August 2002

Ah, fun weekend. But I'm sore. I guess that's what happens when you get dragged thru the water holding onto a big tube a few times, then water ski, then go back to being dragged. But it was so much fun. Cheers to Al for his kindness and good boat driving.

Classes start today. I only have one class, 2 hours long. I'm actually very happy with my schedule this trimester. (Yea, I'm on trimesters, but I get the same breaks as everyone on semisters). So basically I have fewer classes at a time, so we can focus better. I don't feel like I'm ready for classes, partly because I haven't gotten my backpacked stocked with stuff, or anything even close to that. My laptop is basically ready to go, still needs lots of happy fun software put on, but I'll get to that as I go I suppose.

I best be off, wouldn't want to have to rush to make it to my early err, 10:40 class :).

Happy happy joy joy! Orientation (aka boredom) is over. I learned about everything I already knew. I also got the laptop installation CD's that they didn't send me, so now the laptop has all the 'special' software for the program. I'm thrilled.

Have seen most of the people the past week that I haven't seen in 3 months which makes me happy. I've also had the chance to meet a few new persons. Tonight is the 'welcome back' BBQ (really just a cook out, as all KC people know that BBQ implies BBQ sauce while cooking of the meets). I look forward to once again laying on the floor at Mike's house.

Things left to do:

• Get Loft / Beds setup
• Buy port replicator for laptop
• Buy Books
• Buy battery for my UPS
• Save money because I'm spending too much
• Get a job
• Setup the 'server'
• Other stuff too

The move-in activities continue. My desks are all setup, and I have my new laptop and all other computers here, still working on hooking everything up just right. Our living room is starting to take shape too. I'm very pleased that besides having a stockpile of food, our kitchen is all organized and everything is put away. We just need more room for glasses and all would be awesome.

I've done 3 car loads and 3 truck loads of stuff so far from Al's house. I declare that I have far too much stuff. However, all the furniture (well, by All I mean the stuff in the living room) is mine, so that adds up fast. Huge thanks to Al for letting so many people keep stuff at his house. I took the vacuum back from him, so I vacuumed his whole house pretty much before I took it today. I didn't spend lots of time, but covered most all the floor.

Tomorrow start orientation. I've braced myself for boredom.

Well, sitting on my bed and piles of blankets and stuff typing in this entry of course! Things are starting to take their shape, after all we have Internet access now so what else do we really need?

What's that, food you say? Yes, I agree, food is needed. And since it's afternoon and I've not eaten lunch-type food I'll have to do that. Tim bought some groceries, and I see some bread, but I didn't see anything much to put on the bread to make a lunch type food out of it, I'll have to investigate that one further.

Well, sitting on a conference bridge trying to get a problem resolved, sounds like it may be about fixed (this is after 2 hours and 7 minutes). Been a somewhat busy day, I've been trying to help with this issue basically all day, as well as listening in on the hour-long director's call this morning.

Tonight will be busy, intern dinner @ applebees followed by bible study. Then when I get home I'll have a few things to start getting ready for heading back to the land of Phoenix.

Need to call about my laptop, will do that after I get off this call. 2 hours 12 minutes...

Had my going away lunch at Mongollian BBQ for work, it was very good. We had to do it yesterday (Tues.) to try to accomidate everyone's schedules, as our director scheduled a lunch deal for Thursday... who does he think he is? (:

I got my application sent in for the lattest Research Assistant job, however I'm less qualified for this job than the others, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

Whew! Lots of little things. Thats what happens when you are moving I guess.

Today (Saturday) has been cool. Both literally and figuratively. So Quick rundown on the days events, first I went to visit my cousin, then I came home, then I went to the wedding reception for my old friend April Baack. Well, not Baack anymore, but that's a hard habit to break.

So my cousin lives in lawrence, so I drove there to see her new appartment (I'm weird, I like seeing where my friends & relatives live). Anyway, very nice place she has, well, considering she's in college and all, and this is lawrence we're talking about (ok so I don't really think Lawrence is my favorite town - so I'm a bit partial). Anyway, we talked and went to eat lunch and came back and talked some more, her roommate had gotten home by then. It was rather entertaining as we talked about smashing pennies when we were younger and things, and its almost scarry how much we know about the best ways to go about doing that... her roommie said "your family sure has a history of smashing pennies". Made me think, yea, we kinda do... its one of those stupid things. Ok, I'm done, not talking any more about pennies and smashing.

I got home at 4:00, and April's wedding started at 4:00, and I very much dislike being late to things, so I didn't go to the actual wedding. I was awkwardly tired too. So instead I layed down in the basement and watched UnderSiege 2. Right at the end of the movie my mom called me and told me that the wedding was over and I could meet them for the reception. Well, that required clothing. Make that, clothing nicer than what I was wearing. So I went, and all my pants were wrinkled. I figured I had a little time, so I stopped and ironed them all so I'd be good to go for work.

After ironing, I went to go pick out exactly what I was going to wear, and then I realized I had my suit at home. Silly me. So, instead of wearing any of the pants I ironed I wore my suit minus the jacket as it is summer, and my car's A/C isn't the best. So I went there, and had wonderful time. The most touching moment (for me) was the father daughter dance, to 'Butterfly Kisses'. I don't know why, 'cause I'm a long long ways off from being a father, but it was very touching. I did get a chance to see many folks that I haven't talked with much over the summer, and since I'm heading off next saturday for AZ it was very convenient to be able to catch up quickly. So I thank April for picking a wedding date before I left to go back to Phoenix, and I apologize for not making it to the wedding... I missed out.

So, its been a wonderful day of seeing many people I won't see in a long time. It makes me sad to leave, but I miss everyone in AZ too. People keep asking me if I'm reading to go back, the answer is always "yes...and no". Perhaps I'll have some visitors in Phoenix from the Kansas folks this time around? (That is, besides my parents... it is nice that they come, but I'm specificly referring to other folks - I don't have to show my parents around Phoenix, they already know the town almost better than me). Well, bedtime has come.

Manual labor kinda has that very refreshing accomplished feeling sometimes. Sometimes I miss my days of mowing lawns, being outside and doing real work. Man & machine, and with the exception of collecting or sending bills, interaction with other people was fairly minimal. Equipment is often much easier to deal with than people, if it isn't broken you take it apart and have a look to see how to fix it. If it runs out of gas you just open the top and pour more in. If it needs an oil change you dump out the old and in with the new. Very simple, it dosn't fight back with you it just lets you do what you know needs to be done.

Isn't that an interesting thought? How about a machine that talks back and tells you that it doesn't want your help, it can do it on its own. Anywho, wild imagination...

So there's this guy doing jackhammering outside my office, like on the piece of concrete as near to me as you can possibly get. So I watched for a while, and was greatful that I wasn't doing that. But there was a part of me that wanted to be doing it too. Anyway, the greater question was why? It wasn't like there was a huge need for the concrete to be re-poured. They've been doing little sections of the walkways outside our building, a few at a time. I guess someone just wanted to give the construction workers something to do, because the walkways were easily walkable, not like there were huge chunks missing or something. Oh well, such is life.

Fast forward... It's now 10:50 p.m. I supopse this could be a new entry, but I'm lazy and don't want to start a new one :).

So today was pretty cool, work was, well, pretty typical, although I did some more website updates which made me feel useful beyond just sharing my knowledge with the world :). After work I went to pickup our poor subwoofer which had a blown driver. Luckily it was covered under warranty, so we incurred no cost. When I got home hooked it up and its sounding much better, good as new. Played around with speaker setup too, but went back to how it was originally after I finished playing.

In between picking the speaker up and getting home I went to the intern farewell event at Comedy City (I hope that is the right link). It was a lot of fun. Got to see the other interns that I had done a few things with during the year, and had some good nice conversation too. Well, thats besides the laughs :). The comedy really was very good. I think my favorite was when we had an old guy do a punk rock song, I'm trying to remember what the song was about and I can't recall, as there was far too much entertaining stuff that night. Next wednesday is the last Intern dinner, I'll go to that before bible study as I'm leading bible study I will need to be sure and prepare ahead of time :). It'll be my last hope 20-something bible study for this summer too... sniff sniff. I've completely switched topics at this point, so I'll end the sentence and try to come up with a title for this entry.

Ok, seriously, don't expect an update every day like this!

So I was reading someone else's journal, and ran across this line:

"I'm not sure anything could top this past year."

I guess much of that is because of the large increase in persons who I would call my friends. For much of what I learned was because of them. What I've learned is hard to put a finger on. How I've changed is hard to describe. Many situations I've learned from are not really shareable.

College, well, my first year was pretty life changing, as they always are when you're gong off to somewhere new. But to be honest, a lot of those typical freshman year strugles just weren't there, or they didn't hit me the same as they do other people. There's a number of reasons for that, but I think it probably boils down to two: First, I've always been very independent. Just ask my parents. Second, I had an awesome roommate from the get-go. Oh, a third reason, perhaps just as important but more subtle... very supportive parents who were always there when needed to lend a helping hand.

Anyway, so this past yeaar I was actually somewaht social for really the first time in my life. I had learned how to listen previously, but now I learned that oftentimes thats more important than anything else. I became a bit less of a neat freak - although the FBI was still very impressed with our cleanliness :).

I guess what made this past year so great was the people. How can you top living with 3 other awesome guys with the same major as you? And having so many great friends, and making several more throughout the year? I think back and almost cry, because I know that those were some of the best times I'll ever have in my life. I didn't really want the year to end, the graduation ceremonies to come. But what better way to graduate than with your roommate's and best friends by your side?

For those of you who have been reading past entries, you'll know that I have been slowly making changes to the formatting. Well, I had some spare time so I finally put in some styles, and fixed the entry on 8/4 so that it wasn't quite so bloated with tags galor to make the font's work out. Well, Anyway, I finally added CSS to this page, (that's Cascading Style Sheets) and hopefully eventually that'll flow out to the rest of the website as it makes it much easier to maintain once they're in place. I've just been my normal lazy self and done things the old-fashioned way, which is great if you're living in the land of 3.0 browsers, but we're pretty well beyond that. In the event someone stumbles upon the site with an oldie browser well, things just won't look pretty but everything is still there.

Whew! Ok, I rambled about techno stuff enough. What, you want more to read? You're addicted to reading journal entries? Ok, fine, me too.

I woke up this morning at 8:30. Well, I thought it was 8:30. I thought something which I should put here, as I want to be to work by 8:00 or shortly after. Somehow either just after I woke up or just before I woke up I managed to advance the hour on both the current time and the alarm, which rather confused me. But I was happy to know it was only 7:30 after checking my PCS phone. Always a good source of time, much more accurate than most other sources of time.

Thats all for today, at least for now.

I'm trying a slightly new format to this, I don't plan on changing the old ones, but I may stick with this new 'style' for future updates.

I've been working on this all summer. I may add more to it later, but I thought this was a darn good start.

1. Kansas is always green in may.
2. Arizona is never green.
3. 17.5 hours is plenty of time to transport yourself from one location to another given the right road conditions and lack of law enforcement.
4. Driving is something that should never be taken over by computers.
5. You can't forget how to ride a bike, you can't forget how to make music - just have knock a layer or two or 10 of rust off first.
6. Skinny fingers make guitars easier to play.
7. An out of tune piano is like a piano that sounds bad.
8. Friendship doesn't require close proximity, but it can help.
9. Life is what you make it, you feel how you want to feel, outside events can shape who you are but you have to let them.
10. God works in mysterious ways, and most all the time you don't even know it until afterwards.
11. If your job asks you to do X, and you don't want to do X, find something Y which you do want to do and work on it while also working on X and you'll be much happier.
12. There's no substitute for a Kansas thunderstorm.
13. There's no substitute for a good back massage.
14. Fireworks are cool, and just because nobody else is around does not mean that you have bad seats.
15. $100 worth of fireworks is not too much for one evening.
16. Showing someone something new to them is one of the neatest things.
17. Rain just gets you wet.
18. Very talkative people make good tour guide announcers.
19. Be sure and learn things right the first time. If you haven't done something in a long time, you will almost always resort back to how you originally learned how to do it.
20. Music has amazing powers.
21. There's only so much you can learn by reading someone's online journal.
22. Often the things you are the most scared to do, make the most positive impact.
23. Life doesn't get more hectic. You just realize the heckticity more as you get older. (I invented a new word!)
24. People often worry more about issues 1000 miles away from them than issues 20 feet from them, because they don't have to do anything to fix the problems then.
25. The right hand really doesn't know what the left hand is doing.
26. Sometimes a friend is someone who is there for you. Other times a friend is someone who isn't there.
27. God is always there.
28. Single serving friends sometimes become more.
29. Worrying about other people's thoughts often happens on a subconscious level.
30. Going home sometimes means meeting new people as opposed to spending time with old ones.