Posts Tagged ‘Matt’s work’

I went to a Halloween party tonight with some work friends. Matt had to work, so I went alone. It was a drinking party, so I pretty much just ran around and took photos of my intoxicated coworkers, but it was still a good time! It was a costume party and I spent all week trying to figure out some cute way to incorporate my growing belly. There were quite a few people there I didn’t know, so I didn’t want to just be “that fat girl”, I wanted something that would explain it! ;-p Well, most of my ideas were pretty dumb. I kicked this one around for a while, but thought maybe it was too sick. Well, I got over that and decided it was cute! I got some comfy yoga pants and a long sleeve t-shirt and some white puffy paint and viola! I’m a pregnant skeleton!!

This morning Matt reenlisted in the Air Force. He had a lieutenant that he works with conduct the ceremony. His supervisor, another coworker, three guys I work with, and I were there to cheer him on. He had the great idea of holding it in the high bay in his building, where a giant flag hangs from the ceiling. It was informal, but nice. We brought a cake and gabbed for a while before getting back to work. In order for Matt to get his orders to Japan, he had to reenlist, since it's a 4-year assignment. He figured he might as well tack another 2 years on there while he's at it, since he's decided to make this a 20-year commitment. So we'll be military for quite a while longer and who knows where we'll go after Japan! I think it would be great to get an assignment in Europe sometime. We left when I was almost 8 and I haven't been back since. It would be nice to see some of the sights I did when I was young. I think it's exciting; I don't need to settle down in one place just yet. He'll be able to retire at age 39 and then find something else to do.

Matt got an assignment! We don’t have orders yet, just the rip. Guess where?! Misawa, Japan!! This is so great because that’s exactly where we wanted to go (#1 on his Dream Sheet.) He had been applying for special duty postal assignments to get to Japan, but there were no slots for his rank at Misawa, so our last application was for Kadena. Well, he didn’t get a postal job, but rather got chosen for this quarter’s overseas nonvolunteer assignments in his career field! We’re not sure what all he’ll be doing yet, but the unit is part of an intelligence group, so that might be interesting! There are a few downsides, though. His report date is 29 Feb and cannot go out any earlier than 30 days ahead of time. Well, being due on the 8th, that really doesn’t work for us. Our options are for him to go out and I’ll follow later, but depending on whether the baby comes late, he may miss the birth! Or we could apply for a new report date, which is what we ended up doing. The date couldn’t be pushed any earlier, only bumped out later. He picked March 31st, but we’ll see what we get back. If the baby comes perfectly on time, then it’ll be about 6 weeks old when we go out there. Initially I would have preferred to go out while pregnant, but this is nice because then family members can meet baby before we move across the world. I know Mama will try to be out for the birth, but that is hard to plan around, especially with Andrea’s due date only 10 days after mine and wanting to be there for her, too. Matt’s parents and Jen will be out in the middle of February also. It will be such a hectic time, but it will be nice to see everybody and maybe get a little help out with getting ready for the move and taking care of baby.

Matt and I have talked a lot about Tal and Gabby and decided that it just doesn’t make much sense to try to bring them. We have to get them microchipped, rabies shots, a FAVN test (will probably take a month or so before we can do that), then a blood test followed by 180 days of quarantine before they can enter Japan. Well, I’m not sure we’ll have the time. Plus, it will be such a drag getting them out there on a long flight then the 12-hour pet shuttle trip up to Misawa. And temporary lodging doesn’t allow pets and our housing options would be limited with them. I think it would also freak them out a ton and who knows how they’re going to handle a newborn on top of all that. We’re going to try really hard to find them a good home and maybe (hopefully!!) they’ll get to stay together wherever they are. It’s sad and we’ve grown really attached, but I think it would just be crazy (and expensive) to try to move them out with us. It will be quite the stressful time without dealing with pets. They’ve been so sweet with us and we love them so much, but so long as they’re with loving new parents, I’ll be okay with it. Maybe someday when we’re settled in we can get another kitten, too!

So I’m emailing this post to my blog and hopefully it posts it correctly. Of
course, plenty has happened since last October. The problem is that I’ve
gone back to pen-and-paper journaling, so I’ve had little desire to blog.
We had Thanksgiving at home, Christmas in New York with Matt’s family, new
Year’s in California with my mom and Ron, Matt turned 24, I started school
in January, we started attending a new marriage-related Bible study, I
dropped all my classes in February, Matt’s sister (Jen) moved out to LA and
she and Matt’s dad came up for a few days to visit, Matt started a new
3-on-3-off 12-hour work schedule, my father came to visit at the beginning
of March, I’m doing web design work for a creation science traveling
home school science course, I turned 24, I’ve been doing temp work as a
coupon printer installer/retrofitter technician at grocery stores, and
that’s pretty much the gist of what’s been going on in our lives. More on
some of that a bit later.

Wow, it's been a while. Well here's the scoop … Matt's parent's were out last weekend from New York. They flew in to San Diego to hang out with Matt's uncle for a day then took the train up to meet us in Santa Barbara Friday night. We went out for Hawaiian BBQ at L&L for dinner then headed home. We pretty much just sat up and chatted before crashing. Saturday we split up: Matt and Dad went golfing while Mom and I toured around Solvang. She and I had lunch at the Solvang Restaurant, of course (I had to introduce her to the delicious Aebleskiver!) We stopped by my favorite local yarn shop, hung out in a windmill, and took plenty of photos (on her camera … they'll be posted as soon as I receive them.) Saturday evening I cooked my "famous" chicken parmesan and we played Star Wars monopoly. Sunday morning was church. It's about time we attended. A mixture of my TDY, Matt's wacky weekend work schedules, and super-laziness have kept us away from church for months. Although we can still only attend every other Sunday, it's still very nice to be back. After church made the winding drive out to Jalama Beach to bottle some sand, wade in the frigid water, have a terrific hamburger lunch, and pick up a really cute coconut windchime. We made sloppy joe turnovers again to enjoy over a game of Mad Gab. Over the weekend we watched a few movies (our #1 must-share, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, provided us with much shrieking laughter) and spent a lot of time just relaxing and chatting. Matt and Jason both had to go to work early Monday morning, but we stopped by Matt's work for a picnic lunch before heading down to Santa Barbara. I dropped them off after getting lost around the town so they could enjoy a few days of 25th anniversary celebration. It was a great visit! Other than that … nothing else terribly interesting has happened. Matt's on his Panama schedule now, so he works all of this week (but had Wednesday-Thursday as a "weekend"), but has all of next week (minus Wednesday-Thursday) to hang out at home. It's a little wacky, but once we get used to it I think we're really going to like this new schedule. Matt's computer has been on the fritz lately. We've taken it in to get checked out twice now and they can't find anything wrong with it. It reboots after 5-10 minutes consistently when it's at home. Gaming is impossible. Whenever it tries to boot, there's a very high chance it won't POST and will just beep every three seconds. Of course, Best Buy can't reproduce this and has run through all their stress tests and it's been behaving excellently all week. It must be our room. It's been a nice break from gaming, though. We spend more time doing crafts, reading, and, well, sitting in front of the screen still I guess. Matt's been cross stitching this cool wolf scene (only his second attempt at the craft) and it's really coming together. He still has a lot to do, but it's a big project. Here's what he has finished so far (about two weeks of on-and-off work):

Math is going all right. I have a test next week and, of course, we've all ready started into new material that won't be covered on the upcoming exam. I hate doing learning and doing homework for new material when I want to focus all my attention on studying old material. We still haven't gotten our first exams graded and returned, but I hope we will on Monday. My teacher is always so excitable about problems that we do. He'll write a problem up on the board and tell us to take five minutes to do it. He will get so antsy that he can't contain his excitement and will just do it for us within the first two minutes, telling us all the time how we will be think it's so cool. I like math. I'm pretty good at math. I've just never felt really excited about it or found anything to be particularly beautiful. Until last Wednesday. I had checked out a book from the library last week about cool tricks and neat things in math. It had introduced Euler's formula, e^it = cos(t) + isin(t), which is really neat, as well as the awesome relationship between five fundamentals of math: e^i(pi) + 1 = 0. I thought this was all very cool, but the book didn't say too much about them. I was psyched on Wednesday, though, because we ran into these while discussing homogeneous linear differential equations and got to prove them! It suppose part of the excitement came from not being mostly lost in class and that I actually recognized something that we hadn't yet talked about. I'm sure non-math people can look at the two equations and not care at all, but really, they are very beautiful and amazing. I think it was the first time I really appreciated an equation as elegant and realized what a genius Euler was.

Not too much of interest has happened since my last blog. Jason's still here and workin'. Matt just got off an exercise, during which he had to work the 11pm – 7am shift. Today was his first day back working a normal schedule, thankfully. I had my first math exam last Monday which, after 7 hours of straight studying prior to the test, I think went pretty well. Really, for not being in class for half the material I think it went all right. It's a good thing there are 4 more exams this semester, though. I finally had my investigation interview for my clearance (after completing the paperwork over a year ago!) Matt, Jason and I went to a BBQ at my friend Brian's last Saturday. Brian was in my math and physics classes for the last couple of semesters, but is moving to San Diego this week. We had a blast playing a few crazy games of croquet and hanging out with friends. We're getting ready for Matt's parents to come out a week from Friday. We'll head down to Santa Barbara to pick them up on Friday evening, then they're leaving us on Monday morning, so there's not a lot of time. I'm really looking forward to it, though! Matt and I gave up our WoW addiction last month for a new one: Guild Wars. I'm enjoying it more, though. Our main characters are level 19 (out of 20) right now and got up there pretty quickly, but there's still so much more to the game, not just leveling. He has a ritualist/necromancer, I have a monk/mesmer. We also have rangers which we haven't been playing as much. I'm having a blast and it's always nice to run around with Matt. Melissa came over last night and we made dinner and baked cookies. We tried these awesome sloppy joe turnover things (just sloppy joe filling scooped into a rolled out biscuit, then folded over and baked) that everyone gobbled up and she made peanut butter cookies. While I was working on the sloppy joe meat, I saw her pouring salt into a 1/4 cup. Wondering what she was doing, I checked the recipe and saw that it only called for 3/4 teaspoon both salt and baking powder. I missed the part where she added 3/4 cup baking powder, and she was almost finished with the salt! We tried to salvage it, but it just wasn't happening. It was a good laugh, though. We'll never forgot to pay attention to measurements. :-p I've really just been hanging out with Matt during his off-time while this exercise was going on, so I haven't spent too much time by myself. That's started back up again, so I filled today with chores and crocheting. I collected a lot of cheap practice yarn when I first taught myself how to crochet, but didn't use it all up. Now I have baskets full of yarn I never really want to use. I gathered up eight skeins to make an afghan for charity with or something. I've done a few rows on it now and it's grown a lot on me. I've been wondering what on earth to get my brother's girlfriend for Christmas and haven't really come up with anything. I'm sure it gets pretty cold in New Jersey, and an extra afghan can't hurt. That is, unless Matt really wants to keep it (I think he likes it more than I do!) I also finished my Stitch My Square trades. Unfortunately, it's not going on this month, so I don't have any squares to stitch. Here is my community post with photos of all my squares, sent and received. Well, Matt should be home from work soon, so I'm off to figure out dinner!

Well, I guess it's time for my monthly update! ;p Finals went pretty well. My semester grades were acceptable. School continues into the summer. I just finished a 15-day online physical anthropology course. I'm so glad it's over! A semester's worth of material from two books was pretty demanding for two weeks. I passed, though not happily. Too much work? … or I'm too lazy. I started an 8-week art appreciation course online as well. It seems more interesting and should be considerably more comfortable than my anthro class. Matt met a guy at ALS in April, a cop named Jason. They play World of Warcraft together and apparently get along pretty well. Jason has a long-term girlfriend, Becky, who just moved out here. The four of us went out for an Italian dinner last Saturday and had a blast! I love meeting new couples, since we're so antisocial and have no one to hang out with! The evening was a jumble of the boys talking together about video games and work while the girls talking about other random things and getting to know each other. We invited them over for dinner at our place on Thursday, which occurred last night. What a great time! I spent all day in the kitchen preparing almost-from-scratch spaghetti sauce and meatballs (the awesome recipe can be found at spaghetti sauce and meatballs .com !) Everyone enjoyed the food — the dinner was definitely worth all the effort! We played guys versus girls Scrabble, in which the girls BEAT the guys by a whopping two points! They stuck around for almost five hours chatting, eating cake, and trying to encourage the cats into being more sociable. We'll definitely have to do it again soon! Matt and I celebrated our first anniversary last Sunday, June 11! It has been such a wonderful year! We spent the day in Santa Barbara, visiting the zoo (I had to observe primates in action for an anthropology paper), having lunch, and going to a concert. Concerts "near" us are generally in L.A. or San Francisco, neither of which we like to frequent. We saw that there was a show in Santa Barbara, which is so convenient for us, and snagged a couple tickets. It was a radio station thinga-ma-jig with four big bands and two openers. The only ones we were interested in was Franz Ferdinand and (slightly) The Strokes, and hadn't heard of any of the others. No worries, it was cheap and bound to be a good time! We got there at 3 to discover that the concert goes for 7 hours. Well, we hadn't been anticipating that (though we should have realized it, considering there are six bands playing). We sat through the first two acts, Hard-Fi and She Wants Revenge, which were so-so. The show was at the beautiful Santa Barbara Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater overlooking the ocean. It's almost five thirty by now and we're getting a little overwhelmed by wild and crazy obnoxious girls. I think in general we're okay with groups of people, but crowds of pushy, high, noisy people get to us a bit. We watched Panic! At the Disco perform, which we had never heard of before but were pretty amused by. They drove all the crazy girls around us wild and we listened to a bunch of screaming and singing, but that's okay. What I liked about the band was their sort of skit performances. As the band played, they had a wildly costumed troop of dancer/actors perform along with the song. We didn't have amazing seats, so some of it was a little hard to see, but a lot of it seemed pretty neat. Panic! did perform a Smashing Pumpkins song, Tonight, Tonight, which I thought they did a great job with. And they had their dancers dressed similarly to those in the Tonight, Tonight video waving large fans. I was really waiting for Franz Ferdinand, but they wouldn't go on until five hours into the show, and we were both a little grumpy at the audience and the length of time we were sitting on stone benches, so we decided we'd be better off leaving anyway. We've yet to sit through an entire concert together! I think this one bummed us out a little bit because they aren't bands we really care too much (or know anything about) anyway. So we went to Borders and blew some money on Neil Gaiman and R.A. Salvatore novels! Overall, it was a nice anniversary celebration! Anyhow, I've written this blog four times today because of recurring power outages. What's going on out there?! And Matt just got home, so we're going to play some WoW (our level 10 mage & priest, woohoo!) then hopefully go out to see The Lake House tonight. Ta ta!

Today was the last day of instruction at the college. Yippee! Next week is finals week, but I have all four of my finals on Monday. Yah, it's a bummer of a stressful day, but at least I'll get it all over with at the beginning! I have high hopes for As in three of my classes, just not math. I don't expect to fail, I just don't expect an A. Thank goodness I'm all finished with calculus; this last semester was a bear! School's been good the past month, just busy. I finished up tutoring earlier this week. I'm praying my Algebra 2 tutee passes. He's worked so hard and it's the sixth time he's taken it. It's time to move onward try something else. Things haven't been too exciting over here, really. Matt graduated from ALS on the 4th of this month. Last week we went over to our new friends, Dave and Clarissa's for a lasagna dinner and some board games. Yesterday we bought a new digital camera (here are random photos of my playing around with it last night.) Matt is back on WoW and I made a character, too. He also picked out a new game to play, Rise of Legends, which seems really cool. We're getting ready for a trip to Colorado next month. We're spending a week in Colorado Springs with my mom and Denver just hanging out. We'll go to the Renaissance Festival, do a bit of hiking, check out Denver's Museum of Nature & Science's BodyWorlds 2 exhibit, see some of my pals in Fort Collins, my mom and I will have a little spa getaway — it'll be a blast! So I've been pondering what to do with my near future. I need one more math and one more physics class and a health class and then I'll have three associates degrees from AHC and nothing more to take in the way of transfer credits. Matt could be transferred any time or, at least, he'll be getting out in less than two years. I don't have enough time to transfer to a university (the closest of which is at least an hour's drive from home) and finish a physics program. I figured I'd take my math class at night at AHC and my health class online next semester and work full-time during the day. Then the following semester I'd take physics at night. So I need a job. I was looking into PG&E's nuclear power plant; they need an operator and I'm qualified. That sounded interesting, but it's quite a ways from home and it would be shift work that rotates all the time, which would make transportation difficult. I had heard that the squadron where I work for the guard once a month, needed to fill a full-time Mon-Fri technician slot doing the same thing I do on drill weekends. I guess the slot was opened, but the window closed and I can just keep checking back on the website to see if it ever returns. That would be the perfect job for me right now, but it may never reopen. I enjoy being a student, so I thought maybe I'd just continue studying at the junior college in a different field. UCSB has a BA program located at AHC for a few majors (not physics). I was thinking, if I were to study one of the arts, I'd be most interested in an English program. UCSB provides that where I'm currently going to school, so maybe next semester I'll pick up a few literature classes. All in all, I guess I don't know what I'm doing until Matt finishes his commitment and we can move somewhere where I can complete my degree of choice. We'll see what happens. I'm looking forward to the summer. On the 30th I start a 3-week, 3-credit physical anthropology course online. Then I'll start an 8-week art appreciation course, followed by a 6-week psychology course. They're all online classes, which I enjoy doing. Plus, I get tired of driving out to Santa Maria or relying on a carpool. I can't realistically attend on-site classes anyway, since I'm going TDY at the end of July for 6-weeks to Georgia for more military training. It'll be a bummer being away from Matt, but it'll be nice to earn some extra cash, have more time to do online classes, and explore the local area. I'll drive up one weekend to see Andrea and Michael at Langley, maybe check out a concert or two (there's a ton of interesting musicians playing nearby during my stay), and see the sights. That's all that's really been happening lately. I have today and the weekend to finish studying for Monday's finals, so that's what I'm off to do. That and play with the new camera …

Jen, Matt's sister, spent some of her Spring Break with us last week. We only had four days with her, but they were a blast!

Day 1: Took some time off school to pick her up. Met the kitties. Looked through photos of her Martha's Vineyard internship. Listened to recordings she and friends did there. Cooked dinner. Watched Alias. Chit chat. Day 2: I had to go to school. Matt and her hung out and played Halo 2, Monkeyball 2, and some other games. Mystery Science Theater 3000. Went out to Sugar Magnolia's for dinner. Watched more Alias. Played with the kitties. Relaxing and more chit chat. Day 3: Turned in keys to the old apartment. Early Bird miniature golf special at Boomer's. DDR (man, are we out of practice!) Ordered pizza. Watched more Alias. Day 4: The self-proclaimed cat-hater falls in love with our kitties. Gabby didn't want Jen to leave (or she wanted to go with her!). Drove down to Santa Barbara. Walked along State Street. Watched some guy play the drums. Saw the beach. Strolled along the pier. Ate enchiladas and burgers at Ruby's. Saw her plane off. Spent half an hour watching the cool clock at the Santa Barbara Airport.

Jen is such a cool chickie. I wish we could have spent more time with her or at least see her more often. We'll fly out to New York for Thanksgiving this year, so we'll have some time then. Matt and I had an awesome time visiting with her. I think we're a little boring to come and visit, but she argued that we aren't. I'm glad she enjoyed herself. My mom and Ron are out on the east coast spending time with my sister and cruising around the little states. I'm so jealous. From the sounds of everything, Andrea and Michael are doing pretty well. Work is a bit of a strain on her eyes (being that she just sits and looks at screens non-stop), but it sounds like she enjoys it enough. Michael is working at Olive Garden now and it sounds like a good job. I found out what dates I'll have long weekends this summer when I'm down in Georgia so we can coordinate a time to visit. Andrea needs plenty of advance notice to apply for leave and I need to get plane tickets to Virginia whenever she gets it approved. I'm not especially looking forward to six summer weeks in Georgia, but having a weekend to visit with Andrea and Michael will be worth it! My classes are canceled today and I've been a bit under the weather anyway, so I'm taking the day off. So far I haven't done much: a little bit of math studying, chatting with my brother for a tad, updating my photo gallery, watching part of The Squid and the Whale, and hanging with the cool cats. It's nice to have lazy days. School is school. Still haven't heard back about my second math exam, though I don't have high hopes for it. I'm trying to get a head-start on the third exam at the end of this month because I hear it's the toughest and all this doesn't exactly come easily to me. It's getting more interesting/fun, though. I'm just having my doubts about whether or not I can handle future math classes. Physics is fun, as usual. The school is hiring a new full-time physics professor and they're in the interviewing stage right now. The picked ten candidates to do a short teaching demonstration of Gauss's Law. I attended three of them yesterday to give my feedback. It was actually a lot of fun. I'm not really allowed to discuss the candidates … physics teachers are just funny people. It was kind of neat because I aspire to be a physics teacher one day (high school preferable, then possibly moving on to college eventually) and I got to hear critiques of how all these teachers presented the material. It was pretty informative and hopefully somewhat helpful when I'm up there one day. Matt is almost finished with his first week of Airman Leadership School. He was really dreading doing this class, but it seems like things aren't nearly as bad as he had expected. The material seems pretty easy and he can get all his homework finished during class breaks. I wouldn't say he's making friends, but there are a few cool guys in there that he chats with and maybe could turn into something more. It would be nice to have some couple-buddies to hang out with. Today he had to attend in full service dress, which is very uncomfortable. It seems men have it worse than women on account of their neck ties, but they look much more striking than women do in blues. So he's at work right now getting choked, then in a few hours he'll have to do his PT evaluation. We've been pretty lazy lately and haven't run all that much, so he doesn't expect to do so well. But come the end of the month when he has his final exam, the difference will be quite significant. I'm sure he'll do perfectly fine, as he has long legs and is built to run; he'll probably just be sore this weekend. That's all for today. I'm off to download some more MST3K and lounge around lazily. Woo!

So things are going great! School is awesome. My Mondays and Wednesdays are crazy long, but I'm getting used to it. I have a chemistry lecture at 9:00, three other classes throughout the days, then wrap it all up with a two and a half hour calculus lecture until 9:20. Chemistry is with the same prof as last semester and I don't care for him much, though I do feel I am learning more in this class than Chem 1. I picked up an intermediate piano class twice a week to do something fun, and I'm one of two students enrolled. The teacher has a beginner's class at the same time, so she just sets the two of us in practice rooms by ourselves to do our own things. It's fine with me because now it's more of an independent study sort of course. I play whatever I want, I just need to perform a piece from each of four different music eras. I played for a long time when I was younger, but it's been so long since I've touched the keys, I really wanted to brush up. It's all rushing back pretty quickly, thankfully. My teacher is also the director of the Lompoc School of Music, a nice little academy in town where people to go learn piano and whatnot. Well, I guess they have a shortage of instructors and my teacher asked me to come on down and teach beginners. I'll pop in sometime next week to check the place out and fill out some paperwork, but I told her this semester is so busy, I won't be available much. She thinks this semester would work out if I were a substitute teacher, then began the full-time thing with my own students in the summer. I'm psyched! I figured someday I'd like to teach piano, but I envisioned myself much, much older. This would be a great experience and I'm really looking forward to giving it a shot! My Physics 2 class is pretty much all the same students from Physics 1 last semester. We have a grand ol' time. Right now we're studying thermodynamics, which crosses over with some of the material presented in chemistry last semester. It's not so bad, but I don't find it all that interesting either. Physics 2 at this college is sort of a hodge-podge or random topics fit between Physics 1's Mechanics and Physics 3's Electricity and Magnetism. I love my teacher so much though! Same woman as last semester. I think she's great. I had a six hour break between my physics class and my math class, so I thought it would be a good idea to pick up something during that time. I decided to go for a general education Concepts in Physics class. Everyone in the class are liberal arts majors of some sort and are taking the course to get a science credit out of the way. It's neat because they're people I don't have any other classes with (unlike all my other classes where I see the same faces all the time). It's all non-math based, mostly just talking about, well, concepts and playing with toys. Right now we're still doing mechanics and motion and all that, which is super-dull since I just spent a whole semester on it. The cool part is I get to sort of play assistant, though. I get to work with the other students and help out with experiments and explain whatever they didn't get during lecture. My teacher (the same woman that teaches my other physics classes, so she already knows and likes me) is going to set up an honors course for the class that I can take to get a 2 credits of honors in. All I have to do is continue to play assistant and do a presentation on whatever I want (physics-related) at the end of the semester. Woo! Math is … interesting. It's at night at the end of a long day and I would have thought I'd be too exhausted to sit in a two hour math class, but I was wrong. My prof is so completely hyperactive and writes notes a million miles a minute, I spend the entire time just trying to keep up with my notes and comfort my pen-blistered fingers. It's fun, though. He's really a super math geek. Last class he put a problem on the board and told us to take a few minutes to work it on our own, then changed his mind, "no, never mind, I'll do it for you!" like kid who just couldn't wait another second to open his present. The material is a little heavy, though, and I think it will be the class demanding the most studying. Half the semester is multivariable calculus, then the other half is linear algebra. It has me a little intimidated, especially because a good portion of our class is students that didn't do so hot in his class last semester. We'll see! I also picked up a tutoring job at the college. Since I have tons of time that I'm hanging out at school waiting to go to class, I figured I'd get a job. My calc 2 teacher last semester recommended me to the tutoring department, so I went to see what it was all about. During my little interview I was signed up to tutor Algebra 1 and 2, Trig, Pre-calculus, and Calculus 1 and 2 as well as Intro to Physics and Physics 1. So any student that comes in looking for help in any one of those classes puts in for a tutor request, and if we have compatible free-time, he'll get matched up with me for some session throughout the week. So far I only have two appointments, an hour with a guy on Thursdays for Calc 2, and the same guy for an hour on Fridays for Physics 1. It'll be great because it will keep me fresh on all that stuff and I'll also gain some more experience sort of teaching. And get paid a little bit, hehe. Right now I only have two hours a week to my name, but I'm sure after the first exam, students will start looking for tutors. Anyhow, now that you're bored to death about school stuff … Things are going well at home. My crocheting has suffered some since I'm always busy. Matt and I (well, mostly Matt right now) are playing Ultima Online instead of World of Warcraft now. Matt's been really nostalgic for the game, since I guess it was the first MMO he played and he's always comparing everything we play to it. We both got a little tired of WoW and he seems much happier now with his gaming choice. Work is still sort of boring for him. They just don't have anything for him to do until he gets his clearance. The wait for an interim clearance is still a year, too. I guess his supervisor came to him the other day and said that since his freeze code (he had a 3-year hold put on him when he got to Vandenberg) expires in February, he'll be reassigned as early as March this year. We were told that he would have another code placed on him once he came to this new job. I'm not sure where the misunderstandings began; Matt just thinks his supervisor's kind of a putz and this whole thing was poorly planned. We aren't packing or anything yet, but Matt had to update his dream sheet (base of preferences … he has three Colorado bases, a Wyoming base, and four California bases on it now) the other day to help his chances of getting somewhere he wanted. I guess we could hear any day now that he has to up and go. If he has to go before the semester is over, unfortunately, I'd probably have to stay here. There's no way I'd get through months of these classes just to either get Fs (probably not since we're on military orders) or have them deleted from my transcripts (most probable). Hopefully that's not the case and if he does get reassigned soon, they'll give him more time and I can finish up this semester. It's still sort of a bummer, though. The guard unit I'm at is almost completely non-deployable since we have a real-world full-time mission and can't afford to have people go. We have a sister unit in Colorado that's in the same boat. But pretty much every other guard unit is highly deployable. Now I don't mean to sound like a coward or anything, I'd just rather serve my country at home than in the desert at this point in my life. If we stay in California or Colorado that's okay, but if he gets sent anywhere else, who knows what will happen. And to him. Right now he's not in a deployable situation either, and that's ideal. I guess we don't have a lot of control over it right now, so we'll just have to see how things shake out. As of right now though, we aren't looking at moving into a larger apartment in March for either the luxury or to accommodate Matthew if he moves out here. It would be silly to pack up and move to another place, just to move out again shortly thereafter. Carol's moving to Nebraska on my birthday. I'm a little bummed out, since she's the coolest (only?) girl I really hang out with around here and we've grown pretty close over the past year. Our schedules rarely match up so, so we don't get to see each other that much anymore. Now that she just has a few weeks left, we're trying to plan all sorts of "dates" before she goes. Going out to eat at places she won't have in Omaha, seeing movies, going to Six Flags. All my weekends will be Carol Weekends! It'll be such a bummer to see her go. We can e-mail and call and message on MySpace, but it will be a while before we see each other again. Friday we went out for Thai food and crocheted together. I'm working on a cute crochet scarf for her right now because I know it's cold out there. I know she's excited to get out of the Air Force and be reunited with her husband and all, so I'm glad for her for that. I hope she finds a girl buddy or a nice couple or someone to hang out with out there, too. Melissa and I have been hanging out a lot more lately, too. I was so terrible while I was working about hanging out with her. Last semester and so far this one has been great, though. We see each other at least once a week (unless some visit or holiday interrupts) and are getting to know each other a lot better! I'm going to pick her up here in a few, so I'll be wrapping this up. Today I think we're going to be all crafty and bead necklaces and earrings and work on her crocheting. It's fun and she's getting a kick out of it. She's meeting weekly with a woman from church now too, and when she told me I turned just a hint of jealous. This lady takes her out to do all the cool things that she and I do or that I want to do with her. I have some big-sisterly competition! I know, it's silly. It's for this woman's school project, she has to get to know a teenager and write a paper about her. Now I just feel like I have to keep Melissa as entertained as she does! It's all good, though, I'm glad she's having fun with another cool adult. Anyhow, I'm off to get all crafty with my sis! Ta ta!