Because Kate doesn't get enough attention

Hooray for posts that have nothing to do with their titles!

Today was a good day and an all together surprising one because today for the first time in a while I sorta stepped back and realized that I'm happy. It isn't everyday that one can just stop think about themselves and say, "Yes. I am happy." Sure I've felt good and ok and so-so and alright and I've been "pushing through" and "hanging in there", but today, right now, I feel happy. I also learned a thing or two today:

1. I itch.
2. Snow blowers are probably the best inventions ever ever! We have a gas powered behemoth and boy can it move snow around! I did my entire driveway in no time at all. No back breaking work with a shovel or anything. Fuck that. Hell no, not for me, I've got my self a snow blower!
3. I really love driving Opis in the snow. Now I know I've never formally introduced her, but Opis is my dad's Saturn Ion that I drive. Not my first choice, but she gets the job done without complaining too much. I arrived at the name Opis because according to Roman mythology Opis was the wife of Saturn and since you always name things after women Opis it is! Anyway, Opis is front-wheel drive and a manual (lovelovelove stick) and gunning it in first to plow through the snow to get out of the driveway this morning was so so so much fun. Granted the drive way was clear, but just getting out onto the street in front of my house was a blast!
4. Julie and Julia is a good movie and did 2 things for me: one-blog more! and two-make me really hungry.
5. My mom makes the best lasagna. I know your mother does and every mother does...but my mother actually makes the best lasagna.
6. Annette Bening is gorgeous. Saw her tonight in Being Julia (two movies with "Julia" in the title in one night? who knew?") and she was stunning. I would totally be that younger guy who sleeps with her and then sleeps with the hot blond chick my age. Sounds pretty awesome to me.

And that's all I have to say for my self tod-oh wait, and.........right, remembered now. I'm reading this new (new as in they have an archive that goes back to 2005) webcomic called Shortpacked (click the link to see what comic is was reading when I wrote this) and I don't know how I feel about it. I read other webcomics that are relationship/drama driven and they are fun and I read others that are fun and quirky and have no real continuity, but this new one sorta tries to be everything...and I don't know if I like it. I mean, I am reading it and mostly enjoying it, but I'm also mostly reading because I'm hoping it will get better. I dunno! We will have to see.

A bottle of wine and the rest of reality

So of course I didn't finish all 16 pages. I did a bunch, handed it in, and then went to go watch Ninja Assassin...which was so awesome! In summery: it is really hard to write something when it isn't really due.

Last night for the first time I finished off a bottle of wine by myself! I was very impressed with myself. Of course when I told my mother her response was, "Yeah, not too difficult." I thought it was neat and I was proud of myself, regardless of whether it is a feat or not.

Now that the weekend is over though, the daily grind starts over anew!

A Blues Brothers paper

One of the most famous lines form the Blues Brothers movies was the line "We're on a mission from god," and today I sort of feel like and outside hand is trying to push me in the right direction.

I have this paper due...in like 3 weeks, but our professor said he would look over it and give us edits if we gave him a rough draft by tomorrow. So today I started to write my paper. So far I have two sentences and the paper has a max length of 16 pages.

Yeah, I am optimistic as well!

But i decided to go home and shower so that I could push through until the late night without having to stop to shower later and so I could sleep-in in the morning (more on my ideas behind showering in the afternoon at another time), but alas! The shower was taken when I got home.

This only leads me to one conclusion: god wants me to finish this paper before I shower. So here it is, plain and simple: do as much as I can on the paper and shower in the morning.

Updates to follow.

For want of an autumn breeze

I had fun Saturday night.

Went to see a show with my girlfriend which was a feature of one of my university's graduates and her band. Good music, nothing particularly unique, but very enjoyable to listen too. It had been pegged as more jazz club type music, but it turned out to be a more indie-jazz-rock type of gig. She was wonderful, the band was great...but the music was kind of generic.

Afterwards we went back to my campus house to meet up with my house mate Eric and his girlfriend Kate to play some Hearts and await the arrival of other friends to drink with and then go out to enjoy the night.

That was the general idea, but we ended up playing, after a few drinks, that favorite game of our childhood: Truth or Dare. Nothing too exciting and we ended up watching Planet Earth and going to bed around midnight.

My mother always told me never to mix drinks because that would always lead to the worst hangovers. So I woke up Sunday felling a little...tender. In all truth I've felt much worse, what I really wanted though was to walk outside and get a blast of cold New England air. Instead i was greeted with 72 degree temperatures and sunshine.

All I wanted was to be cold, but clearly global warming decided to laugh in my face. Luckily I was able to receive my respite at 6pm when the sun had finally gone down.

Now I know some people, like my girlfriend, are summer children and need their warmth and sunshine. I too enjoy a good warm day as much as the next person, but have you ever wanted to be cold? I don't mean near hypothermia, skin turning blue cold, but just a bit chilled, a cold breeze in your face, that feeling of the cold slowly reaching through every open stitch of your clothes and pushing away the warmth.

I wanted it and was over joyed when I finally got my breeze.

Oh, and I played with a bunny.

Bathing caps, BMWs, and booze

Today I have (still have) a lot of reading to do for a paper due tomorrow about tectonics in Death Valley for my seminar class. Seeing as how it's Sunday and no one wants to do any work, I attempted to do the reading and write my summary. Of course when one is reading very technical scientific papers, it occasionally becomes difficult to really become enthralled in the material. Needless to say I felt rather unmotivated. This is something I have been feeling a lot this past week and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it isn't due to lack of sleep or the fact that I've had a cold all week. No. It is clearly because I haven't been exercising.

Last month I participated in my first Triathlon and had been exercising (almost) every single day to prepare for it. And since then I have gone completely cold turkey on the working out front. I had heard form friends that when they stop exercising that they start to feel 'blah' or antsy from not being out and about. I had always maintained that whether I running outside or running my fingers over a video game controller it wouldn't affect me.

Well...on the off chance that i needed at little pep in my step from exercise I went for a swim before continuing to read my papers. And today, for the first time, I had my bathing cap that they handed out for the Tri and I used it, not because I was hoping to swim extra fast and wanted the reduced drag, but because I needed something to keep the hair out of my face when I swim. Apparently water doesn't care if you comb your hair in the morning or not, it makes everything hang down and that is very annoying when you go up to breath and the only thing you see is not the wall but hair.

AND on a completely unrelated note, during brunch this morning my two friends Clay and Ben and I were discussing whether one thing was arbitrarily better than another. Ben brought up cars, something I am very knowledgeable about, and asked if a Ferrari was a better car than a BMW. To which I and Clay (who had just spent a semester in Italy) responded with Ferrari's being better. Ben then responded with: why? Well, this is harder to answer because they are different cars aimed at different markets. Is a Ferrari a great car to haul a week's worth of groceries home? Is a BMW the best car for going head to head with a Lamborghini on the track? This of course leads to the inevitable wishy-washy answer of: it depends on the situation. To be sure everyone would love to have a Ferrari in their driveway, but they would probably not care for the upkeep costs or track ready ride during daily stop and go traffic. But on the same token, the super rich would probably never want a BMW in their driveway when all their friends have Ferrari's and Bentley's.

It's been a week since I've turned 21 and I haven't really taken advantage of my new alcohol status. I suppose this week I will go to the liquor store to get carded just so I can show them my ID and say, "Yes, it was just my birthday."

The end of a hiatus and the start of something new

So as the summer progressed I found myself with less and less free time. There was research during the day, hanging out with friends at night and then- oh shit, time for bed. Though I was able to find time every day to write a letter to my girlfriend, that activity mostly took over blogging for me. Writing at length about how my day was only to go back to a blog and write it again seemed silly and time consuming and I didn't want to just replicate the letters again, because then they would lose their significance (they were meant for her, not the whole world, whether the content was trivial or personal).

BUT NOW she is back in my time-zone and I am not out hiking about the west with Texans, so I can find some spare time out of my busy schedule to write again and keep this going.

So this is the end of the summer hiatus (until my week long vacation next week) for the Blue Shag Carpet, but more than just a restart, but a new beginning.

In the beginning I had pledged to keep people's names secret through the use of nicknames: this will change...maybe, slightly. The stories just don't flow well when I am having to constantly change and alter names, plus my friends who read this (all 2 of you) know who the people are so the anonymity is lost anyway. So it seems like a great opportunity to do a slight change. For the more benign tales of adventure, names will be used. However, some tales are just way too embarrassing for real names, but those stories never have a huge cast of characters. As such, for the especially juicy bits of gossip and ridiculousness, names will be arbitrarily changed on the spot. Most likely a "Boy A and Girl A were with Girl B and C..." sort of set up and if I am feeling especially creative: actual fake names!!! But for the time being, real names, real people, real hilarity.

Unfortunately these changes will have to wait until next week, since Ari (short for Ariana; my girlfriend) and I are going to the Adirondacks for the next week before school starts. I am really excited for this trip. Just the two of us, the mountains, the lake, nature, and all the time in the world. It's going to be so nice to just sit and relax and get away from it all before school starts up and there are the added things like life to get in the way of living.

Also, I have decided (almost arbitrarily) to do a triathlon in September. Now what would ever posses me to do such a thing you might ask? Well, at the start of last school year I decided to be more open minded and say fewer nos and more yeses, as such when I was asked to do a triathlon, it seemed like a great way to get in shape and I wouldn't be going it alone (Maggie, a grad student in my department, is the one who convinced my to do it). Now all I have to do is convince as many other people as I can to do it with me!

Well, that's all for now folks! More later and LOTS more after this coming week!

Epic Fail: making coffee

So, what do you need to make coffee?  Ground coffee, water and a filter for the coffee maker right?  Exactly what I thought.  So I wake up this morning and go for coffee and it turns out I forgot the most important ingredient in making coffee: a pot to collect it in.  So instead of nice hot coffee I had a sludge mess of grounds and water burnt onto the heating pad and dripping all over the table where my coffee maker is.  

In other words:  EPIC FAIL!