Why is it that when I'm looking for staples at work I always overlook them, despite the fact that they have the word, "Staples" blazoned across the box? It's because Staples is the store they were purchased.
I've always wondered if this is intentional. It doesn't matter, I can never find it when I go looking for them anyway.
Usually Christmas is spent divided between Alex's family in Illinois and my family in Ohio. I'll be visiting with my family over New Year's.
It was a nice Christmas so far, I got one of these and this. I have the MP3 player loaded with music already, I have yet to install the expansion pack for my game though...maybe I'll do that tonight. I am behind 2 expansion packs, I got a gift certificate for Target as well, I'm thinking that I'll spend that on my second expansion pack. Then I have to make a resolution to play more Sims this year...things have been so incredibly busy and I hardly have time to play anymore.
We discovered the joys of waiting until Christmas Eve to go shopping for gifts. Seriously, there's nobody out and the people who are out are nice. Plus things are still on sale. I like that. The second round of Christmas shopping comes after Christmas...the second best time to go Christmas shopping...after Christmas sales rock! Although I have a list of things I want to buy for myself. I'm terrible this time of year, I tend to buy more for myself than anybody else. This is also the time of the year that Alex and I buy our electronics. Why the heck not?
Alex's brother and sister-in-law bought a Wii, we got to try it out at their house this week. It was fun to play :) I kick butt at bowling.
It's good to be home though. I always enjoy coming home after a long trip. This next week won't be so bad, I have to work on Saturday but then I get Sunday through Tuesday...nice!
This is a conversation that happened outside of the graduate library at school. A man was walking up the sidewalk, I think he was eating a salad or something. He stopped momentarily then he saw me coming the other direction and said, "A black squirrel". I looked at where he was pointing and laughed. I told him that this was actually the second one I've seen today, the other one was outside the other entrance of the graduate library...I doubt it was the same squirrel.
Anyway, the man said, "that is actually the first one of those I've ever seen." I laughed again. The he paused and said, "only in Detroit!" and continued to walk down the sidewalk eating his salad.
Now every time I see a black squirrel I'm going to think of Detroit.
Today is the last day of class for the semester, luckily I did my presentation and turned in my paper last week so I'm already pretty much done! It was a good class, just a lot of work. I got a lot of great resources out of though, I spent most of the weekend trying to update my WSU site with my class projects (not live yet).
Things are a little better financially, we got some financial aid from UMich yesterday, we're using that to pay my class that I'm behind on. Once I get that paid today I can register for my Winter classes (yippee!) I think next semester should be fun and maybe a little challenging. I'm taking two classes (one more than I usually take). One is Multi-User Computing Environments, I get to learn the joys of Linux and Unix. This actually really does excite me. We have a Linux computer we never use, maybe I can finally put it to use! We're probably going to get a lot of financial aid coming our way actually, I'm thinking about using some of that to buy myself a new laptop. I have a new HP all picked out, I was thinking about turning "The Beast" into another Linux machine...although I have to make sure my new one is up and running before I completely wipe out the old's OS...maybe I'll dual boot it too, who knows. Alex wants a desktop for this but our old desktop is even too slow to run Linux and we can't hook that one up to our internet right now (either wired or wireless).
The second class I'm taking is probably going to be Digital Issues. This is a seminar class, I expect it to be a lot of work. I'm supposed to have a lot more credits done to take this class but the prof said he'd make an exception for me. I love this topic though and I'm completely excited about researching it all semester! We'll see if I change my mind after class starts, but I even have a good idea of what topic I want to research already :) I get really motivated when I can research and discuss topics I'm really interested in.
In other news, our GPS unit broke. We turned it on one day and it just beeps at you with a screen that says "software missing". The message boards say this is an update gone wrong but we didn't do any updates. It's just been sitting in our "geocache bag" since the last time I used it. It's still under warranty so hopefully we can send it in and get it fixed with little problems. We want to get the thing fixed as soon as possible, some days were really cold to go geocaching but this past weekend would've been great to go out. We were also talking about "caching along a route" when we go to Illinois for Christmas...we might not get a chance for this now. We were actually going to use it to get ourselves to a party on Friday, the routing feature on our GPS is awesome...I hate printing maps now.
The library is giving us a million days off of work, other than the fact that half of those days will be spent in Illinois and not at home shut off from the rest of the world (which is what I'd rather be doing), I will probably enjoy what little opportunity I have before I have to start thinking about being responsible again.
A co-worker sent me this article from the Onion this weekend. It was too great not to share.
