Sunday, October 30, 2011

home improvement

I'm so proud of myself! This weekend I did my first home improvement project. I guess you'd call it that, anyway. Even though I live in an apartment. And it wasn't really that big of a deal.

Basically our front door sucks. It wouldn't close, it was a bitch to lock... you had to kinda pull up on the handle like you were trying to lift something about as heavy as a refrigerator and use your other hand to lock the door. After I was done with it, it's gotta be the best door on my block. This thing is awesome and I smile every time I use it now, because I fixed it on my own. It closes and stays closed, and locks perfectly.

Plus, I went and bought real screws to rehang my surround sound speakers. Since I put them up, thumb tacks have been holding them in place. The one by the door kept falling down because you had to slam the door to make it close, and we eventually just gave up and laid it on the back of the couch. But that's all in the past now. We have real wood screws in the walls and there's about a zero percent chance they'll fall down now. It's exciting.

I don't know why I get so excited over home improvement stuff. I can't wait to have my own house that I have free reign over. There's only so much you can change about the apartment. I wanted to bust out the wall separating the living room and staircase, and my roommate was just like "..why?" Which is a fair question, I guess. I think it's just something I want to do for fun. To see if I can. I don't know. If I had to pick a legit reason it'd be because it'd make the living room look bigger, it'd look cooler, and just be something different... all the Baylor Plaza apartments are exactly the same layout, for the most part. Largely identical. I think it'd be fun to do something different. It's really just some wood paneling, I think.... how hard could it be?

But that's the question from hell that always bites you in the ass. Regardless, I really like looking at the finished product and being like, yeah, I did that. It's just not the same when you have someone come in and do it for you.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

So happy Halloween week. I love all the old horror movies on TCM that happen around Halloween. It's always fun to watch mystery/murder/horror from the 1950s. So tame. Then you can switch over to amc and they're playing all the more recent scary movies, with the occasional stephen king marathon.

Needless to say, it hasn't been a very productive week. Class is boring me to the point of picking up minesweeper again. I'm way out of practice, and its hard without a mouse, so I have some room for improvement. Right now, the best I can do with the oversized squares and the macbook's touch pad is almost 400. It's pretty pitiful, so I'm working on that during class. As far as homework goes, it doesn't really happen. Most of my classes don't have homework, and the ones that do don't count it for much of a grade, so I spend my time doing all kinds of other things. Like watching movies with friends.

Plus, I had an intramural flag football game last night with KPsi. We lost and I got my jaw bruised really badly, but it's so much fun that it makes up for it. We aren't that bad, honestly. Our record right now is 2-2, and one of those losses was to army ROTC. The one last night was to a church group, and it was a pretty evenly matched game.

Past that, zombies is still going on. The zombies finally outnumber the humans left. I'm still living, though I probably shouldn't be. I keep insisting I narrowly escaped one at the movie theatre, but by 'narrowly escaped' I really mean he got me and I'm denying it. And now I'm one of the last ones left. Then today, one of the zombies caught me off guard at the business building... but he's one of the nice ones. For those that know him, it was Will McKee. Why he was in the business building is beyond me, since it obviously wasn't to hunt.... he came up to me while I was sitting in the hall waiting for the class before mine to let out and had a nice little conversation with me. Then he was like "wait, you aren't dead yet, are you? And its not right before class..." Then he decided he'd leave me alive. Something about wanting my death to be more interesting. Thank god. Or.. thank the undead. Or something.

So that unnamed girl I'm in love with is getting closer to me. She has no idea how much she's torturing me. I'm not giving any sob stories on here, but its turning into a major part of my life, and its my fault, I think. I don't know about her half of things... what she thinks, what she's planning, if anything... I guess time will tell.

Time for lunch. Be back soon :)

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

The best day of the year.

This is beautiful.
You don't understand unless you live in Texas just how wonderful the first day of real fall is. Sure, the 'seasons' have names, but everything works on its own schedule in Texas, and the first day after the hot, still summer where its windy as hell and requires a jacket is maybe the best day of the year. I'm sure it'll get warmer again before it gets cold (Texas cold, not real cold) for good for awhile, but I'll take anything I can get right now. It's absolutely perfect outside. Nice and cool, but sunny, so its just a bit chilly in the shade or during a strong gust, but gloriously warm when the wind dies down for a second in the sun. Warmth is something that hasn't had a good connotation since about February. Okay, March, if you're nice.

This is my perfect weather, anyway. I'm sure some people think its too cold, but they're dumb. This will be the perfect few weeks in Texas, until the day I have to use the heater in the apartment for the first time. Until then, its windows open and let the breeze in.

I can't even think straight because I'm in such a good mood because of this weather. The only thing that could make right now any better was if I had some friends to share it with and if my damn back would stop hurting.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

blah.

You know those nights where you just sit and hit refresh on facebook? I'm there right now. I have two tests to study for, and I'm looking for any excuse not to. But at the same time, I'm feeling too lazy to really do anything at all. I'm just... blah. Yep. That's the best word for how I feel right now. Blah. I'd sleep, but I'm not tired. I could clean my room. I could do laundry. I could take Berk on a walk. I could clean the freaking kitchen. I'm too lazy to do any of that right now though. So I blog.

Despite my reason for coming here, I have things to say still, I suppose. The bears lost this weekend to the farmers down in college station. It was a downright pitiful performance by our defense, and our offense was only mildly better. We should have won, but what are you gonna do? The trip overall was equally depressing. Kick off was 11 in the morning, and we decided to have practice before we left for hell, so we woke up for a 4:30 practice, with KPsi getting there around 3:45. In the morning. So that was fun. I didn't get a lot of sleep, especially since I was in full recovery mode all day Friday on the couch. It was 'fall break' this weekend. I put it in quotations because we only get one day off for the 'break'. It's more like fall pause. Or if you're a Baylor Bear and a fan of the excess of puns, you can always go for 'fall paws'. So anyway, we naturally had a party on Thursday night, and I spent all of Friday, after I woke up around 11, on the couch drifting in and out of sleep and watching tv. So by the time I needed to go to bed, which was ridiculously early anyway, I just couldn't. I got to sleep around 1, which was better than some, I guess, and ended up meaning about 2 hours of sleep.

I know I'm saying too much about it now, but remember that girl I really like? I got to watch her and her guy all day, from 4 in the morning until 6:30 ish that night. That just made it all so much more painful. It's one thing from a distance, and for short periods of time, but this a new level of torture.

Enough about that though, before I forget this is public and available to anyone on the planet. My back also didn't help the trip, since there was practice, which hurt, then a 2 hour bus ride, which hurt more, then standing for the game for about 6 hours, which was awful, then another 2 hour bus ride to top it off. I need 4 asprin just thinking about it.

Then there are all the little things. After the game, we got dinner, but it was 45 minutes late. Our bus watched a movie, but the band staff person brought mediocre movies. Just little stuff like that. Sorry for bitching the whole post so far, really. But I'm gonna do some more, because this is my place to rant.

KPsi is playing zombies again. If you forgot or are new to the blog or whatever, zombies is pretty simple. The moderator assigns an alpha zombie that no one knows, except for the two of them. The alpha zombie attacks players with a zombie weapon (nerf gun, water gun, plastic spoon labeled 'zombie weapon'.... whatever) that's labeled appropriately, and then that player becomes a zombie. Everyone is notified of the zombies after the alpha. Game is on at all times that aren't band or kpsi events. So, between classes, lunch, in your own bed... all fair times and places for zombie kills. It keeps you on edge, but it also means I have nearly no friends for awhile, since any of them could be the alpha zombie. I can't trust any of my closest friends right now or see them outside of band.

And to top it off, the game has been going on since Wednesday night, and alpha has yet to strike. That's 3 full days (Saturday doesn't count at all) to attack someone. I can understand planning out a good kill, but come on. Let's get going, so this pain can end faster. (I know it's not apparent from my bitching, but I LOVE this game. It's so much fun, once it really gets going)

I can't really think of anything else that I can say on here. I guess I should go study or something.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Perspective.

This is the universe. Or, at least, the "visible universe," so basically what we can see. Please note, if you can see it, the scale, where that little bit is the distance light can travel in a billion years.


In the visible universe there are 350 billion large galaxies and another 7 trillion dwarf ones.
Here's ours:

Ah, the Milky Way Galaxy. Home sweet home. This galaxy only has roughly 200 billion stars that make it up, as opposed to the trillions in neighboring galaxies. The Sun, our faithful star, is pointed out to the picture. You'll note the closeness of Orion, and relate that to what you see in the sky at night. What you see, according to this picture, is orion as it looked about 10,000 years ago. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's still pretty darn far away. Now, our Sun seems pretty miniscule. Here's a picture of that.


So, there's our tiny little sun, with a few rocks going around it. Don't think the Sun is so tiny? I found a nice little video that'll fix that.

 That saves me the time of comparing our little rock to the Sun, too. So there's our planet. Little nothing, pipsqueak Earth.


Here's my not-completely-accurate history of Earth (so don't bother correcting the order or accuracy of these events). Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago, give or take 500 million years. That's a long time. It took a couple billion to settle down, but then volcanoes and such caused Snowball Earth around 2.3 billion years ago, and that lasted for a few million years, and would have killed everything on the surface, except that there wasn't enough oxygen in the atmosphere to make an ozone layer, so the surface was right near radioactive. Then we warmed up, oxygen levels rose, and suddenly those single cell organisms that survived started growing. Then volcanoes and ice ages killed most of them. Anyway, this continued on for another billion years or so. Then finally around 500 million years ago, about 4 billion years after the Earth formed, the first green plants hit up the surface and shit started crawling out of the ocean. 300 million years ago now, we have insects and primitive sharks and stuff. We're around the Pangea time. Then Earth freaks out again, killing 95% of all life. That last 5% eventually turns into the dinosaurs. They last from about 250 million years ago to 65 million years ago. Now, considering how quickly everyone's been dying so far, they did pretty well. Till the meteor hit the gulf of Mexico. So they died. Mammals take over, and lucky them, they can survive ice ages, because there were a few of those going on. About 12 million years ago we start seeing apes. Early human forms start showing up, but almost go extinct because of a super volcano 75000 years ago (ever heard of Yellow Stone?) Humans as we know them start showing up at around 10,000 years ago, in the tail end of an ice age that peaked around 30,000 years ago. All of humanity, then, prospered in the last few years, as the world is still heating up after the last ice age.


So we fit in this little sliver of time - a fraction of one percent, of Earth's history, which is young compared to the rest of creation. We live on this rock that can fit in the sun 1,300,000 times, and that's a small sun, one of 200 billion in our small galaxy, which is one of several trillion galaxies.


And you're pissed that the lady put too much sugar in your frap. Shut up, tri delt; I'm trying to study.