours--and exhausted for four days afterward. It's that sort of tradeoff.
So for three months I haven't really wanted to talk to anyone else but Mona, a combined results of the facts that Mona is nifty and we were surrounded by people I didn't really want to talk to. Suddenly last night I was surrounded by literally hundreds of people I like to talk to (it's a big cocktail party), and I actually felt overwhelmed, which is rare--more typically I just feel tired.
As a result I didn't really get a lot of time with anyone, because I'm just having a hard time holding prolonged conversations with people, so I kept flitting from one place to another. Mona had a similar problem from a different cause: she's an extrovert, and was so excited by seeing all the people again that she bounced from conversation to conversation in much the same way I fled.
A few weeks ago I started designing a game to play gin rummy, as a way to get back into programming, because I like to play rummy, and because it seemed like there are some interesting problems involved in developing a general strategy for it (and possibly other games, like gin), finding some underlying principes for how it's played. Unfortunately I didn't have a computer to work with, so now that I've been back, I've been working on it, so far just the support work, like a deck of cards, and predicates for comparing cards, that sort of thing. The deck of cards works, but there's a fun issue with how to compare cards and determining what cards to keep and what to throw away, and then also a mechanism for scoring. It's coming along nicely, though.
I think I'm starting to look for a job. Sure, I'm still going traveling in a week or so, but if anyone wants to hire me, I'm happy to worry about that when it comes.