Miscellany

I haven't been much of a blogger lately. I have my suspicions as to why, but they're not really important. Hopefully soon I'll get back to doing it more regularly. But as a result, there are lots of little things to talk about, none of which really deserves its own post....so here's the miscellaneous randomness of my life:

Moving: Well, the big move may happen this week. What I know for sure is that I'll help out with my dad's Science Club meeting on Thursday after school, then I'll drive to MD overnight. Normally, I'd forego overnight driving (especially sans caffeine), but I need to spend Friday looking for (and hopefully finding) an apartment. If I find one available for immediate occupancy, my parents will drive up on Saturday with all of my stuff, furniture, and my cat. If I find one that will be available really soon, or even if I don't find one at all, they'll just bring up my stuff (no furniture or cat) and I'll store it or something. Then, when a place _is_ available, I'll make another trip to TN to pick up my furniture and cat or possibly my family will come up again during Spring Break. As two months is a long time to go without a bed, I'm really hoping it won't be that last option. So, MD folk, I'll be back in town "for good" starting sometime early Friday morning, but I'll be pretty busy over the weekend.

School: I just tried to register for my classes and there's some block on my registration. The lady who might know what the problem is comes in at 1:30. Hope with me that it's something simple. I now plan on taking three classes: Tuesdays, 7-9:30PM is Space Human Factors and Life Support; Wednesdays, 6:30-9PM is Satellite Design; and Thursdays, 4-6:30PM is Software Safety. The human factors class will be interesting - it'll cover life support systems and the "human" aspect of space travel. I'm counting this as my "easy" class since my "expertise" at my old job was the life support systems on the Space Station. Design classes are always fun, so the satellite design class should be good. It'll give us a nice overview of each typical satellite system (power, thermal, guidance, etc.), then I'm sure there'll be a group design project. :) This course is possibly time-consuming, but hopefully also not terribly difficult. The last one could be really hard, or it could be a cakewalk. I hoping that some of my friends from my old job will take the class with me, so we can cut up in the back of the room. :)

Job: I still have no idea about a job. I figure that I can live (_very_ carefully) as long as I'm making at least $6/hr full-time, but I'll also need to pay for school, so something higher than that would be really good. It needs to be full-time so that I've got some amount of medical insurance, and I'd rather it be relatively mindless work. The last real "hourly" job that I had was in high school at Service Merchandise and I used to have nightmares about it, so hope that I've gotten over my fear of working in retail sales. If anyone knows of anything, let me know. This semester it could pretty much be anything, even a 9-5er, but I don't know about next semester, so flexible hours are probably necessary.

Guitar: I played and sang "Untitled Hymn (Come to Jesus)" for church on Sunday. When I got out my guitar on Friday to practice, I noticed a new "feature" near the top of the neck that I'd never noticed before. I thought it was odd that I'd never noticed before that it was two pieces that were joined, but whatever. On Sunday morning I realized that the neck was cracked, pretty much all the way to the fret board. The guitar made it to and from Mexico, to Kuwait, Iraq, and Jordan (probably - I didn't examine it very closely at the time), but sometime since then either due to temperature changes or impact or something else....well, she's dead, Jim. Lacking anything else to play, I went ahead and used her on Sunday morning, but I'm going to head over to the store where we bought her three or four years ago to see about buying a new one. They buy used guitars, so maybe I'll get some small amount of trade-in for her "electric" side or something. So sad. :(

Wasting Time in TN: I've spent much of my time here helping my family clean/reorganize their house. We've sent a lot of stuff to charity and a lot of stuff to the dump. During my less busy time, I've been playing games on the computer, and watching TV and DVDs. Last night we finished watching all of "V." That was originally a TV mini-series in 1983 and 1984, then it lasted one season as a TV show. It was about these lizards that dressed up like humans in order to act like our friends, but really to rape the planet of its natural resources. They eat a lot of mice and other rodents, and the guy who plays Freddie Krueger is a friendly lizard. :) It's fun. I also very much enjoyed the Alias season premier last Wednesday. JJ Abrams (series creator) decided to give that to my mom as a birthday present (Happy Birthday, Mommy!). I was worried through the first hour that my boyfriend Marshall (the tech geek) wasn't going to be on the show anymore, but he is, and I'm happy. My other boyfriend Michael Vartan, of course was still there. But sadly, they say that they've killed off Lena Olin's character. Fortunately, no one's ever _really_dead on this show (except for Dixon's wife, Emily (this time), and possibly many of the "red shirts," to use a Star Trek term). But Spy Daddy was just as ambiguously good as ever, Sloan was just as ooky as ever, and it looks like Agent Sean might get a girlfriend this season. :) Yay! Agent Sean is my other, other boyfriend (he's the big teddy bear imaginary boyfriend, Vaughn (Michael Vartan) is the hot imaginary boyfriend, and Marshall is the geeky imaginary boyfriend - hey....when they're just imaginary boyfriends, you can have as many as you like and switch between them depending on your mood. Imaginary boyfriends are very convenient that way.). The credits are a little different, but I could still do my internationally-known "Alias Dance" to them, and the disguises, accents, and fight scenes were just as much fun as ever, so I have high hopes for this season. :)

ANY-way.....so now I'm going to head over to Jesse's house to spend time going through my stuff in his basement. That should be "fun." And cold. And dirty. But at least his crawlspace is tall enough for me to stand up, mostly. Purple Heart is coming by again on Wednesday, so I'm hoping to finish going through everything by then. That's the goal anyway. We'll see what actually transpires. We'll also see if I can practice what I've been making my mom do - enjoy it for one last moment, now give/throw it away!

Car: I finally got my MD license plates, so my car is official now!! :)

Computer: I forgot to tell you that my computer is no longer a paperweight! My hard drive is probably definitely gone (although we'll see about someone Marshall-esque retrieving the data, if it's not too expensive), but my church generously replaced my hard drive for me and got Henry back up and running again. Not having much need for him here, I've only recently finished getting him back to the way that I like him, but he's working just fine again. I'm still sad about all of the applications I've lost though. And I haven't connected him to the internet at all to update anything, so it's entirely possible that SP2 will work its magic again, but I hope it won't. I think I've got a scheme for having internet connectivity once I get back to MD, but otherwise, does anyone know the cheapest way to get internet access in the DC area?

Sunday School: I'm sure you've all been wondering how things have been going with my Sunday School class. Well, unexpectedly, I've really enjoyed the time. Mostly because I always had a class of one - me. No one else ever came, and except for the first time, I didn't get caught, so I got to have an hour of "me" time. That was definitely better than sitting in some class. :) But I turned in my book yesterday, so my career as an adult Sunday School teacher seems to have come to an end.

That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure I'll think of something else piddly here shortly, but it can't be that important if I can't think of it now.