My blog has been getting spam comments in German. Perhaps my blog is now reaching a larger audience?
The new carpet was put in yesterday, and my bed arrived this morning, meaning that my room is almost 100% finished. The only thing that will change in the near future is that a table is coming up into the living room / office area, but other than that, I am ready for action.
My house is a mess right now because we are getting the new carpet put in. Last night, we stayed up until 3 or so trearing up the old carpet and taking it to get thrown away. It was actually fun for me. This time last year, I would have killed to spend an evening tearing up carpet, making stupid jokes and complaining about the landlord with a bunch of guys my age.
I am getting much better at the skateboard. It is surprising how fun it is to roll around school on that thing. I haven’t seen anyone else riding one either, which seems really odd because it just makes so much sense to me to ride that thing around. I have rejiggered my class schedule to take classes more suited to me and such; it appears now that I only have one class on tuesdays and thursdays. I was debating getting a job before, but now it just makes even more sense. I know I told myself I’d try to go at least a month or two without a job to see what it was like to ‘just be a college’ student, and I could really use that extra time to make some sweet grad school applications; I just am used to having a job because I’ve been pretty much continually employed since I was 17 or so.
I think I’ll make some dinner now.
I spent about 4 days or so gradually moving into this house. I’m not totally set up; we are getting new carpet put in on wednesday, and I’m still waiting on my mattress to arrive. My room is up on the third floor; it’s a little small but I kidn of have two rooms, because there are two on the third floor and i’ve been given the impression that both are mine. We’re having a barbeque tonight to squeeze the last bit of fun out of the summer; i think there will be a slip’n’slide there!
I was planning on maybe getting a bike to get to and from school, but I decided that bikes are boring and all the people skateboarding in california made it look like fun, so I went and got myself one of those. It’s a real blast. It’s kind of hard to do while you’re wearing flip flops, but I really like wearing them, so perhaps I’ll have to carry them in my backpack or something. I also like that there aren’t a million kids at Xavier riding skateboards, which makes it unique or something.
On the whitewater rafting trip I met a girl named Kathleen with whom I get along with very well. She goes to school at Northwestern, which is in Chicago. She has been co-opping in cincinnati at Ethicon Endosurgery since february, and soon she leaves to go back. It kind of stinks that she’s leaving but for some reason it doesn’t bother me too bad at all – I guess i’m just really happy with the way things are going in my life right now.
I went whitewater rafting this weekend, which was wildly entertaining. I’m in the process of moving into my new house down in norwood, at 3739 Regent. My housemates have spent the whole summer fixing the place up, and it is starting to look pretty nice. It was already fairly clean for a ‘college guys’ house, but that’s not saying much because they are usually dumps. I just went and bought a dresser and filing cabinet from a thirft store – I’ve needed that filing cabinet for a while. I’m going to get working on bringing the rest of my stuff down here to school and making some lunch and perhaps mowing the lawn later tonight.
Moving into a new house is pretty fun.
I am back in Cincinnati now. Got in yesterday afternoon. It was one long trip. The first thing i did was go to Xavier and say hello to some people there. Anneliese and I had lunch at some greek place that was pretty good, but I think i like the one I went to in New York better. After that, I drove home. My mom was pleased to see me, but other than her the only one who registered a positive expression was the dog, Charley, who licked me profusely. I hope I have a wife like that one day.
My guinea pigs ran into their purple castle when I came down the stairs. I know they’re rodents and you can’t expect a lot out of them in terms of endearment or loyalty, but I was really hoping they’d come out and make that squealing noise they used to make in the morning when I brought them their apple slices.
I leave tommorow to go whitwater rafting. Now it is time for dinner!
With the command ’svn ci’, I finished my work this summer, checking in my changes on proof to our group’s paper. It’s around 20 pages right now. If you’d like a copy, just send me an email; it will probably only appeal to those of you who dabble in algorithms as a hobby. It’d put up a direct link but was advised against doing this.
Tonight we will probably have some kind of celebration involving poker, drinking, and saying goodbye. Tommorrow morning, my dad and I drive up to San Franciscso, and that’s the start of my 5 day road trip. Fun. I packed up all my stuff last night, and was amused to find that everything fit much nicer than on the way out here – I guess spending all summer thinking about packing objects into containers helped me pack my car a little more efficiently, even though I picked up about 8 cubic feet worth of books, board games, and various other crap that either was given to me or that I bought when I probably shouldn’t have.
Last night, all the students and our advisors went out to dinner at this fancy indian restaurant. Ran, our advisor, had his kids there. They were so cute. After dinner, they took me by the hand and lead me around the plaza where the restaurant was, explaining how most chain restuarants get A’s from the health inspector, but this pizza hut got a B. I can’t wait till I have kids of my own. I bet they will be so nerdy. Hehehe.
I emailed my housemates about leaving my key where I can get it – I need to find out whether our landlord has finished putting new carpet and such in the house. After I get home, I’m leaving in a day or two to go white water rafting, so I’m not sure if I’ll try to get myself partially moved into my house at that time, or just crash with my parents for the two days I’ll be there. Probably the latter because after driving for 5 days straight I probably won’t feel like doing a lot of moving.
On some accounts, the start of summer seems impossibly far ago. I have had so many experiences, met so many people, made close friends and had so much life since I set out for my summer adventure; At the same time, It seems like it’s over ‘all too soon’ in another respect. There is a good chance I’ll never see some of these guys again. This is where I like buddhist philosophy; part of their religion is the idea that you enjoy what you have at the moment but do not try to hang on to what you have lost or yearn for what you hope to have, because that will just make you unhappy. I’ve had good memories formed here. I will begin the drive home and form some more in Cincinnati.
Today I decided to reconfigure my trip home. I had originally planned to drive from San Francisco to Salt Lake City on Monday, from there to Ft. Riley, Kansas on Tuesday, and from there Home on Wednesday. That’d be 3 days of 13+ hours/day driving. Not really a great idea. So now I plan to leave San Francisco on Sunday and Arrive in Utah, from there to Denver (well, really, Parker) Colorado on Monday, from there to Columbia, Missouri On Tuesday, and to home on Wednesday. That puts be at 13/8/13/8 hours of driving each day. A nice shuffly kind of thing. I’ll stay at Kevin’s place in Missouri, which I think works out quite nicely for me. I look forward to getting home.
We have been watching these hilarious movies here; they are mock british science education films. Here’s one on ‘maths’. We’ve also been playing a lot of poker, but I’ve been trying to get people to play somethign else, like Settlers of Catan, which is a very excellent game.
Only two days left. Tommorrow we’re working on the paper in the morning and then we spend all afternoon presenting our results to the other groups. The paper is close to 20 pages now, and It’s getting longer because I came up with a result on monday that I’d been trying to get for a long time. I feel like I have contributed handsomely to the paper and the progress of the group. Friday we’ll just polish up the paper and then we’re probably going to have some kind of party that night or something. I’m going to miss these guys. As I get closer to the end of my time here in California, I realize more and more just how long I’ve been here and how many good memories I have formed. It’s been a good time. Luckily, Claudia is from Cincinnati so I’ll be able to hang out with her every now and then, and we can recall our days here in Claremont. I’m going to go eat some Chipotle now, because it’s free if I bring my student ID card. It’s going to be weird paying for that stuff again. I think I’ll probably forever associate Chipotle with this summer and ridiculous discussions we had outside on the patio with other researchers at Mudd. This school is one cool place.
All said, though, it’ll be good to get home.
My hair is black now. I like it, but apparently people think I look like some kind of emo kid. I admit to liking Dashboard Confessional, but I’m not bummed out all the time, and I don’t have a particular penchant for black clothes, leather, or bad poetry. I just like my hair black is all ! I have been getting more looks from the ladies, I think, but then I would have no way of quantifying this. Who knows. I’m going to eat Chipotle and read some Harry Potter.
I like clever T-shirts. Unforunately, many t-shirts try to be clever, but are really just dumb, obnoxious, or pointlessly profane (in an unfunny manner.) I saw a guy with a t-shirt that said something in binary code on it, and asked him what it meant. He said it was ‘you are dumb.’ I’ve seen several other nerdy t-shirts to that effect: “stupidity is not a crime, you are free to go” etc etc.
I decided I’d make my own. It arrived in the mail today. Here are the results.
The fellas over at www.pointlesswasteoftime.com always have something interesting to say. The weird thing is that even though the articles are wildly profane (in a manner that I find absolutely hilarious), I think they’re full of unconventional wisdom. This is their latest article.
I called my cell phone number last night, and somebody picked up. He claimed to have bought the phone from ’some guy on the street’. I told him I’d meet him at a local target store, to buy it back for $80. He said ‘OK’, and after I hung up, I called the police department, who said they’d have someone there to show up as soon as I started talking to this guy. I was pleased – I was going to get my phone back and hopefully send some bastard to jail. Unforunately, he didn’t show up.
If you like board games, Settlers of Catan is very excellent. It seems rather complicated at first, but once you’ve played one game it is pretty simple, makes sense, and is very entertaining.
I screwed up my car yesterday, backing out of the parking lot of the games store. I turned too tightly, and the bumper scraped against some plastic panneling on the base of my car. It was falling off the bottom. I got out and my friend helped smack it back into place. When I got back to school, I used some duct tape to put it back together. You can see duct tape on the rear passenger side of my car now. Not a lot, but it’s noticable. I was feeling pretty crummy about this, untill I remembered something Anneliese told me once. I was telling her how I bought a new shirt for St. Patrick’s day, and had a little line on it, where it was folded. It had been sitting in the store so long that the fold line was somehow slightly bleached into the shirt. She told me she liked it, because the little imperfections in things give them character and make them more lovable. I decided that instead of fretting about how my car had a little duct tape on the side of it, I should be pleased, because now my car has character. Whenever I see that little spot, I will think of my days in California and smile.
It’s all about the attiude, I suppose. I look forward to seeing Anneliese when I get home.
Some people like to tinker with their cars or machines. I like to fiddle with computer related stuff. I just installed an anti-spam plugin for the comments section, to remove crap like “redolfo: hey, man, i like you’re site www.porn.com/xanax’ or what have you. I am working on some kind of solution that will allow me to link this site with livejournal because people seem to like that site but I prefer having www.markpneyer.com. Hmmm; Ideally, markpneyer.com could query livejournal for comments and such so that it’d be totally cross-integrated and commenters at livejournal would see comments made from www.markpneyer.com. Hmmm.
I managed to lose my cell phone. That is crappy. What makes matters worse is that I am in California, and I plan to drive home soon, so I kind of really want to have a cell phone for that trip home. I was on Megan’s family plan, which only complicates matters further. I really don’t like not having a cell phone, so I got panicky and wanted to do something about it right away. I was planning on leaving Megan’s family plan, because that’s weird and I’d like to be able to manage my own phone bill and such, but I wasn’t going to be able to take care of that untill I got to cincinnati to get that taken care of. The Verizon people said I could get a new phone and then cancel that account once I got back to cincinnati. That sounded like a great idea to me, and I thought about possible occurences and then decided to go for it. I have a new cell phone number now, (213) 219 2879, but I plan to cancel that when I get back to cincinnati and have my old number ported to this account so I can just keep the cell phone.
I am kind of stressed because I feel like I made a mistake in logic, but when I go through the possibilities, it seems like I acted a little sooner than I problem should have, but that I’ll be fine. If everything goes well, the only thing I’ll have to pay for is a new activation fee, which I was planning on paying for anyways because I wanted to leave Megan’s account. The worst that thing that could possibly happen is that I have to pay to cancel my contract on megan’s family plan, and then still have to pay the activation fee for this new phone. That, however, seems pretty unlikely to me and was already going to have to happen once I lost the phone.
The moral of the story, is that it sucks to lose your phone because you lose numbers that weren’t saved anywhere else. You can’t call someone to ask them their number, and there are some people who I will probably forget that I ever had their number. Also, the phone that I got to replace my old one feels pretty cheap. I asked for the cheapest one there was, and got a free one. Woot for that I suppose. I wanted to get some abstract algebra done, but I’m too stressed to think clearly now, so I think I’m going to go and exercise.