Fantasy Garage: The Final Two

So what does one do for Christmas of the year he started his blog, but finish something?! Yes, after dropping off a cliff in mid-March the Garage will finally be completed, but not without some serious thought. You see, after including a sports car, a grand tourer, a roadster, a minivan, a bargain sports sedan, a muscle car, an entry luxury car, and a hot hatchback I honestly was at a loss as to what else I should include. I've hit almost everything that I would have wanted. I've satisfied almost all of my auto enthusiast buttons, so what is missing?

My favorite Porsche and a bionic cheetah.

Cars: Porsche Cayman and Infiniti FX50 AWD

Options:

Porsche (what isn't an option?): Red leather interior, sport exhaust, suspension upgrade (PASM), PDK shifting system, limited slip rear dif, sport chrono package plus, 18" wheels, sports bucket seats, nav system, and BOSE sound system.

Infiniti: sport package.

Prices after options:

Porsche: $75, 450

Infiniti: $62, 265

Of course there would be a Porsche! It is impossible to ignore the perfection that they have been building for decades (though it is very easy to overlook several other fine automobile makers). The 911 has long been considered the gold standard for performance even though it is the best engineered bad design ever. Who ever though it was a good idea to put the engine in the back of a car clearly missed a physics class or two.

None the less, I did not choose the ass-engined 911 for two reasons: 1) it's too damn expensive before options and 2) the mid-engined Cayman is better. For far too long the Cayman has been the talented little sibling that mommy and daddy have been trying to ignore. As the 911 moves past it's prime of the ultimate sports car, eyes focus on the beautiful little coupe: the Cayman.

I never liked the Boxter. I always thought the lines were funny and you lose stiffness when you chop the top off something, but in the Cayman you have that top and with it the performance of cars double its price.

A perfect mid-engine layout with the rear wheels chirping away at the road and it's just bliss. Porsche has perfected the ideal of a car being an extension of one's self. Plus, I just love the way it looks. The sheet metal from behind looks as if it was modeled after the small of a woman's back, which is one of the sexiest parts of any woman.

Now why the hell is there an SUV in a garage of an auto enthusiast?! Now, I have to explain: I love Infiniti, I feel that they are doing BMW better than BMW is doing BMW and with the FX50 they have something truly crazy, yet tame. 0-60 in 5 seconds flat. Sure a BMW X6 can do that...for $7K more. And that is what makes the Infiniti so appealing: it can do it for less and better.

Price doesn't have to factor in with a fantasy collection, but when it comes to ridiculousness I want mine without iDrive. I want it with speed and handling in mind. I don't care that the car will never see mud. I want to drive up to a traffic light next to a Mustang GT, rev my engine, and then look in my rear view mirror at the owner's face as an import SUV out runs him! That's what the FX50 is about: fast, handling, luxury.

Now there are some elephants in the room in the form of the latest Top Gear. Granted there are faster sleds out there, but why spend $100K when you can have just as much fun with less than $70?

As such the Garage is now full and I have enough left over for beer money (or something better)!

Money left over: $13, 504

A trip to THE city to see a show

The first thing that strikes you when you walk out of the subway is the size of...everything. You are forced to just stop and reacquaint yourself with what you previously understood as the proper scale for everything. Once you have done this you can keep walking and you become acclimated to it, but the sense of awe never really goes away. It is a similar experience to jumping into the ocean in September: the water is freezing and the fact that the water is cold doesn't go away, but you get used to how cold it is...sorta.

We were going to the city to see the show Billy Elliot, which I knew to be "musical something something dancing something something good". In other words I had now idea what I was going to see, but it turned out to be an amazing show about a working class boy in northern England and his quest to join the Royal Ballet School in the mid-1980's. Marvelous show, I encourage everyone how has the chance to see it.

I hadn't been to the city in a month, but then I was going to visit my (now ex) girlfriend and my mind was on other things, plus it was still light outside when I went. Going into the city this time, however, my mind was on the other cities I had visited in recent memories: Boston and Philly.

Philly had been grey, intelligent, and had a sense of beauty that is most similar to watching an elephant move: large, graceful, and majestic. Boston was fun and hip with tall shapely architecture and a one letter subway name.

New York City, however, is different.

NYC is THE city.

At the beginning of freshman year people from all over the country all came together and there were many of them who weren't from the northeast. There were also some who lived near major cities, so they were all very confused when people would say, "I went into the city." As if everyone knew what they were talking about. These people quickly learned that "the" city was New York City, and everything else was just called buy it's real name. By the end of the year people would say they went to visit a friend in Boston or they went to visit a friend in Philly, but they never went to visit a friend in "New York City". No no no. The went to visit a friend in THE city.

And growing up near the city sorta ruins every other city for you. Nothing is a big or grand as NYC. Which is why I affectionately call Boston: Bostontown, for it is not a real city like NYC is.

What made this trip to the city different than ones past was that I was getting there at night and at night in the city it is brighter than during the day. And everything is illuminated. Everything.

So I walked out of the subway station to street level at 42nd street and looked up...and up...and up to the billboards bigger than my university's tallest building. Light that made the subway seem like a dark cave. Buildings that made the ceiling of everywhere seem retroactively claustrophobic. A child past by me and pointed up and said, "Wow mommy! Look how big it is!!!" I myself stopped in awe at the mass of buildings color and light, because unless you see it everyday, it really is a shock to the system.

And you really have to take a moment to look and try and take in how big everything around you is, otherwise you might fall over dizzy trying to comprehend it all!

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!

I caught a chinchilla, what did you do today?

So this week began with graduation on Sunday.  It started out hazy and then turned beautiful, so beautiful in fact that I got a wee bit of sun on my face and arms.  Hopefully this won’t be the only sun I get all summer, but if this rainy weather continues, it just might.

 

Then Monday…oh dear, Monday.  Monday was as crazy as crazy could get.  I woke up early so I could get a little bit of work done in the lab and then rushed around doing a million different things.  It didn’t help that I realized late that it was Memorial Day and everything was closed…except my favorite deli (thank the heavens!).  I moved out of my university apartment and dumped all my crap into the apartment I am subletting from a friend for the summer.  Then rushed back to help my lazy roommates pack…which consisted of me just packing more things into my car (I have a car now, on long term loan from my mom) and ferrying people to and from the storage facility.  After all was said and done I went to bed (after fully unpacking my stuff which was an ordeal unto itself) and woke up early to meet my advisor.  But Steve, you may ask, why would you have to meet your advisor early in the morning?

 

Well, I’m house/animal sitting this week for my advisor. She has chickens (which are probably the easiest animals to take care of out of the lot of them), chinchillas (which are cute and fluffy, but try at nothing to escape their cages when ever you get near), and her dog (who is super playful and I feel bad every time I’m doing work or eating and say ‘I can’t play now’).  Now that I take it all in as a whole it is not such a bad gig.  Free eggs, puppy to sleep with, doing a friend a favor, but the mornings are a little...shall we say: brutal!

 

The little doggie is pretty much my alarm clock, which is just really annoying when you haven’t had a full night’s sleep, and most of the chores take place in the morning.  The night time is easy, but oh god these mornings.  Especially because it has been cold and wet, it is just down right dreary…but I do love New England.

 

The Old Friend left for her summer adventure(s) Tuesday night.  I’m really going to miss her.  She has become such an integral part of my life that I wish there was some way we could be together more over the summer than not seeing each other.  But such is life right?  She’ll have fun doing her things and I’ll have fun doing my things.

 

One issue I have with house sitting: communications dead zone.  I have no cell phone service and I can’t connect to her house wireless.  Now this wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the fact I am like 5 minutes from campus: close enough to stop bitching, but far enough away that you don’t want to walk in the middle of the night.  I am mostly up set about the internet.  If she had no internet I’d be cool with that, but the fact that it exists and I can’t figure out how to make it work erks me.  So I’m writing this post in a word doc and going to transfer it over to the blog at a later time, so though I am writing this on a Thursday, it might not be until Friday that it is up, but hopefully I’ll be able to get to my apartment tonight to get this up.

Finals are (have been) over!!!

Now that finals are over and graduation is behind us it is time to move into the summer.  Which means of course....SUMMER THESIS RESEARCH HAS BEGUN!!!!!!!!

Yeah, that and just a crazy couple of weeks.

More details to follow...eventually...soon-ish.

FINALS!!!

Here I sit as finals week is about to begin.  Since the whole shooting thing professors have reduced finals so that they won't be as rigid and terrifying as they would have been.  That being all well and good, I still have to do them.

Now for the plan:

Monday: Geochem final, probably take it in the afternoon.  It's take home and open book.  Not too too worried about it.  At night I'm going to get together with my partners and do a Lab presentation write up.  And if that doesn't take too too long study a little sed.

Tuesday: SED SED SED!!!  Study until my eyes fall out and then either take it at night (since it's take home) or...

Wednesday: Probably take sed final in the morning or early afternoon.  Then at night I am going to work on my Silent Spring paper so that I have all my sources read and an outline.

Thursday: Write the paper.

Friday: Finish Silent Spring paper in the morning if I some how was unable to the day before.  Write Geochem research paper (5-7 pages about algal blooms and nitrogen in southern California, not too hard).

That's the plan, now let's see if I stick to it!

Movie Review: Star Trek

To answer the esteemed Musical Daddy: it was awesome!  This movie cleverly repackaged Star Trek for a new generation.  First thing's first: all the famous one liner's were there, and they didn't feel out of place at all.  All of the personalities of the characters were spot on for how young rambunctious versions of themselves would be.

That being said, this movie had a very different feel compared to the series or even the past Star Trek movies.  The Star Trek series tended to lean more on science, ethics, morality, politics their episodes, while the movies were usually vehicles for exploring more grander philosophical questions.  This movie was able to do both, but leaned less on the philosophical.  There is one scene...which I won't spoil too too much, but there is one scene in the movie in which all the characters pause to consider the grander philosophical question...and then we move on.

The movie was very fast paced, and I feel like the director used it more as a vehicle to pay homage to the previous movies, while wanting to do something bigger or more different with the series in the future.  There were several scenes that were reminiscent of the past movies: Wrath of Kahn and The Undiscovered Country in particular (I felt).

The new theme song is a little brassy, but it doesn't take away from the movie.

This movie is not the original series.  If you go looking for the same thing, you'll find that it has been revamped with a couple extra doses of realism and is significantly more fast paced.  If you go looking for great science fiction, with special effects and space battles: this movie does it best.

It was Star Trek, but it was newer, fresher, and gave a great background for what the next movie will hold.

Safe again!

So this week was pretty crazy.  It was the last couple days of classes and then the annual spring-fling and then reading period.

Then on Wednesday one of the students here at university was gunned down while she worked at our bookstore cafe.  The killer then fled.  Campus was shut down.  People made a mass exodus; leaving for home or anywhere that was not here.  Those who could not leave, or those (like myself) who chose not to leave stayed.  

Then tonight, as I was leaving the movies after seeing Star Trek, we got the news that the killer turned himself in!  It was a great way to end a truly epic movie.  Now things will return to some assemblage of normal, though we will grieve for the loss of our classmate.

I, for one, always felt safe here on campus.  The local police and the campus security really made me feel safe during this troubling time.  

Though this event has shaken our university to the core, I feel that it is important to rise above the situation.  An act of violence always reminds us of how fragile life is in the grand scheme of things and we should take some time to reflect on the things and people that are dear to us.  However, we should also use this as an opportunity to live life to the fullest.  Though one of our own has been taken from the path laid before us, we should walk on and honor her memory by treating each day a little dearer, and appreciate the gifts that we have been given.

I believe that the best way to honor the dead is to keep on living.  There is a time to mourn, but they would not want us to mourn forever.  I feel this quote nicely sums up what I am trying to say:

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears.  We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.  ~David Sarnoff

Rest in Peace Johanna, I never had the pleasure of knowing thee and the world is a dimmer place without your light.

Sunday field trip to the beach

Why sleep when there's coffee?

Why sleep indeed...

This week I've woken up earlier and gotten less sleep than I have during any equivalent week.  Mostly due to procrastinating, but there was work in there also!  I've found that waking up early to finish work is really awesome.  Get some coffee in me and I am there!

We has our last lab field trip for my sedimentology class this week and I took some pretty good pictures.  I was finally able to get a close up of something with the object in focus, and the background not.  I was really proud of myself and now I am looking forward to taking more photographs of things going forward.

The work is starting to pile up, but I've got a plan: do it.  Plain and simple, but first we are going to present our data to the town from the frozen lake project that we have been doing all semester for my geochem class.  I had a run through today with my partner in front of our professor and he was impressed that we were so prepared so far in advance of our presentation.  We still have a few minor tweaks to make, but we are all set to do a great job next week when we present in front of like 100 people.

The Old Friend and I are going out for Mexican tonight and then to a show that her former roommate is in.  I am looking forward to it all, I just hope the rain doesn't get too crazy too fast.  Lots of rain will make it very much not fun to walk down Main Street eating ice cream.

This Sunday my sedimentology class is going to the beach to do look at some coastal processes (pictures to follow!) so I am really looking forward to doing that and learning about beach forms and such.

I'm brain dead from sleep deprivation.  More on how the weekend went in my next post.

Yeah, I'm a great blogger

So over a week without a post.  Go me.

So what happened in the last week:

Saw a weird puppet/dance/senior thesis production with The Old Friend.  It was a little out there, but the costumes were neat.  It was as is someone knew what they wanted to do and had the fabric all written down ahead of time, but then walked into the fabric store and realized, "Hey, look at all this other fabrics that they have in this store!  I want one of everything."  So there was about a football field's worth of fabric for each costume.  Plus it was very interpretive.  Weird all the way around, but definitely interesting.

Had a picnic in a cemetery...which was fun.  It was going to be just The Old Friend, her best friend, The Brewmiester, and I, but instead it was me, The Brewmiester, The Old Friend and a bunch of her friends (her best friend didn't make it).  It was a different experience.  Some of the people were tripping on...something or other.  We (The Brewmiester, The Old Friend and myself) didn't partake in any of that stuff, but it was funny to watch the tripping people interact with each other and the world.  Unfortunately there was not much in terms of food, so The Brewmiester and I bailed early to go get some food.

I GOT INTO THE BA/MA PROGRAM HERE AT UNIVERSITY!!!  Which means that I'm staying for a 5th year to get my masters, which is pretty cool.  It also makes sense for me, because I want to go into industry when I get out of school and having a masters makes it easier: I'll start at a higher position (and salary), I'll be able to move up more easily, and since I won't be getting a PhD (for now at least) I will be doing active work, rather than just research.  But overall YAY!!!

This week was fully of de-stressing: some good, some not so good.  Good de-stressing: drinking tea and getting enough sleep.  Bad de-stressing: get all of my papers due the last week before summer break.  Now it really is all on me to do them and not clusterfuck myself on that last week.  But on the up side I will probably only have 2 finals during finals week.  So that's kinda cool.

My housing for the summer is all but locked in place, unlike some of my other friends, so that is also a relief.

Aside from that, nothing else to report.  I know the garage still needs 2 more cars.  I'll get on that eventually...after I finish my first paper I will add a car.  How about that?

Today was super exciting, or not

Today I had roast beef for lunch and I was a little underwhelmed.  This is probably due to the fact that it was the last one at the cafe and a wrap instead of a sandwich.

In other more interesting news I have confirmed my classes, or at least registered for the classes I want to take.  Hopefully I will get them all!

Easter brunch and shifting papers

So you guys know when you go to a restaurant and you are kinda dressed up, maybe a nice shirt or a clean pair of jeans, and in walks some guy that looks like he could have just finished washing his car?  Yeah, that was me for Easter brunch on Sunday morning.  My mother called me to say she was in the parking lot and that we should go get brunch.  So I did what any self-respecting university student would do: NOT tell her to wait while I showered, but instead throw on clothes over my pj's and go to brunch.  Of course wearing a hunting-camo shirt might have been a little much in terms of tactlessness, but she woke me up!  So there!

And that brings us to today where I accomplished everything I wanted to do, and I'll be damned if I start tomorrow's "To-Do List" a day early!  If you put something off until the next day then why the hell start early?  You have already set time to do it tomorrow and starting today would just screw up tomorrow's schedule.

Speaking of screwing with schedules: professors that push assignments back.  On the one had it is amazing because you now have all this extra time to do the work, but now you also have all this extra time to procrastinate until the night before.  After having this happen to me twice within the past 3 days I am fed up.  As such, and I am saying it here, I will hand in one of my 3 research papers early!  Enough of this weekend before crap.  I am tired of not doing stuff and then letting it build to a fever pitch.  A little work every day will keep my productivity-self happy and I will probably do a better job than waiting until the weekend before.

I hope I don't end up eating that last paragraph.

Hahaha, what a great night

So this week I have been...off, but on the other hand I will leave that for another post!

Now we are going to shit gears *manual-stick-shift-motion*.  Tonight was awesome!  And by awesome I mean the lead tag on this should be: party, and nothing else!

So I was at the university sports grill, picking up dinner with my brother (a dinner I never finished, by the way) and I see JWB with his roommate and he stops me and tells me he is going to a movie and that it is an open invitation.  WELL!  After last night I jumped at the opportunity to do something social with people and my brother.  We go to see Adventureland (review not pending, it was good, go see it) and my brother, being the dumb ass that he is, gets hopped up on caffeine from drinking caffeinated soda and asks to leave.  I heard, "I'll go stand over there."  So then end of the movie rolls around and he is no where to be found.  I'm freaking the fuck out and for good reason: I just lost my brother at 10PM on a Saturday.  Luckily he was just sitting in the lobby playing his DS.  But he didn't have his cell phone with him so all the calls I made went unanswered.  And he blames me for him not having his cell phone.  I, apparently, rushed him out of my apartment too fast.  Whatever.  Everything was ok and we got back and hung out with JWB and all was well.

Then the boy felt that a movie and a concert would be "too much" and that he "wasn't me" and "couldn't handle the late nights yet" because he wasn't in college.  So, he stayed behind and I went out.  No big deal: he had his game and I had the world as my oyster!  

So I went with JWB to a ska concert at one of the frats here at university.  It is actually a "literary society", but anything with Greek letters is a frat...so it is a frat.  But it was GREAT!!!  I let my hair down (usually i have it parted and swept back) and rocked out!  I was dancing like I haven't done in a long time.  It was so much fun.  I am at a loss at how to articulate how great it was to just dance and enjoy the music.

Afterwards, I met up with The Old Friend, which was great since I didn't want to just go right to bed.  We hung out and compared notes on how our nights went and got to see each other and breathe for a bit, which was nice.

And now I am back here, in the apartment, writing this.  And tomorrow (later today) I will write more about what this post was going to be about when I first thought about writing.

Great night!

:-) 

It only falls apart when I try to make it work

What a cluster fuck of things going wrong and not working out!  So my brother came up to visit for the weekend and I had hoped to have him and The Brewmiester hangout, cause The Brewmiester is a fun person and he plays World of Warcraft which my brother used to play.  So there is potential to get along there.  Plus, even if there was nothing going on tonight party-wise, The Brewmiester can find a party anywhere, or can just make one.

But The Brewmieser went away for the weekend.

Not a problem there are other people I know that I can party with and show my brother a good time.

But it's Passover and Easter weekend, so that number is effectively halved.

That's ok, I did my research and some key people were still going to be here.  Then one by one they had other things going on, there were no parties, everyone was staying in, it's the height of thesis season, AND ITS FUCKING RAINING!!!

Yeah, clearly not the night of fun and debauchery I had planned for my little brother.  Luckily my wonderfully fantastic girlfriend, The Old Friend, keeps her ear to the ground like no other and was able to get us some entertainment in the form of a comedy show on campus and then I took my brother contra dancing.

All in all, the night was not a complete wash, but I could have been so so SO much better.  It is times like this that I really miss The Roommate and The Shrink; even if they call it quits early to go to bed, they were always game to hangout and find something to do that was social.  

Now, could I have done other things and searched out people and hung out with them on an almost individual basis?  Sure, but to have my brother tag along it would be weird for him since he wouldn't know these people, plus it would be weird to be all, "Hey!  I haven't hung out with you in a while, by the way this is my brother also."  I could have done it, but I would have wanted to run all over campus in the rain doing it and that wouldn't be fair to my brother.  

Another possibility would have been my brother coming up next weekend everything could possibly happen.  :-P Argh!  I'm just frustrated about what could have been.  This brings up something I think about every now and then: regret.

The idealist in me feels that one should live without regret.  There are countless quotes about "if you spend all your time looking back, you miss the present" and so on and so forth.  I really try not to let regret seep into my life, because, well, the quote is right.  Life has no rewind or pause button.  There is no spell check for the long text of life.  No save points.  Only the constant forward motion, the world keeps on turning, the pen never leaves the page.  If we have regrets, then we shouldn't have done something in the first place.  Regret ends up being that which prevents us from going forward.  Regret stops us, while life continues to move on without us; like suddenly stopping on a treadmill.  

Because of this I try to live life without regrets and without shame; live in the moment and not the moments that could have been.  This has led to some very fun and interesting experiences, most of which I am thankful for and have enjoyed immensely.  

However, ideals are called ideals because they are not actually how life is lived.  As such, I have come to the conclusion that everyone has regrets because, well, we are human and it is just a fact of life.  So, do I regret that the night not turning out the way I wanted it to?  Yes, but only because I'm human.  

This week is all about me bitching

I hate working on a reading for a long time, barely understanding it as you're going along, only to have the professor send out the reading response questions and have none of them be clearly answered by the reading you have been struggling all day to understand.  

So, now I'm going to start another reading based on one of the reading response questions that I think will be more easily answered/more straight forward.

This is something I don't like about sociological and philosophical and metaphysical readings: they are operating at a level so far above me about things I take for granted every single day.  Which is like (this is probably the most famous analogy) talking to a fish about water.  Granted the sciences are the same thing, but for systems and the vocabulary is completely different!  In my Science and Technology Studies readings they use words that already exist and just give them different meanings!  What is that?!  Or...bah.  I am just frustrated that I really don't understand this reading and should stop blogging and move on to another one.

I guess I will just go to class on Friday (I know, it IS shocking for me to be doing readings in advance) and just say, "I found the reading to be very dense and difficult to understand.  I don't know if I am interpreting this correctly, but I think the author was trying to say this..."  I feel that I'll be alright if I say that.

Phewwwwww........ok, back to work.

A better day, with a positive outlook for the rest of the week, and a shout-out to sxephil

Today was grey, but not raining, which made things way better.  So here is a short list about the things that made today better than yesterday:

1. I didn't get coffee this morning.
2. I now know a different way to get the header file for my data to get the data to work AND I know how to upload it to the class server.
3. I still don't know how t find some stuff for my thesis, but I figured out who does and will contact them tomorrow.
4. Talked to my professor about having his house this summer (turns out it is faculty housing and I can't, but at least I tried).
5. Deciding to wake up at the normal time tomorrow (which by the time stamp on this post would be today).

Things are looking up!  I got my bs-ing out of the way today and yesterday and I am ready to get hard to work tomorrow afternoon on the things I have to get out of the way so that my little brother can come visit me and "experience college life" this weekend.  Oh he will experience it and it will be fun.

On a more serious note: I follow the video blogger sxephil on youtube.  He won't be posting this week because his father is in the hospital.  After having my father be in the hospital and passing away this summer I know the kind of stress this can put on a person.  As such I want to wish him and his family the best as his father recovers this week.  

The Blue Shag Carpet is wishing your dad a speedy recovery Phil!

Rainy day list

Blah. 

Usually I love rainy days, but today was really a drag.  Dark grey sky from the start and it just rained.  It didn't pour, that I would have enjoyed on a purely "wow, this is intense" sort of way, but no.  Just normal off and on rain.  So let me take you through my day with a list entitled:

10 things that made the rainy day extra grey:

1. Convincing my self I hadn't slept enough, even though I had and wining...or losing depending on how you look at it.
2. Getting coffee when I actually didn't need it and being jittery all day.
3. Walking all over campus and getting my hat and pants heat-suckingly-cold and wet.
4. Trying to view downloaded data for a final paper only to discover that it wasn't in the correct format due to a missing/undownload-able header file?
5. Getting lost in a hallway shaped like a C...with only one, well marked exit.
6. Not being able to figure out what exactly I am supposed to be finding for tomorrow's meeting with my thesis advisor.
7. Not being able to ask my professor about living in his house this summer.
8. Wasting a bunch of time discovering that google can do everything!
9. Not having any work immediately due and feeling incredibly unproductive because of it.
10. Deciding right now to wake up at 7AM.

Yay rainy Mondays!

Confusion leads to more confusion

This morning at 5AM the Malaysian Grand Prix took place.  I was going to watch it, but after a long night of partying I realized that this would be a bad idea and decided to just sleep the full night.  This was, of course, an excellent decision.  Two weeks form now is China at 3AM.  I will miss this too, but the rest of the season is further west on the globe and start at 8AM, which I feel is more manageable: gets me up early, I'll have the whole day ahead of me, it'll be better.

This means of course that I didn't see what was apparently a wet and wild Malaysian race, but there will be more races so I'm not too worried.  It was called half way through, so I really only missed half a race.

In other news, I missed my friend's, The B-flat, birthday party.  I thought it was last night, but apparently it was the night before.  I felt terrible, not only because I had missed it, but because I called her to let me into her building and woke her up because she had gone to bed early.  Yeah, I felt awful, but we decided to have lunch some time next week so the call wasn't a total waste.

My friend, The Shrink, says I don't talk about her enough on my blog.  There, you were mentioned!

Hell week is now over

Now that that week is over it is time to get back to the good stuff: watching movies, reading blogs, web comics, etc.

Yeah today has been very relaxing to say the least and the outlook for tonight is positive.

We are picking classes for next semester and I can't help feeling that a schedule less jam packed like the one I currently have is ok, but I am already done with basically everything I need to do.  I only need to finish up my minor, but that shouldn't be too bad.  I might have to have some classes be considered eligible, so we will see how it all works out.

That's pretty much it for this Saturday afternoon.  I know I have yet to update the Fantasy Garage.  I will get to it...eventually.  Every procrastinator's favorite word. 

:-)

And then life sucked a little less

So I just found out today that the paper I thought was due April 14th is actually due May 5th.  How awesome is that?!  I was really not looking forward to blasting through a data/research intensive paper in a week.  Many late nights spent analyzing data...it would've been bad.  Now I can do it in a more relaxed pace over the course of the month.

For this paper I have due Friday, a lot of it has to do with medicine and government groups dealing with medicine among other things and it reminded me of something that has always bothered me.  You know in commercials for prescriptions drugs they always warn that "women who are pregnant, nursing, or may become pregnant should not take ____", right?  Well what does "women who may become pregnant" mean?  Isn't that all post-pubescent pre-menopausal non-sterile women?  You know...most of the female population?  This is always something that has bugged me.  Some people have said, "Well Steve, if a woman recently had sex that could lead to a pregnancy then that is the type of woman who should stay away from it."  But that is such a wishy-washy answer!  So if you are a woman and you have unprotected sex and are not using any sort of birth control then don't take it?  That seems like a very unique and random sliver of the female population, not to say that most of the female population isn't also a awkwardly large group to choose.  Clearly this will just be something that I just shouldn't worry about since I am a guy.

So what happened dude?

Yeah, what happened?  I say I will blog more consistently and then don't blog the next day.  Hmmm...I wonder what happened?  Could it be I was playing video games?  No, I gave those up.  Was I hangout out with my awesome girlfriend?  I wish, but alas that was not the reason either.  Could it be that you were working really really REALLY hard all night on some work?  

Yeah, it was that last one.  I have spent 15 of the last 24 hours working on one class, between finishing a lab, going to class and going to lab.  Yeah, it has been an intense last 24 hours.  I also rediscovered coffee.  YAY!

Aside from that, I feel I did really well on the test I took yesterday (in a different class).  I felt really well prepared and there was a question on something I had asked about during the review session the night before, so that made me feel good.

I had lunch with The All-Nighter this afternoon, which was great cause I hadn't seen her in a long time.  Finally we said we just had to sit down and do lunch.  So we did and it was fun.  Gosh don't I tell the best stories ever?  We talked a lot about my major and what I liked about it and how she felt she had been doing the same thing forever.  She has, but she is really knowledgeable about that part of microbiology.  I think she is just jealous that I get to go on field trips.

Today my thesis advisor and I also began clearing some space away for me in the lab so I can get ready to start analyzing samples.  It is beginning!

Nose to the grind stone

So today I studied a lot for my test tomorrow and I am about to do a reading response for another class and go to bed.  I am feeling pretty good about this test tomorrow, the professor was really stressing that we should study things that he covered that weren't on the practice tests, but I think I have most of the material under my belt.  As long as I think through all the problems and don't over think them I feel I should be fine.

In other news I am running out of socks.  I have one pair left and they are my super duper thick wool ones.  Normally I would do laundry, but I don't know when!  Hopefully I will find time tomorrow and all will be well.

Chicken fingers and mayo are not good breakfast foods.  FYI to all you out there.

Ok, now to do this and get a good night's sleep.

Getting my priorities in order

So this past week has been disgusting!  Never have I been so unable to harness my incredible ability to do work. 

I have come to the realization that the leisure and fun I had over spring break is clearly unsustainable.  As we all know from the media, doing things sustainable is GOOD and doing things unsustainable is BAD.  As such I will have to drop some things from my life in order to (three words that should be one) increase productivity and the amount of time spent on what is (should) be really important to me.  

As such, my video game playing: gone.  Outta here!  It is a luxury for those who have the commodity to pay for it; namely time.  I can no longer justify the weekly payments that this activity has asked and that I have been willing to pay in full.  Now, I will probably keep with the midnight study break tradition, but the casual playing: indefinitely shelved.

Blog reading: must be cut down.  Though I love reading them my studies over the past week has shown me how much time I actually spend reading them.  Though I will try to keep up and current, I know many will have to be left as a weekend activity.

Web comics: already reduced.  Sale going on now!  I forget the last time I read a web comic.  Clearly this is where I found some of the video game time.  Fun thing about a web comic is though: if you fall behind all you need to do is go to the page and catch up.  This seems like a great Saturday morning activity and it should become only such.

Blogging: must be upped!  Just because I am reducing my time with other things doesn't mean I have to reduce everything!  I do have to round out the fantasy garage and keep this blog more up to date.  Things get boring sometimes in my life, but I should be able to find somethings to write about.  It just starts to flow when you sit down at the keyboard, the trouble is typing those first few lines to prime the system.

Work: ugh, exponential increase.  This is one of those things that one would like to do, but is really hard when you don't have a gun to your head.  Metaphorically, of course.  I can't do my current work schedule and add stuff to it without running out of hours in the day.  Mostly I am looking at the long term papers I have due this month and my thesis work that is going to start demanding my time unconditionally, relentlessly, and with a passion.

Sleep: eh, whatever.  This week was terrible for me sleep wise.  Coming off of 2 weeks of 8-10 hour nights to *BAM!* less than 7 hours every night, sometimes...a couple of times less than 6?  WHAT IS THAT?!  But, I am a university student.  This is what we do, but I am going to try and get to bed...around...before...not too late after...one-ish.  From now on (an watch me eat those words).

Ok, now to go watch the first Formula 1 race of the season!

Greetings from the mangosteen lab

Hi.

I know it's been a long time and I should probably have a top notch excuse as to why I have been so lax with my blogging as of late...but I don't. So deal with it.

This week is the start of the 2009 Formula 1 season. The race is Sunday in the land of Oz. It should be exciting considering the new regulations that have been put in place regarding rear wing and diffuser design and the implementation of the new KERS (kinetic energy recovery system) which gives drivers a 6 second boost of 82hp per lap. It is a boost button like in the video games! I can't wait, it should increase passing A LOT! I am super excited to see how the new cars handle the tracks.

In other news I bought a 4 pound cake for my major's mixer this week to encourage more people to show up. Last time there was a pretty low turnout. My plans for increased turnout might be hampered however by the fact that it will rain tomorrow and tomorrow night. looks like my roommates and I are going to be stuck with a ton of cake to eat...what a shame.

The Old Friend is currently working furiously away at some sociology statistics program. She seems to be having tons of fun, and by tons of fun I mean she hasn't had a nervous break down, and by nervous break down I mean made a scene in this computer lab, and by make a scene I mean yell at the computer because the program is apparently not that easy to use and requires intense concentration. I'll tell more about her adventures in stata later.

I have been using coffee this week as a hardcore crutch in the mornings and I don't like it! I am therefore blaming coffee for the headaches I have at the end of the day.

Movie Review: Eagle Eye

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  Not gonna lie.  It had action and suspense, the kind I haven't felt since...well this afternoon when I saw Knowing, but to keep it more with the genre, since Live Free or Die Hard.

The story centers around Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) as he is drawn into this conspiracy run through the country's electrical grid, cell phones, traffic cameras, etc.  He is called upon by a almost random female voice to perform tasks as she wills them to an end that...well to find that out you should see the movie.

This is an edge of your seat thriller in the same vein as the Die Hard series.  Fast paced, but with a story to keep it going.  LaBeouf is great as the 20-something lead, showing that he does have some depth beyond the teenager that he has played in Transformers and Indiana Jones.

I would highly recommend this movie for people who enjoy action movies.  One thing I found especially interesting about this film that is appearing more and more in popular culture is the single divorced parent.  The female lead (played by Michelle Monaghan) is a divorcee single mother.  This is common, as 50% (or more?) marriages end in divorce, but the rate at which it is being Incorporated into movies these days is remarkable!  And it isn't just movies.  I saw a commercial in which it is alluded that the father figure is single...I am guessing via divorce.  So just thought I would mention that since I found it interesting, but...yeah...action-suspence...good movie.

As Galactica sails into the sunset

Well kids, it's been a fun ride, but all good things must come to an end eventually.  Tonight was the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.  BSG has been one of the best shows I have ever watched.  I haven't been this saddened by the passing of show since..well, since I finished reading Watership Down, and that wasn't even a show!  It was fitting and gave a real sense of completeness.  A fan could ask nothing more from a show.  

But of course the real problem now becomes what do I do with my Friday nights?!  Clearly I will think of something.  For me though this has become a tradition: every Friday this season I have gone over to my friend The K/T Boundary's house and watched it with her and her husband, but now we won't have BSG!  So we will figure out something, it is just too much fun hanging out with them.

In other news being back at university has been super lame!  I forget the last time I was this unmotivated to do work, but I have made some progress: I have done some work on a lab that is due in 2 weeks, I have some papers set aside to read over for a paper I have due in 1 month, and I met with my thesis advisor to discuss more things for my thesis.  So I guess I have been doing some stuff.

In other news: nothing.  Life has been pretty boring.  

I ate some good chicken sausages for dinner last night.  Yay.  Go me?  But the eggplant parm I had to go with them was terrible.  Absolutely the worst thing I have ever had.  I would not have it again...unless I decided to give it a second chance.

I also saw "Knowing" with Nick Cage this afternoon with The Kart (he's back so I'm not so so alone) and it was interesting.  I would write a proper movie review, but I don't want to give away anything.  It was very interesting and worth watching.  Actually very interesting when paired with the end of BSG.  Makes one think that everything happens for a reason or something, huh?  But randomness versus determinism is for another blog post.

For a post that I didn't expect to write, this is acquiring some length.  Shall I keep going?

Oh, no Fantasy Garage today.  That is a job for Saturday Steve.  He will give you what you want.  I, however, am Friday Steve and I am shirking my responsibilities and giving them to Saturday Steve.  Sucks for you Saturday Steve.

Sorry person!

I just realized that I rejected a comment for my Friday post about the VW GTI.  Here is what it said:

ms3 10x better

I didn't mean to reject you, blogger just wasn't very specific about which post it was directed at and I was confused.

Sorry.

Back at Uni

Got back at university last night after a lovely concert Sunday afternoon.  Spent last night catching up with The Scrum, who was here even though we are still on spring break.  What ever, he just left a few minute ago so I can blast my music as much as I want.  YAY!

But I didn't come back early just to stare at the ceiling, I am here to do work.  Today I am going to start getting books and papers together as preliminary research for the papers I have due later this semester.  Also I am going to figure out when all these assignments are due.  That seems kind of important.

I will also start decorating the apartment a little with the 3 posters my brother got from last year's auto show.  Hopefully the rest of my housemates won't mind.  I am just tired of people telling us we need more decorations!  Screw you guys, maybe we like the spartan look of bare white walls.  It gives that "We are thrifty and appreciate empty space" vibe...and the "we're too friggin' lazy to do anything about this" vibe.

Fantasy Garage: GTI

Car: Volkswagen GTI

Options: Six-Speed Automatic DSG with Tiptronic

Price after options: $24, 930

So, it's Sunday.  Not Friday.  Which means...another "regular car", but don't get me wrong.  This is by far not just some ordinary car.  The VW GTI is legend as the hot-hatch of hot-hatches.

Now if someone were to ask me which hot-hatch I would've said the Mazda MazdaSpeed3, no questions asked.  And even today it was difficult to choose which one to put in the garage, but one thing changed my opinion: actually sitting in the current generation Rabbit.  My friend The Car Girl has one and it is so roomy inside that you have a clown car feeling when you get out.  The car looks smaller than it is, plus it has the functionality of a hatchback.

Did I mention that it's fast and handles great?  Oh, can't forget the one option: DSG transmission.  This transmission has become the gold standard for what a performance dual-clutch should be.  And it should since VW owns Bugatti, which also has a similar transmission.

Plus it is affordable, proving that you don't need to spend $50K to get a performance car.

Money left in "Fantasy Garage Account": $151, 219

The Xbox is back

There is a god.

Movie Review: House of Sand and Fog

God was this depressing.  Oh boy.  I watched this because I had never seen it, we owned it, and knew it was supposed to be good.  It was one of those movies where you know from the first few minutes that it won't end well and it is going to be incredibly depressing.  It is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The movie is about a woman who gets evicted from her house due to a mix up at the tax office and the man who buys it for his family.  She has her family coming to visit her and doesn't want them to know her life is in the shitter and he is barely able to make ends meet and need to flip the house at a profit in order to get money to pay for his son's up coming college education.

You can already tell that this isn't going to have a happy ending.  The cinematography is beautiful and the acting is superb and the movie is very well done.  It shows how simple acts of desperation can lead to even more depressing endings.

If you are looking for a "good" movie: watch this.  If you like depressing movies: you'll love this.  If you are looking for a feel good movie: run far away from this one.

The Roommate and the longest goodbye ever

So while saying goodbye to The Old Friend last night as she was in the airport terminal, I was reminded of the long goodbye I had given to The Roommate before he left for study abroad this winter.  It wasn't so much that it was a long goodbye, but that it there was never one, but many. 

This brings to mind an old philosophy I had that there was no such thing as goodbye, but only until next time.  Meaning that we never never see people again, that we will eventually meet up again, whether you are leaving for work and you say goodbye to your wife or saying goodbye to a temp on their last day of work.  I always felt that you would see that person at least one more time or that we would all meet up again someday in some sort of afterlife and that there was no true goodbye.  But the problem with this was that there was no other good way of saying goodbye than: goodbye.  So I have been forced to drop my little ideology and say goodbye to people, but I still think to my self every time I say it that it isn't really goodbye, but until next time.

And now that I'm done being sidetracked: the long goodbye.  It started with the last day of finals, when I said good bye to him as he and The Shrink went back up to his apartment to keep packing.  

That would have been it, but then he went home with The Shrink on his way back to his home.  She (The Shrink) lives the town over from me.  He was supposed to leave, but then there was a massive storm and I hiked through the snow to watch a movie and bake cookies with my friend The Cookies, which is completely unrelated, but an awesome story in and of itself.  

But he was trapped!  And he went shopping with me and The Shrink to get Christmas presents for my mom.  There I said my last goodbye to The Shrink, who I wouldn't see again before she left for the semester abroad and goodbye to The Roommate, for the second, but not last time.  We both knew it wasn't going to be the last time because I was going to visit him in a couple of weeks.

Then I went to visit and had a great time and said goodbye again.  But this turned out to not be the last time either!

He then came to visit me at university one last time before he left for his semester abroad and this is where the goodbyes got tricky.  I had a party for him (and because we were all back on campus) and he came and left quickly.  The next day The Brewmiester and I were going to visit The Baker because she was having a birthday party.  So The Roommate and I said goodbye one last time then before I left.

So, there was not just one goodbye, but many over the course of winter break until I finally didn't see him again until he comes back this spring/summer to do research at university.

Weirdest cold ever

So I have just gotten over this weird cold.  It started with some minor back ache on Sunday morning and a throat tickle.  I say tickle cause my throat wasn't really that sore and it didn't get really sore like when I have other colds.

Then Monday I had a really trippy dream, because I always have really trippy dreams when I get a cold.  But I woke up with intense lower back pain on my left side and had some runny nose issues, but by the end of the day I was right as rain and thought I had kicked the sucker.

But then Tuesday the congestion and gland swelling got worse.  

Same for Wednesday.  

Then Thursday I woke up with a real krink in the left side of my neck (which I still have a little bit of, but not so bad any more) and had a dry cough all day long.  It turns out it was a post nasal drip cough and here is how I found this out.  I had heard from a friend that you should take Musenex for a cough, because most cold related coughs are due to post nasal drip.  Of course, being me, I thought he was full of shit, but yesterday I took a Musenex during the day to help with my congestion and the cough stopped.  So then last night I took another to go to bed and slept like a babe.  So: Musenex for post nasal drip coughs!

But what made this cold so weird to me was the body aches and post nasal drip cough.  Most of my colds are sinus related, but this one seems to have been more body cold than just head cold.

Weird stuff.

Slow couple of days

So much to blog about that I am separating it into separate posts to make up for the lack of posts over the last few days.

First: my brother's wisdom teeth.  All 5 are out and he is doing just fine.  I think he was more worried about what was going to happen than things actually happening.  When the doctor came out to talk to us after the surgery was over (same doc who took out my wisdom teeth) he told us (my mother and I) that when he went in to start the nurses were all talking about how cute I was.  Apparently I won them all over.  It was a pleasant ego massage: middle aged women swoon over me.

When we brought him home he was out like a light and my mom and I had a nice pasta and meat sauce dinner.  Since then he has stopped wearing a scarf of ice and towels and is eating more and the swelling isn't that bad, but that is mostly due ( I think) to the fact that he is already a little chubby.  When I swelled up, you knew it because I am normally pretty slim.  Him on the other hand it isn't as noticeable.  This is all really a plus for him, since he will be able to look fine when he goes back to school next week.

Other than that, The Director and I went out to dinner last night with a teacher from high school and that was nice.  I hadn't seen either of them in a while and it was pleasant to see both of them again, even though I was still a bit sick (wait for second post).  And then The Old Friend called from the airport before leaving for the next 10 days, it was nice to hear from her since her phone had died the day before and I wanted to say goodbye (more related to this in third post) before she left.

Aside from all that it has been pretty quiet around here at home.  Oh, I got to visit a bunch of teachers from my high school.  That was nice to see them all again.  I was talking with them and just so surprised that I had graduated 3 years ago.  It seems like such a long time ago.  Oh how time flies.

Wow stick (the manual kind)

Now that I'm not at university and driving more often I get to talk about cars a whole lot more than I used to.  Starting with how much I missed driving stick.  I have gone from mediocre to competent, just by being away at university.  Now those things might seem to be exactly the same, but I assure you they are different.  Mediocre means I could do drive a manual, not good or bad, but I could do it.  Sure there were times when I would jerk the car, or the very rare occasion when I would stall, but today I was driving around in my very hilly suburb and I was pretty competent.  I didn't roll back to much on the hills, I didn't stall out, and my shifts were pretty smooth (on average).

In other news, I guess you could say I'm a little sick.  I thought I would kick this thing fast seeing as how I didn't really have that much of a sore throat two days ago and I was feeling only a little sniffle yesterday and was expecting to bounce forward today.  Not so much.  Felt worse than yesterday, pretty much all day.  I blame the change of scenery.  I always get sick when I come home from being at school.

Also, when I get sick I usually have really trippy dreams and the past two nights have been no exception.  I don't want to go into details, but Sunday night's dream was really vivid.  Last night's was too, I just don't remember it at all, but I know it happened.

Catching up on the good stuff

Like cars.  I spent most of the day reading up my two Car and Drivers that I have been neglecting and was reminded about why I subscribed to them in the first place.  Great in depth reviews of all the cars that are on the road or about to be.  But the best part about today is that I was able to get a bunch of new ideas for the ole Fantasy Garage.  I hadn't realized almost half of it was American, not that that is a bad thing, but I hadn't realized I loved big engines and muscular styling so much.  Actually, its mostly due to the fact that there are some real gems amid the coals and sand.  

So today I went with my mom to her boss's house to take care of his cats cause he's away on vacation.  Did I mention he owns a 1962-1963 Pontiac Tempest Le mans 2-door convertible?  Yeah, it is really pretty to look at.  But it is sitting underneath a bunch of crap in his garage.  I think it should be out cruising the streets.  Maybe he will be looking for someone like me to take it off his hands some time in the future?  Someone like me maybe?  Perhaps?  One can dream right?  My mother questions whether or not it would be right for me to have such a impractical car as my first, but it has a back seat and a trunk.  What more does one need?  I think it would be awesome to have, yet would set me back several thousand dollars which I don't know if I have (or will have) to part with.  Sounds like a good time to check my bank account...