SixFeetOver version 4.0

What a Week

These last two weeks have been, to put it lightly, intense. To start things off, two weeks ago was the beginning of the midterm period, which actually has gone well grade wise so far, but it has been a lot of work keeping up. That's nothing new though. The big story is my car. The week following midterms was spring break. The Thursday of spring break I had my rear brake lines replaced. The next day I was driving down to Amherst to visit Mike, trying to beat the incoming blizzards. I would have beat them, except just south of Keene (about 2.25 hours from my house), I'm driving along and I press down on my brakes to slow down for the car in front of me, which is about to turn off the road, and discover to my horror that my brakes don't response. I ended up pushing the brake pedal all the way to the floor, yoinking the e-brake, and fishtailing followed by going off the road. Miraculously, I didn't hit the van in front of me or the fence on the side of the road where I went off. I tested my brakes at this point and they seemed to be functioning, so I extremely carefully and slowly drove to the first mechanic I found. This happened to be located in Armpit, NH (Lat 42.766454, Long -72.389002). There, I met with an unfriendly mechanic who wouldn't help me and a woman who made references to her recent imprisonment. AAA had to tow me away (45 minutes later). I came to discover the hard way that AAA basic only covers the first 5 miles of towing, and after that it is $3.00 per mile. Thankfully I only had to be towed 12 miles. The poor Mike drove up from Amherst through horrendous weather to rescue me, the refugee, and we went to his parents' house for the weekend. It was a rather pleasant weekend actually, despite the car trouble - Mike's family was very good to me. They found debris (inexplicable) in the braking mechanism, cleaned it out for cheap and I was on my way on Sunday.

Now, Tuesday night at about 10:30 I'm driving down Route 128 in Mass. I start hearing this loud squeaking noise when I'm about 5 minutes away from Gordon, which quickly changes to the sound of metal on metal, which quickly changes to the sound of my engine failing as my RPMs drop to nothing and I coast to a stop on the side of the road. Bam. I'm getting towed again a couple days later. This time, the oil plug fell out of my oil pan (inexplicable) while I was driving, and all the oil drained out, killing my motor. So my car is toast. I'm selling it for parts, or as a fix-me-up, to a shop on Monday for $80 less than it cost me to fix the brake lines a whole 5 days previous.

Oddly, I'm doing alright about this. I don't have a car now, but it will work out. And I look forward to having a new a better car in the nearish future, and I have no idea how to pay for it, but He always provides. Somehow, it will work out.

EoSP

It's the End of Summer Post (EoSP)!

Let's see. I wrapped up my final day of window washing today; now I just have to wait till next Tuesday and I'll be heading back to Gordon, and picking up Alice along the way. Today was nice and relaxed, the boss had us clean his house (windows, walls, gutters, deck), so it was hours for the crew and a clean house for his family. We had a company barbeque tonight too, that was fun.

I guess I've done a few things since I wrote last. I went out to Minnesota to visit the lovely Alice for a few days in mid July. It wasn't a super long visit but I was able to go for five days, which is more than we were really expecting for the weekend, so that was exciting. It was of course a great experience - I got to meet some of Alice's friends, go to the Minnesota zoo, go swing dancing, and just have a generally really good time. I also went camping with Mike and two of his friends from school, which was quite good. We went out and did some "real" camping - no amenities were available. We also did a ridiculous hike, almost literally running up the mountain, hiking to the top in an hour and a half, a hike which no doubt should have taken 45 minutes more than that. Soulfest (music festival) was the following weekend, and that was also mostly good. It was better than I had thought it would be, and in fact before I went I had almost no motivation to go at all. But many of the bands performed swimmingly; Newsboys, Casting Crowns and Jars of Clay, to name a few.

The rest of my summer will consist of wrapping up all my loose ends here at home, cleaning up this disaster of a room and packing to head back to school and start work down there. I'm excited to live in an apartment down there, although it will be the first time in my life where I've had to provide my own food and go grocery shopping for myself regularly - that will be interesting. But I'm looking forward to going back.

Update

So, let's catch up.

Alice's visit was fantastic. It was pretty amazing that timing worked out for her to stay here for a week. I felt bad because there isn't that much stuff to do out here where I live, especially compared to where she lives, but we had fun, going to the North country in NH, visitng Jared, and some other things.

I ended up not going for the tech job for the hospital. The pay wasn't what I thought it would be and the commute would have been ridiculous (up to 1.5 hours at 6AM - and I'm very much not a morning person.) Never mind the wear and tear on my car. Anyway, instead I've been washing windows. It's been a very interesting job - much more involved than windex and paper towels, like I thought it would be. We wear tool belts and use special forumulas and squeegees and razor blades, etc etc. It's quite a production. But I've seen tons of absolutely gorgeous houses since most people who hire professional window washers are pretty wealthy and have very nice homes. That's been the biggest perk of the job.

I finally got a laptop. Dragging the enormous desktop that I have back and forth between school and home has been a huge pain, and I'm never able to go anywhere like Starbucks to do work when I'm at school because I usually need my PC. So my laptop came, and it was a bit of a DIY project, in that I installed the RAM and hard drive myself. Then I installed windows, fired it up...and the left speaker went crazy. It made a horrific staticy type noise for quite a while, despite reboots, and whether windows was running or not. The noise stopped and a few hours later I realized that no sound comes out of the left speaker at all. I'm pretty annoyed, because I'll probably have to send it back almost right after getting it. Sigh.

On a better note, this Thursday I fly out to Minnesota to visit Alice. Let's just say that these next 3.5 days of waiting cannot go by fast enough. I can't wait to see her again.

summer

It's been awhile since the last post. I have no excuse.

Finals went well for the most part. My differential equations final was a bit of a beast - it was a take-home that required quite a few hours to complete. I did fine on it though. In fact, I may have finally gotten a 4.0 this semester, depending on how rigorously my French exam is graded.

Alice is touring in Italy with the rest of the Wind Ensemble and college choir from school. I'm jealous! She managed to call me today from Italy though, I was very happy about that but it made me realize exactly how much I missed her. She will be staying with us for a week after she gets back though - the highlight of my summer, no doubt!

I was talking with Mike the other day about summer plans and told him that I had the dull job of window washing lined up for me this summer. He came to the rescue and told me about a tech support summer job for Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center that his mom had told him about. I got very excited at the idea of doing a resumé building, intellectually stimulating, hopefully high paying job. So, I began editing my resumé and cover letter with Alice's mom's help, and less than three business hours after submitting it got a phone call to set up an interview. Tomorrow I'll be in Bedford at 10:00AM (it's a 1.5 hour drive) for my interview. Hopefully it will all go well and I'll be a techie for the summer!

P.S. - Suse 10 is a beautiful Linux distro. I just installed it on a clunker of a machine and it's running pretty nicely.

22

Last Wednesday was my "golden" birthday, as they say - I turned 22 on the 22nd (of the 2nd month, no less). Having never had a girlfiend and a birthday at the same time before, I was quite curious to see what Alice would do. She made the day a ton of fun. When I got to my 8AM class that morning, my teacher handed me a birthday card. I thought "Wow, why is the math department giving me a birthday card?" I took the card out of its envelope and saw a picture of two little kids hugging each other - now I was creeped out that the math dept. would give me a card like this! Upon further inspection (that is, reading the inside), I realized it was from Alice, who had secretly slipped my prof the card to give to me the day before. Then in my next class a couple hours later (with the same prof), he hands me another card. I thought the original had just fallen out of my backpack, but no - it was a different card from Alice. Well, I thought that was really thoughtful, but I wasn't expecting any more in the day because she personally knew this professor, but she didn't know my other profs. I was wrong! My programming teacher had a card in hand when my 1:00 class started, as did my French teacher, who almost got the class to sing to me in French. So she managed to make going to classes on my birthday pretty special.
After all that, we went to the gym (to prepare for the food we'd be having later, of course). My mom mailed me a giant whoopie pie, my favorite dessert. After talking to both my parents and Alice's parents on the phone, and going to the gym, Alice took me out to Chilie's for dinner.  Going out to eat is an amazing thing when you are used to school food, and my cajun steak was especially amazing there.

My Mom's birthday is the day after mine (somehow that keeps happening every year), so she and my sister came down on her birthday to go out for lunch and celebrate.  We had a good time, although the treatment at the restaurant we went to (Not your average Joe's) was somewhat less than average.  Oh well.  In any case, it was an enjoyable couple of days.

Now, today is my last day of classes for the quad.  I have one midterm left and 14 pages of work to hand in for linear algebra.  After that, Alice and I are flying to her house in Minnesota for a week.  I'm excited!