Posts Tagged ‘physics’

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!

Well, happy 2006! Yah, it doesn't feel too different. More laid back, I guess, but that's because I'm still on my super-break away from school. (20 Dec – 23 Jan break, woohoo!) Last weekend my mom and Ron flew out to Santa Barbara. On Friday they came up to see the casa de Conklin. We went golfing on base (Ooooh, I am so terrible! It's only my second time out playing 9 holes, though. Matt promises he'll really teach me.) and then out to a nice dinner at Lompoc's finest, Saletti's. Mmm. They returned to Santa Barbara and we drove down Saturday morning to join them on a whale watching expedition. Well, it's been ten years since my mother or I have set foot on a boat, and Matt's never been ocean-bound (Ron practically grew up at sea). The four-hour tour took us out to the Santa Cruz islands and three of us spent most of it asleep or on the verge of losing our breakfasts. We were so miserably sea sick and no one even saw a single whale. It was pretty stormy and rainy out, so maybe the whales were afraid to come up (and get wet??). It seemed like a great idea and we were all really excited about it, but just couldn't stomach it. No worries about not seeing whales though; we got four free, non-expiring passes to go do it all over again (this time, with Dramamine)! (( Whale boat pictures are up here! )) Saturday we also celebrated Matt's and Ron's birthdays. After recovering from the boat trip, we perused the (closed) stores on State Street until our 9pm dinner reservation. Still raining. The restaurant was great, though. We had a classy band and were seated on the patio (it had stopped raining by then, thankfully) and a terrific dinner! Matt's first experience with lobster bisque or filet mignon. Neither of us care much for lobster. Anyhow, it was an experience for Matt, but not really his style. We decided to celebrate his birthday Matt-style on Monday. Sunday was mostly just sleeping in, kicking back, hanging out. My mom and I went out to see Fun With Dick and Jane because the boys just wanted to sit in the hotel room with their new books. :p That's all right, it's nice to hang with my mom! Despite unfortunate weather and motion sickness, it was great to see her and Ron! Since then Matt's gone back to work and I've been playing it lazy. Well, sort of … I took down all the Christmas decorations and reorganized most of the apartment. I couldn't just be a total bum all week! Mostly I've just been crocheting, though. Last weekend my mom got me a Crocheting for Dummies book, and I've been yarn-wild since! Yesterday I finished my first project: a scarf. I didn't go by a pattern, just flew by the seat of my pants with it. It's hideous and I think I'll mail it to my sister. All day today I've been working on an afghan. I think it will take some time. I ordered the spring semester's school books online rather than bother with the bookstore lines. The arrived today and got me all excited! I have a piano book, a physics book, and a linear algebra book and they just get me all giddy to jump right in! It's not that I don't like sitting around at home crocheting and watching movies, but I'm just psyched about school. I looked up my fall grades yesterday. Bragging time. All A's! Well, I'm just pleased because it's my first 4.0 college semester. So now I want to see if I can do it all over again! I really need to work hard to bring up my horrific CSU freshman GPA — at least now my cumulative has broken a 3.0! =\ That's about all in the wonderful world of Mel. Today ends my "weekend" (so what if it was nearly three weeks?) I have to work tomorrow and Sunday. Really, my job seems interesting, and I'm sure it will be someday, but guard drills are the most boring things ever! I can't wait to get my security clearance and go to school this summer so I can actually do work and not just sit around once a month trying to look busy. Argh! I hope you all enjoy your weekends! :p Ciao!

Well, thank goodness the semester is over! I had my calc and physics finals yesterday and I believe they went quite well. I guess I was expecting a lot worse. It’s just great to have that huge burden lifted! I still have a [very easy] chem final left on Monday morning, but I’m not really sweating it too much, then I’ll be completely finished! Woohoo!

What a way to start out my awesome break. Yesterday after my tests I started to feel sick. Good timing, I suppose, but it stinks spending the first day of winter break in bed. Last night was sleepless as I was dealing with sore throat misery. Hopefully it will all subside by tonight.

I finally registered for the Spring semester! I’m all excited about my classes in the Spring, but not too excited that I won’t enjoy my break! It will be fun except my math class is only available on Monday and Wednesday nights. That wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to show up early those days for my other classes. There’s no point making the 30-minute drive home in between classes either, it’s just a waste of gas and time. So two days out of the week will just be really long for me! I picked two fun classes that I don’t need at all, but should help kill time. The college only offers beginner’s and intermediate piano. I know I’m well beyond that, but it will be nice to play again. It should be a peaceful hour. I miss playing and all I have is a crummy electric keyboard that doesn’t even have enough keys for all my songs. :p Anyhow, this is what I’ll be looking at next semester:

Should be fun! Well, I’m going to return to bed to read/recuperate. Ta ta for now!

I don't know why, today is just sort of a down day. I skipped school today, half because I feel crummy, and half because I'm just not in the mood for it. I really wanted a day to be alone. It's not that I don't love Matt's company, or that of my buddies at school, it's just been a while since I had some time to myself. Granted, I've been doing housework and all day, it's still nice though. Tuesday I got my third calculus midterm back. I've taken the class before and I've done fine up until this point. I don't know if I've psyched myself out or what. My first two midterms averaged a 98%, but this one dropped my average a whole letter grade. I think I get the material; I did fine on all the homework and I studied. Maybe my brain was just saying "hey, you always fail at this point, so why should this time be any different?" It's silly and my grade is still fine, but it frustrated me so much. Classes are just getting me down a lot right now. I was looking forward to going back to school so badly when I wasn't able to, but now that I'm here, I just can't wait for the semester to end. So registration for the spring opened today. I had the choice to apply to transfer either in the spring or wait until the fall. I chose to get one more semester in at the junior college and just transfer in the fall. I'm looking at my classes for the spring though, and I don't have many options. My Mondays and Wednesdays I can all ready tell will be draining. I have a classes 9-10, 12-1, and 7-9:30 … What long days those will be. I have no choice though, I need them. Matt and I went out to dinner on Tuesday with "the gang". It's nice having a group to hang out with. Marc's introducing us to new people every week at our "Friday Night Thing", which is turning out to be way more fun than I had anticipated. Carol and Ian went with us to see Chicken Little afterward. It was cute and all, but I wasn't super-amused. Matt and I just got Mystery Science Theater 3000's 8th collection volume in the mail the other day. I haven't seen any of them yet and he's seen one, so I guess we're picking on that no one has seen for tomorrow night's MST3K showing. Hopefully it's a good one. I guess that's enough whining for one day. I'm off to bake a cake and do some physics. Mmm.

Matt and I are preparing for a Halloween party. My friend and his buddies wanted to have a Hecatomb tournament in celebration of the new expansion and I volunteered our home for the festivities. No, I don't have a costume, but I do have a bunch of cute plates, jack-o-lantern candles, and a talking skull. I think we went overboard a little bit. I'm excited though, as we don't get many visitors and this is an opportunity for Matt and I to meet a handful of new people and hopefully crawl our of our shells of anti-socialness (a word?). So I have another friend I go to school with, a part of our carpool, who is originally from Mexico and his family is very rooted in Mexican tradition. He's been sharing some of the Mexican superstitions he's grown up with. Some of them are just too amusing, I have to share. He had a headache yesterday and began telling me and our Friday driver about what his family does for headaches. They'd take an uncooked egg, make the sign of the cross with it, kiss it, and rub it all over his head. This was supposed to remove excess air and any negative "vibes" that have been directed towards him. Then they'd crack the egg open into a clear glass, hold it up, and inspect the cloudiness of the egg. The patterns in the goo are supposed to indicate what sort of negativity was directed towards him. Then they'd place the glass under his bed to continue to trap negativity while he sleeps. It's dangerous for him to peer over the glass, as everything would reenter his head. I thought it was a strange superstition. I wonder what would happen if you crack it and cook scrambled eggs … My physics teacher assigned a formal lab writeup yesterday. She's giving us a month to work on it. It can be typed in Word with hand-drawn diagrams and hand-written formula derivations, but I thought this would be a great time to practice using LaTeX, a typesetting program. I've never done more than just simple mathematical expressions on it, and there is so much more to learn. I spent about five hours working on all my data tables, formatting, and formulas yesterday. I know, such an exciting way to spend a Friday night! Frustrating, but interesting. No, I haven't read the manual or the tutorials or anything yet, I'm just kind of feeling my way through it, occasionally looking up a help post. If anyone's familiar with LaTeX, lemme know and I'll have a few questions.

Well, just posting so you know I'm still alive. Mostly. School's been going well. I was taking an honors calculus 1 course, all independent study projects, but I dropped it because I think it was just too much work. I have enough to worry about between the others. Which are going quite well, actually. It's just a lot of work, but it's fun. So, Matt and I gave up on City of Heroes. Not that it wasn't cool … I think it just got old faster than I expected. The best part was creating a new character … playing it was well … okay. I think the thing is, I need loot in my game. In CoH, you don't have an inventory or find treasures or anything like that. We decided to get sucked into World of Warcraft last weekend. That definitely hits the spot! I heard all the ranting and raving about it, I just didn't think it would be so much fun! We spent way too much time gaming over the weekend and while doing so, I came down with something awful. I feel like I get sick way too often. I think it was just my time to get sick, but the staying up late on the computer Friday and Saturday really didn't help. I missed school on Monday … everything was just so painful and I couldn't speak. Tuesday was hardly much better, but I had a physics quiz, so I dealt with it. I'm now 95% healthy. I surprisingly don't have much news. Really, my life is: wake up -> school -> home -> dinner -> hang out with Matt / play computer games -> sleep. So exciting! Last night we were playing WoW and our pastor and two other people from church stopped by unannounced. That wasn't a problem at all, but if I had known our pastor was coming by, I would have straightened up! It's been a sick/lazy week … Anyhow, we're relatively new to the church and they stopped in just to say hello and chat. Get to know us a bit more. They asked a lot of questions … you know "if you died today, do you know for sure you'd go to Heaven?" "if you died right now and were standing before God and He asked 'why should I let you in?' how would you respond?" You know … kind of morbid stuff. It was nice to talk to them, though, just about any general questions we had about the church or our walk or anything. I kind of want them to come over more regularly, because I have plenty of questions! It was a nice visit, just kind of caught us off-guard. And one of the guys left his coat here … I guess I'll bring it to church with me. :p The last three weeks have had quite a few ups and downs. I know I worry unnecessarily about things. All the time. I guess every now and then I just panic and go "what on earth am I doing? Why am I studying EE? What will I do with it? I want kids, right? I don't want the daycare center to raise them, I want to, right? So, what's the point? For after they're grown? Why all the hard work?" I dunno … I guess I've just been worrying a lot about the future and what it is I really want. I do want to learn all this cool physics and stuff like that, and half of me wants to do awesome things with it … and the other half of me just wants to have a family and take care of them and be a mom who's around for them and possibly homeschool for parts of their education. But then would this education go to waste? Or maybe I'll use it 20 years down the road. Then I think about kids. I want kids, I want to be a mother. I think the idea of it is starting to scare me a little bit. Silliness, I know. Some of it is selfish: "ohh, having kids will prevent us from being able to do this and that and whatever else selfish stuff". I know the argument for that, of course, but I still think about it. I think for some reason I'm also fearing having kids. Part of that is a guy Matt and I know from work tells the most terrifying horror stories about his wife's complications in birth and all that and it just got me really freaked out. For like … the past year. I guess I'm just perturbed because since I was young I had "a plan". I know, that's silly too, because you never know how things will turn out. But still, I had one (or a few rather, throughout my childhood): a timeline of how I wanted my life to go. Now my plan forks all over the place … I don't know exactly which path I want. It's okay, it's all part of the journey. I think because school is tough and it's hard work, I just want to make sure it won't all be for nothing (well, other than my satisfaction of learning something interesting). I'm sure it won't be. So … Hurricane Rita. =\ My carpool and study buddy, Erick has been freaking out about it all day. I guess I just haven't been keeping up with it all that much for it to scare me so. It's a big deal and I'm glad people are evacuating and all that. Especially after Katrina, it is really scary. His father and older sister and (as of yesterday) a new baby brother all live in Houston and are unable to leave because the gas stations are all empty and the traffic is horrible. And they can't find plywood anywhere, everyone has run out, so they're panicking a whole lot. So Erick has been a mess all day and he really wants to do something to help. I don't know what to do either. We can't drive down there and hand out gasoline and plywood. We're poor. We're just praying. My father lives in Dallas and my sister lives in San Angelo, so I'm not really so worried about them. I guess Dallas will get hit with some 70mph winds and rain, but that's not as scary. Like I said, Matt and I are playing WoW now. We're playing with friends of mine from Fort Collins: Tim, Joe, and Dave. It's really great to have friends to play with, even if they are far away, and I'm very glad Matt likes them so much. The five of us are having a blast. I think now that I'm talking to these guys I used to hang out with at CSU more, I'm getting homesick. I haven't really been homesick since I got to California. I think now because of the guys and also the season … it's fall, my favorite time of the year, but here in Lompoc every season seems the same. Leaves don't turn colors, the air doesn't really get brisk. I keep daydreaming about Fort Collins in the fall and I'm getting too nostalgic. I hope Matt gets orders soon. I really, really hope they're to Colorado. Anyhow … off I go to do homework, sprinkled with World of Warcraft. Or maybe the other way around.

Monday was my first day back at school. Yippy! I’m just a naturally stressed/worrisome/anxious person anyway, but Monday had me even more so. It was my first day on the public bus, and I was upset to find that they are not so true to their schedules. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if I didn’t have to make a connecting bus to get home, which only runs every couple of hours. I didn’t miss the bus, I just stressed about it! ;p I have each of my three classes Monday through Thursday, and only two on Friday. My Calc 2 and physics classes were pretty much the same exact people, and they all knew each other from Calc 1 the previous semester and intro to physics. So I felt like a real odd-ball, as everyone in the class was having little esoteric conversations and catching up with one another. My chemistry teacher sort of rubbed me the wrong way. He’s funny, I suppose, from all the laughter he receives. I was more irritated that he doesn’t seem to have everything together. On the first day of class, I like to have a syllabus, a lab manual, a schedule of exams, and all the homework assignments passed out to me. Yes, I have high expectations, but my other two teachers could meet them! It’s not just that, he just sort of seemed out of it. Goofy or quirky maybe, but I just felt he was obnoxious. I guess I’ll get used to it. So long as he’s decent at teaching chemistry. I really like my Calc 2 professor. She’s a sweet woman from Iran, but her accent isn’t so thick that I can’t understand her. I hear she’s really tough, but I think that’s a good thing. And my physics teacher is a neat lady who spent twenty years as a social worker before attempting a master’s degree in astronomy because she’s a science fiction buff. Well, that wasn’t doable, as the school wanted a bachelor’s in something like physics, so she went for that and realized that she was good at it and enjoys it. She seems like a good teacher, too!

Anyhow, the second day was a little better. A boring chemistry safety lab (but got out early!) and Day 1 of really diving into calculus and physics material. Fun, fun. I met a few people. There’s a guy that is in every one of my classes that sits behind me in calc that started talking to me. I came to find out he lives in Lompoc, drives to class every day in Santa Maria, and is desperate for a car-pool buddy. This is great news for me because the bus is such a huge hassle! And helping him out with gas money should be cheaper than the monthly bus pass. Plus, he’s in all my classes and seems to have it together, so I have an automatic study partner! Hopefully that will work out well.

There’s not much news other than school. I’m very glad to be taking classes and enjoying myself so far. Hopefully it won’t get too tough too quickly. My classmates and my teachers (well, two of them) seem very helpful though, so I’m sure if I have any trouble, getting help won’t be a problem.

Monday and Tuesday I came home tired and spending most of my time talking to my parents about school or doing homework. I’m afraid Matt is feeling a little neglected. I know I’m sacrificing a lot of gaming and “us” time by going to school, but it’s for the best. We’ll adjust. Tonight Matt has a launch, so he’s been relaxing at home all day, will have to work through the night, then have tomorrow and (if the missile launches successfully) Friday off. So we’re going out to dinner this evening and renting a movie and just hanging out. It will be nice. I have a late start class tomorrow and a canceled morning class on Friday, so I get a little bit of a break, too.

So this is my last week to slack-off. School starts up on Monday and I just realized I'm kind of nervous. I've been going to school a bit for a while, but now I will have a full-load and won't be working … I'll just be going to school. This is a good thing. It's just, it's been a while … I went to CSU in 2001 and failed at it miserably. I guess I'm just worried. I started out in an electrical engineering program, and that's what I figured I'd continue with. I guess I'm just not so sure about that. Maybe I'm just feeling down on myself, but I just don't feel that smart, that I can make it as an EE. I'm still just attending a junior college to earn enough credits to transfer to a university (wherever we end up), so this semester I'm just taking chemistry, physics, and calculus, which isn't that bad. I'm just worried about later on. Things are different this time around — my life isn't like it was four years ago — but I'm still afraid of not making it. Not that I won't try or anything like that … well, I really am just worrying. I'm excited about school and all … it's just been a while since I've done serious studying. And they'll be long days. It will be fine. So playing City of Heroes on my laptop has been a nightmare. It technically runs it, mostly. I had to turn the resolution and all the graphics settings way down to minimum and disable a bunch of stuff, so it looked horrible, but it worked. My mouse pointer was the biggest frustration. It would just vanish … well, it was gone most of the time. I'd just have to flail about, hoping something would highlight and I'd have an idea of where my invisible pointer is. This is not a good thing to do in the heat of battle. Other times, I think all the activity on-screen was just too much and the program would just freeze and crash. So Matt and I decided it was time for me to get a desktop. I ordered a bunch of parts online last week and they arrived on Friday. We had to make a few runs to Best Buy to pick up a few things. It's been a while since I built a system, but it's not too hard, and I got everything pieced together. Of course, it didn't power up at all. I called up my dad for help and he assisted in troubleshooting. We narrowed it down to either the power supply, motherboard, or processor, which was discouraging news for me (sending back the proc or mobo and then waiting for a replacement would just take too long! I want it now!) :p Matt and I were disappointed and a bit grumpy, so we just back-burnered the whole computer thing for the night. Saturday morning I went back to Best Buy to pick up a power supply and try that out. Tada! Thank goodness! So everything is just peachy keen. We had a spare Radeon 9600 sitting around that Matt's system can't use, so I got to install that and now CoH and everything else is gorgeous! I've overstressed my laptop far too long, so it's nice to have a system that doesn't struggle so much. Now game play is more fun and less frustration, the way it should be! Speaking of CoH, I put up a gallery of characters. Matt and I have gone crazy with character creation (maybe 20 of them?), it's kind of silly but really fun! We keep deleting characters to make room for new ones, so I can't get screen shots of the ones we deleted to put up there, but they were cool too. My main character is Impathy (the 3rd one to be named, but this one's a keeper), an electric/electric blaster. It's way fun! Other than that, things have been pretty dull. I'm not complaining at all, I like things to be mellow. It's just there's not much of interest to report. :p I've been spending a lot of time in the kitchen baking treats and whatnot, which I believe Matt appreciates.

So … it's been a while. And here we go! Well, my mother has now nearly fully recovered from her appendectomy. She was in the hospital for seven days, got out and had three horrible days, and then was on a smooth road to recovery. Just a few days after leaving the hospital, my sister, Andrea, was admitted for appendicitis! The craziness! Thankfully hers hadn't ruptured, but was just causing her problems. So she had hers removed as well. I think I should make myself an appointment! :p The lucky duck, she gets two weeks of convalescent leave to recuperate. She's doing just fine now … So last weekend Matt got Friday and Monday off so we took a little trip up into the Sierra Nevadas. Friday morning we drove five hours to Sacramento to hang out with some family friends Chris & ShaRon and Kris & Jaylene. We hung out at Chris's office when we arrived in town. He works in Old Town Folsom where all the shops look like old West saloons. Chris & ShaRon, Rusty & Tiny (their boys), Matt & I had dinner at a nice little Italian place on the balcony overlooking the main street. It just so happened that the rodeo had come to town that day and there was going to be a parade through Old Town. The men wearing chaps and giant hats and the women in big, frilly dresses staged us a little gun fight in the middle of the street and we watched a bunch of horses and old men in go-karts parade around. The coolest part was the long horns they had run down the street. Moo! Then we went over to Kris & Jaylene's to hang out and chat it up through the night. It was a nice visit with people we really haven't seen that much (except for at the wedding). We had to get up early the next morning to head up to Quincy (at least three more hours north) though, so it wasn't a very long visit. A few weeks ago we got tickets to the High Sierra Music Festival. It's a four-day festival (Thurs-Sun) but we could only make it up for the last two days. We arrived in town around 11 am and set up camp in the blazing heat. I've been to a few festivals in the past with my father (mainly Rockygrass in Lyons, CO) and was expecting something similar. This was huge! Matt said it was like a music festival theme park! All the tents were practically on top of each other in a huge meadow, which wasn't quite as comfortable as I was expecting, but it was fine. There were four main stages and bands playing in other venues throughout the area. Tons of vendors and classes and workshops and crazy people! It was, well, kind of like a zoo. The music was good … a little bit of a lot of things: bluegrass, funk, jazz, blues, rock, reggae, tribal … mostly bands just jamming. The first one we saw was Tea Leaf Green, which I do enjoy very much. We also took in some Blue Turtle Seduction (one of Matt's faves, a “High-Altitude Bohemian Tribal Funk Grass” band), Railroad Earth, and The New Mastersounds (a cool funk band from the UK). We saw a little bit of Meltone on Saturday, a jam band of Japanese kids, but we saw more of them playing on top of a camper on Sunday. One of the main attractions for me on Saturday was Gov't Mule and I was waiting most of the day to see them. Well, it was very hot in Quincy that weekend and there was very, very little shade available. I had my CamelBak and lots of sunscreen and was conscious of staying well hydrated all day, but I think I got sun poisoning anyway. My Saturday night was miserable with nausea and the worst headache I've ever experienced. So I just crashed early and missed Gov't Mule. Grrr! Anywho, here are a few photos from our festival experience! It's very difficult to sleep-in in a 2-man tent in the scorching heat with thousands of people all around, so Matt and I were up pretty early on Sunday. The music didn't start on stage until about 10 and there wasn't much that we were interested in until 3 anyway, so we took off and went exploring. To my surprise, Lassen Volcanic National Park was closer than I had thought. Man, we were a lot further north than I had thought, actually! So we got a nose-full of stinky sulfur and a bunch of pretty photos! It was nice to get away from the festival grounds and up where there's a little snow. Sunday afternoon was a blast! We saw Meltone, The New Mastersounds again, and … Leo Kottke & Mike Gordon! Woohoo! That was the highlight of the festival for me and it was awesome! We decided to pack up and drive home right after their show … we really just wanted to get home rather than camp another night. So Matt drove the eight hours home until sunrise on the 4th. So it’s a week later and really there hasn’t been too much excitement since. All week long I have been doing school work, watching Bewitched, and playing Ragnarok. School is a drag. They’re all online classes, so it’s just a whole lot of reading, essays, and quizzes every single day. It’s working out, though. I just registered for the fall semester. Calculus, physics, and chemistry. It should be fun. Last weekend was my first Air National Guard weekend. I signed up for six years, so wherever we happen to move, I’m going to have a job for two days out of the month. I didn’t really learn too much last weekend, just met a bunch of people and did a little bit of training on things I all ready knew, but hopefully come October I’ll get to work more on the equipment and all that jazz. Well, that’s all for now. I’ve been working all day on my security clearance paperwork and a website for my mother’s business. So I'm gonna go watch some Carnivale and conk out now. Ciao!