Onward

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting even though I've been back at school for weeks. Well, this blog has been a lovely place for a while. It seems, however, that the blogging format for Mudd is going to change to an everyone-shares-a-blog system. Which sounds kind of fun, really.

I'll try to get back into the habbit of posting on my other blog, Giraffe Crossing (http://czanda.blogspot.com/) which will be about whatever the hell I feel like talking about. And maybe someday, when I have a camera, I'll put pictures there, too. Or maybe on wherever else I'll be blogging.

There may be one more post here about where the new blog will live. Until then, peace out.

AH

I forgot to post before I left. I had my last week of work. T'was nice. This means I'm home now and not particularly useful as far as Mudd blogging goes. So I shall be hush for the next month or so. Adios.

Clumsy

I really need to stop dropping things on my toes / running into things / get scratched by walking too close to sharp objects. Hobbling is not my cup of tea.

This week has been all sorts of special at work...the CS Staff is all on vacation except for two of us freshmen. This includes our boss, the sysadmin. So unfortunately, when things break, we often are unable to figure out how to fix them. But we keep trying!

Also, this past weekend was pretty awesome, what with the visiting mother and sister. Less awesome, perhaps, due to the snake that was loose from Thursday through Saturday in our suite. But still pretty awesome.

Maaaaaan I'm sleepy. I think this will be another day fueled by caffeine and cute animal pictures.

Silly

So last night I was heading up to bed at a later hour than intended...I had gotten sort of carried away showing off the music I like to some buds. And I stopped at one bud's room so I could take his longboard on a lap of Sontag courtyard to see if I liked it (it is either the model I'm looking at or a very similar one) and...I put my laptop down outside and forgot about it. And this morning, when I realized my error, I walked down the stairs and there it was.

I have regained a tiny bit of confidence about the lack of theft on campus. However, I don't think I'm going to space out and leave my laptop out again. That was dumb.

Let's see...shenanigans de la semaine. July 4th was fun, as was the 5th...yay days off. And this week has been nice and chill at work, though last night I did a "woo! panic!" thing about our web server failing at updating the nsscache; fortunately, we have a genius staff member who advised me on how to fix it, and then all was well! Take that, terrifying and unintelligeable error messages!

So life is pretty good. I'm feeling moderately chipper, enough to do silly things like walk to the practice rooms with a snake wound around my neck and to practice all half a dozen songs I've gotten written this summer. I need to run them again tonight so they're smooth. Should print out lyrics, too. That would help on the music drilling.

Laaaaaaaaaaa.

Chat Dans La Gorge

So I've got a sore throat today. I'm not fond of sore throats at all...constantly clearing one's throat and having a half-human, half-gravel voice is not the most charming of situations. Mais c'est la vie.

This week...stuff happened. Let's see: I seem to have gotten good enough at navigating with a longboard that I managed to ride through the place I fell when I was first learning, no problems. My bud and I spent some time practicing boarding last night after dinner, as he is attempting to learn (and doing pretty well), at which point I discovered that a. the terracey area near Sprague that they just finished is awesome as an obstacle course and b. luging is fun on a longboard. Mind you, I didn't take any sloped areas with the board, as I didn't have a helmet with me...might try rolling from Sontag to Ac End with a helmet and kneepads this weekend.

I have been chilling a lot with said bud of late. Some of his friends came into town to visit him so they might all go together to EDC, the spiffy techno carnival in LA, so I enjoyed participating in their shenaniganery this past weekend. Also, said bud and I have ambitions for delicious dinner tonight involving steak. And salad. I'm taking care of the salad part, thankfully, though said bud seemes to be a bit picky on the veggies...still, real food is good. Especially if it's tasty. Like steak.

Ooooooh so we started a D&D game earlier this week. Tuesday night, I think. Actually, Tuesday was awesome because I first watched Doctor Who, then played DnD, then talked to my sister for a while. A fabulous evening...until I realized that hey, I'd taken our dear Snakey out (his name is actually Snakey) before I went to watch Doctor Who, and it was 8 hours later, and it looked like I had never put him back. So that resulted in a frantic search for a while. An eventually successful search (he was hiding under my roommate's bed), but still, I'm not taking Snakey out again for a while. I mean, he couldn't hurt a fly...I think they'd startle him too much...but it's still bad form to lose a snake in a suite of people. So that wasn't good at all.

Well, I should bug my friend about steakmaking. And maybe I should hit the practice rooms later tonight for some music-doing. (I've written two songs this week, but I have yet to write any happy lyrics this summer, and I told my sister I would...) Should be a good evening. As many are.

Something Cooking

I...am finally gaining some ambition in the cooking department. This is momentous for me. Except for a few family cooking things that I've picked up, I have always been sort of limited to the ability to make pasta and microwave meals. So, going grocery shopping today both hungry and with aspirations of actually making big-person food managed to land me with a piece of salmon. A piece of salmon, ladies and gentlemen, which now sits in the fridge marinating in teriyaki sauce so tomorrow...there shall be salmon dinner. Boo-friggin-ya.

Life has been quite nice and easygoing...though I need to get back on the wagon for practicing piano (and unicycle!) I've been having good chill times with friends. Also, my roomie has been catching up on How I Met Your Mother...so I've been watching a lot of that. A lot a lot. As in it's persistently playing in the background when I am not at work so I hear the theme song in my head when I go to sleep and OH LORD HELP ME...

I'm managing to be ever the more useful at work! I now can actually spend several hours trying to do something and failing as opposed to just spending several hours contemplating how I would even begin trying to do it. Which still isn't super productive, but occasionally there are breakthroughs, and that's what counts!

Also. I got a haircut. This may have partially been influenced by chilling with two buds (one on Skype, the other in person) and switching somehow to playing Truth or Dare until late Sunday/early Monday. Somewhere in there I got dared to cut some hair off, and having learned since 3rd grade about the consequences of cutting off hair other people can see, naturally, I cut some hair on the back of my head that no one could see. However, the next day, the knowing...the feeling the back of my head with the patch of far-too-short hair...it was too much by Wednesday, so I got the hair a-cutted. Which I had meant to do for a while. So it ends happily, and I learn yet another lesson that I should have figured out many years ago but that college enables just fine.

Rolling On

I appear to be back to something approximating good health...my fatigue probably has more to do with me staying up too late in the piano practice rooms than anything else. But I seem to be having minor successes with recording, so that's something.

In the meantime, I've gotten this longboarding thing working pretty well. Having borrowed a friend's longboard on a whim last week, I'm pleased to say that I can now actually get from Sontag to work with reasonable dexterity and not too much falling over. I am now somewhat more motivated to work out this unicycling thing starting this weekend, now that I have reinforced my faith in my balance and my ability to learn how to deal with wheeled man-powered transport.

Work has gotten somewhat more interesting since I stopped being too scared to actually try to solve any problems in which there was a greater than 1% chance of me breaking the system. I think I have yet to do anything particularly clever, but I'm beyond monkey levels of competency with UNIX, which is more than I could say some weeks ago, so good for me.

I did manage to check off one of the things I meant to do this summer yesterday. A few of us went to the Libra Complex (the hallways connecting all the buildings at the basement level of the academic end of campus) late-ish last night, borrowed some wheeled office chairs from one of the CS labs, and went "chairing". This primarily involves finding the gently sloped portions of the hallways, sitting in an office chair and rolling down said hallway, being careful to perform some basic steering to avoid collisions with walls or other chair-ers. Much fun was had.

It does now occur to me that I seem to be at around the halfway mark on the 10 weeks of summer hereabouts (well, 9 weeks...one week was elsewhere) and I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing when I get back home. I mean, I'll have a month of...chill time. How bizarre. I mean, it will be nice...but bizarre nonetheless.