my littlest brother got a blog. *sniff* so proud. so go visit it. i don't know if he's joined the "blogs are stupid but they're awfully fun" crowd, but i'm sure it won't be long...

anible arrived at college today. he has no three-prong power outlets in his dorm room--no ground wire. ?!?

tonight was the annual showing of the princess bride in the college chapel. heh, we don't have an alma mater, we have a movie. (well technically, we do have an alma mater, but the tune is ripped straight from cornell's and the words are ridiculous.) not that i'm complaining; princess bride is one of my favorite movies of all time. even if it does grow the ache of anible's absence. (hey, check out that alliteration, man, nice stuff)

classes start tomorrow. 8am. wish me luck.

usually i don't go in for the "weekly blog questionare" pages (like this one, for example), but i rather like the one i found today.

• if you had medical insurance that would cover any medical treatment, would you seek additional care for anything?
  no. unless it were my funny heart whatzit, but that rarely happens any more.
• for a sizable payment, would you get on TV and personally endorse a product you thought was mediocre?
  no. i'm a terrible liar--my conscience is too noisy. it wouldn't be fair to the manufacturer.
• if you were guaranteed a window view, regardless, what floor of a 100-story office building would you want to be on?
  depends. 100th for a fast elevator, 1st for a slow one. i get the biggest kick out of vertigo, but i don't have time for hours of elevator-riding.

if you're using microsoft internet explorer on a windows machine, you may have noticed that this website does not display properly--this main section is way down the page. internet explorer is NOT a standards-compliant browser, meaning it doesn't support certain features that it really should, like the techniques i use on this page. i could go in and fix it. however. i am a college student, and i have better things to do with my time than fix things that 1) shouldn't be broken in the first place and 2) are broken by a company that virtually owns the computing industry but cannot be bothered to support web standards. so if it really bothers you, get a real browser.

they own me. i have been assimilated. resistance was futile, not that i offered much. but on the good side, i'll have a paycheck covering 22 hours coming soon!

we split up a bit today: some stayed at the actual "desk" answering calls, and some (including me) dealt with the freshmen. o excuse me, first-years. *cough* it was exciting. the day was, in part, a beta test for some home-grown software. it did very well. mostly. failed twice, half-halting operation for a bit (no pun intended) (if you understood how that was a pun, i think you're cool). the lines of new kiddies and stacks of laptops grew slightly as a result, but all in all it wasn't a big deal. lots of fun, especially considering i somehow managed to make myself useful as the intake/pick-up person. (i took laptops and input them for processing, and checked them out when the owners came back.) it was really flying, by the end of the afternoon.

i still haven't been able to register my car--i've been working all day and haven't had a chance to get over there when they're open.. thankfully, the security office won't start ticketing unregistered vehicles until monday, when everyone is back on campus. so i hope they're open on saturdays, or i'm screwed.

*

i've become intimately aquainted with an economically fantastic business plan. say you've designed foo, a top of the line, highly marketable service. start foo free (as in beer). publish pages and pages of literature regarding your committment to keeping foo free. watch your user database grow. eventually, inform users of financially "hard times" for foo, whether any exist or not. suggest that if users are happy with their service, they donate a small amount to foo, through paypal or some such. a few days after the note, shut down service completely. watch your bank account grow. open the service back up when an acceptable amount has been received. publish pages and pages of literature thanking the users' generosity. repeat.

it is truly great to see everyone. i arrived late last night, alone, in the dark, with a car full of stuff, and the sight of my former roommate flying ecstatically out of her room to give me a hug was a very nice welcome. to say the least. and my things (a good-sized-trunk-full and a full back seat) were in the house and up to my room in under five minutes, thanks to the help of everybody and their boyfriends. i've never been moved in that quickly to anywhere, in my life--let's hear it for living with halves of couples, eh? *cough*

i'm just about done unpacking; just one suitcase to go. my desk is maybe 80% organized--there's only so far you can go before books are bought, savez?

*

i have a cell phone now. mum (and anible *sniff*) wanted to make sure i don't get stuck on a highway, hitchhiking with a truck-driver, so she bought me a verizon prepaid cell phone. (i buy the minutes, and i'll pay her back for the phone next summer.) it's great, i love it. so much fun, this electronic gadgetry. so many buttons to push. *grin*

*

went to my first round of helpdesk training this afternoon. it's a bit terrifying--i know my stuff, but being responsible for passing that knowledge to someone else is...not quite my game. i'll master the ropes, i'm sure. eventually. there were two other new trainees this semeseter, both sophomores. the entire office thoroughly enjoyed our little "simulations," and "what to say when you answer the phone" exercises. it will be great fun.

i'm back at school.

yikes.

did most of my packing yesterday--gah, what an awful day. i was edgy enough trying to stuff my life into a mini-sedan; to make it worse, i had two bouts of mini-sedan headache.

first, my father did a pre-big-drive checkup, and discovered that one of my lug bolts (holds the wheel together) was cross-threaded. and all the wheels needed to be re-torqued. he estimated around $10, the guy said on the phone $105.33 [PANIC PANIC PANIC], ended up being $40. so that wasn't too terrible, just a minor annoyance that took a bit of time.

that afternoon, mum gave me a coupon for an "ultimate!" job at her favorite car wash. (my car had been parked underneath a big, beautiful black walnut tree. if you're familiar with black walnuts, you can imagine what the vehicle looked like. if you're not, just imagine lots and lots of avian diarrhea.) anible, who had been over helping me pack (or rather, trying desperately to help only to be snapped at by his stressed girlfriend), came up to the place with me, and we got all excited (ok, i got all excited) about the pretty-colored soap. we finished, the car was lovely, we drove home, we noticed hundreds of tiny nicks in the body paint and on the window glass. [PANIC PANIC WHAT THE H DID THEY DO TO MY CAR PANIC] mom and i brought it back up for an explanation: turns out, they were there all along, we just didn't notice because the dealer had coated the outside with some sort of glaze, which lasts only until the first car wash. *grrr* so it'll be a rust-bucket a bit sooner than i had hoped.

anyway, that last set me off for the rest of the day. was horrible. and then i had to say goodbye to anible (who's going to FREAKING VERMONT) and drive away. *sniff* *sniff*

*sob*

nono, good stuff happened too, i just don't have time to blog it (when did "blog" become a verb?) at the moment.

blogsnob is a wonderful thing. personally, i use it to find nifty tools other people use in their blogs--such as, for example, the rss feed. it's free (blogger offers the service natively only if you pay for it). for those of you unfamiliar with rss (Really Simple Syndication), it's a code that lets you check the latest headlines and postings on a page without actually visiting the page itself. there are plenty of rss readers available, including a sidebar extension for mozilla firebird.

so all that to say, you can now check my headlines (once per hour, maximum) without actually putting up with the orange-ness. (it is orange, right? or is it some sort of coral-ish...?)

*grrrrr*

they're killing off access to the msm (microsoft messenger) network by third-party (i.e., non-microsoft) applications, starting october 15. unless users upgrade to the new msm client, they won't be able to log on. which means trillian and i won't be accessing my msm account anymore.

so now it's the crunch: give in and download the new msm, or give up the account. well, blip them. who uses msm anyway. jeez. *grrr*

[reads a bit more]

o nevermind. there's a reassuring trillian forum thread that suggests m$ is having people upgrade only to ensure they can use the new msm version 6 protocol. since trillian pro already uses it, trillian free will follow and all will be sweetness and light. ...i hope they're right.

there's a park about 10 miles out of town. it's a patch of land pushed out from the hill onto the lake, with areas for swimming and boat-launching and a very small marina. the park spans a road and river. one-third is across the road on the inland side, with a trail to the waterfall that's mobbed every weekend in the summer (but don't worry, the waterfall doesn't care). the other two-thirds are on the lake side of the road: one-third is to the south of the river, and one-third is to the north. there are picnic tables and grills along the water, and a big playground, and a stage for outdoor concerts every thursday. the southern side has a small, grimy swimming area, with two lifeguards and almost more bodies than mud in the water, but not quite. the northern side has a beautful (if stony) beach that stretches across the whole north side, with perfectly clear water underneath a "swimming prohibited" sign. needless to say, i swim on the northern side.

i swam there yesterday, in fact. anible and daniel and i biked out in the afternoon--they for the fun of it, i to see if i could. and i made it--up several mile-plus hills, no less. so maybe i don't have to think of myself as terribly out of shape anymore, what? made it back, too, on a harder route. twenty miles round trip, in hilly territory.

once we arrived, we all went swimming in the perfectly clear water underneath the "swimming prohibited" sign. *grin grin* was much fun--the only things you have to watch out for on my lake are the zebra mussels, which were introduced several years ago to help clean the water. they worked wonders, especially for unsuspecting swimmers' feet, which they rip to shreds. no matter, as long as you're careful or you wear sandals or watershoes. considering the furnace my county has been for past few weeks, a few bits of skin sliced off are a small price to pay for swimming in that lake.

i've finally driven my car. FINALLY! got my insurance card faxed this morning, stood in line for forty-five minutes at the dmv, and walked out with a registration card and two license plates. a few minutes later, i was practicing in a parking lot with anible. (was quite mean to him, too. sorry, love.) i'm a truly terrible driver on standard, ah well. i'll improve. or so i tell myself. and it's so much fun--i find fine tuning rpm's one of life's more succinct pleasures. not that there's much to fine tune (1.6 liter 4 cylinder), but it's the principle of the thing. anyway, drove over to anible's this evening to watch x-men, and i didn't die (driving, that is...), so i think i'll be ok.

i'm falling asleep. goodnight, world.

(i have a car...)

i biked up my street today.

see, this a big deal. my street goes straight up for miles and miles and miles...ok, that's a slight exaggeration...the point being, it's a doozy of a hill. in the past, i could never make it up--the last time i tried (last summer), i got about 50 feet. pathetic and embarrassing, particularly when my "little" brothers and my athlete boyfriend just sail up it with no apparent expenditure of energy, leaving me on the sidewalk eating their dust. i've always felt like the poor weak female (what's she doing on that classy mountain bike, again?).

like i said, i hadn't tried it since last summer. (i was avoiding the humiliation, savez? i hate not performing well at something that matters to me, so if i can't perform well i just don't perform. yes, perfectionism does run in my family.) and i'm currently in worse shape now (or so thunk i) than i was a year ago, so i certainly wasn't planning to try it again. but anible and daniel and i went for a little ride today, and i was on an endorphin high by the end of it, so i thought, what the hey, at least i can say i tried. hence, i tried, and i made it.

the funny thing was, it wasn't that difficult. (i have this funny heart thing that happens when i exert myself too much: my pulse starts racing and i have to sit/lie down to keep from blacking out. after i'm down, it slows until it eventually skips a beat and returns to normal, at which point i can continue doing whatever it was i was doing. it didn't even get started.) i put myself in a really low gear to begin with, and i was shifting up by the end of the hill. i actually made it all the way up my street.

so i'm feeling buff, yo.

in other news: mum and anible and i went sailing this afternoon, before the bike ride. a cardiologist (or is he a neurosurgeon? i can never remember) at our church has this beautiful palace on the lakefront, and he took us out on his little lub dub (ah yes, i think he's a cardiologist). weather couldn't have been better for a sail. warm sun, warm water, beautiful wind. it was great. we all got soaked, thanks to that wind, but it didn't matter because the water was s o warm. (some good came from the week of 90F, after all.) i do love sailing--and of course, mom sailed dinghies all through her teenage years. her first job after college was as a sailmaker. she was in her element. anyway. was very nice.

i'll miss my lake, come fall.

i think maybe the economy is slumping after all. went up to the outlet mall today with mum and grandpa--i didn't need much, but i figured it'd be a good chance to spend some time with them. anyway. my favorite store in the entire complex is jcrew. their styles seem custom fit for me, and they always have some great sale going. except today. there was a sale, but it was a "buy one and get the second x% off!" deal. terrible. needless to say, i bought nothing from jcrew.

cat's cradle was a pack of foma. but i enjoyed it anyway. what a thoroughly postmodern piece of literature, honestly. bokononism is ADMITTEDLY false, but is not phony. it brings meaning and purpose and happiness to human life, so its truth content (argues vonnegut) is irrelevant--it's not even considered. and the whole book is based on that premise. only a twentieth century author could have written a story like this. anyway.

here's a quote i liked, from the first book of bokonon:

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness. [yes, the idea of a lonely god is a bit...sketchy. ignore it and keep reading.]

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." [personally, i love this concept. until recently, i'd always wondered why on earth god set up human history the way he did, why he created us at all--it's not as if he needs us to exist. it's not as if without us, he would be somehow incomplete. vonnegut's answer is just fantastic.] And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And he went away.

i kinda like that. (i know, i don't read it the same way vonnegut wrote it, but that doesn't invalidate the concept i take from it.) who says there is a purpose to divine action, above and beyond the action itself? does god need some sort of "higher" reason to turn void into matter? isn't "because i can" reason enough?

so all that to say, kurt vonnegut jr. wrote a great book. (actually, he probably wrote several, but this is the only one i've read. i'm starting on slaughterhouse five.) read it, if you haven't--ESPECIALLY if you're coming from a christian worldview, it's absolutely fascinating.

bother this power outage.

i know. callous of me. millions of people are without power, virtually camping in the streets of [insert city here]--how can i possibly have the gall to whine when i actually DO have power? i'll tell you: very easily. i'm a rotten person at heart, you know. thoroughly selfish. so the principle meaning this blackout has for me is that my car will not be registered until monday. or whenever metlife insurance restores their mainframe AND the dmv restores whatever it is that's keeping them from being open.

as it turned out, i didn't get my own insurance company. me parents decided to be extremely generous and add my car to their policy (though i'm still paying). so for $260/6 months i'm getting lots and lots of coverage, including collision and comprehensive. very exciting--i was looking at $500-700 for the absolute bare state minimum. a positive event in an otherwise negative day. no wait! i finished kurt vonnegut's cat's cradle, that's positive. (more on that later, i hope.) and i'm currently getting ready to go swimming with my boyfriend in a lake, that's positive too.

i bought a car yesterday.

no, see, it's not just any car. it's my first. my first car, bought with my cash, paid for with my summer job, insured by my insurance company. (no, i don't have one yet. but i will!)

so yes, you could interpret, "i bought a car yesterday" to mean, "i'm flat broke." but that's ok!

today i will insure and register it. i'm feeling slightly daunted--a 20-year-old student with a few grand out in college loans isn't regarded very highly by most insurance companies. no matter, it'll get done. as will the registration. and then it really will be my own car...mmmm.

o yes. it's a 1995 suzuki esteem gl, with a popup sunroof. silver blue. no rust, no big dents, looks beautiful (but i'm biased). i'd post a picture but i haven't one, so you'll have to use your imagination.