101 in 1001… Ready… Set… GO!

It has been quite a while since some of my friends started the 101 in 1001 project, and I had always intended on starting it too at some point. But, like most other things I want to eventually do, I ended up forgetting about it and never did anything. So last month I decided that I would finally get a list together and start the project on July 1st. Well, today is July 1st, I have my list, and I’m ready to get started.

If you’d like to see my list, you can view it here. There are 101 things there that I want to complete in the next 1001 days. Some of them seem simple (such as purchasing something or reopening a blog) and others are harder (such as overcoming my fear of being underground). But I’m going to try my hardest to complete everything on the list in the time alotted. The end date for my project is March 28, 2012, so I have lots of time to get these things done.

Some of the things I already have plans for how they will be accomplished, others I have no clue. I think its going to be quite an adventure over the next 33 months. And of course, I’ll be using my blog to periodically update everyone on my progress and hopefully to share LOTS of pictures.

Ring Ring… I Hate You!

The past two mornings have been absolute nightmares for me. I don’t get much sleep at night in the first place, so normally I end up sleeping in during the morning and catch up on the sleep that I didn’t get at night. But for some reason, the world has decided to conspire against me. On Wednesday morning, my aunt decided to call at 6:30, 6:45, and sometime around 7:30. By the third time the phone rang, I knew there was no way I was going to get back to sleep and ended up getting out of bed. I tried futilely all day long to go back to sleep, but it just wasn’t working. Mike came over during the afternoon and we hung out some before he had to get back home so I could get ready for the show.

During Radio X, I felt like I was going to fall asleep. But as the show wound down, I actually started to feel like I had more energy. This wasn’t good at all because it meant that for a good two and a half hours after the show ended, I couldn’t fall asleep. I think I finally was out around 4am. 6:30 sharp, the phone rings. It was a firend of my mother’s who called “just to chat”. Who the hell calls “just to chat” at 6:30 AM? I was able to get back to sleep, but at 7:30 The Satan Ringer went off again, and I hauled myself downstairs. My mom got a good laugh out of it beause apparently I was very disgruntled; I have no clue – I woke up 2 hours later on the couch.

This afternoon my grandmother was able to come home from the hospital, and I had to go over to her house for a while while a man came to clean the carpets. But she’s here with us now and will be staying at our house for a few days just to make sure shes okay. Then she can go back home and (hopefully) everthing will get back to normal. My cousin and aunt are coming on Sunday to visit, and I’m pretty excited about that. I haven’t seem my cousin in quite a while so it’ll be nice to get to chat (without using FaceBook).

I don’t have much else to talk about except that I’m sick (shingles-like outbreak on my face by my right eye [which is where I've had shingles before]) and that tomorrow I have to head out to pick up a couple books to study for the big bad GRE.

Boredom

I’m being a horrible poster, but if I thought that I didn’t have anything to write about during school, I have even less now. I love this place, but there is absolutely nothing to do here. The job hunt is not going well, and if I don’t find at least something soon searching at all will be futile (since I’m hopefully starting back to school no later than January and that means I’ll be moving again).

The past few weeks have been filled with movies, WoW and worrying about my grandmother. She went back to the hospital last week for congestive heart failure again, and they don’t know what’s causing it. First they thought it was her heart, then her lungs,  then her kidneys, now I think they’re back to the heart. I know they’re trying their best to figure it out, but it’s just irritating because she keeps filling up with fluid. She says it’s like she’s drowning and cant breathe… Something which I, since I have Asthma, can sympathize with.

On Saturday Nicole came up to hang out with Mike and I. We decide that a pizza and wings night in with a bunch of rented movies would be great, so thus began the EPIC QUEST OF FOOD GETTING. We ended up ordering Garlic Pizza from a restaurant called Mangelardo’s which is about 45 minutes away. We also called a bar in the same town called Alliger’s House of Wings and ordered our wings. We got up there early and had about 20 minutes until we could pick up the wings so Nicole got a tour of Athens/Sayre and Waverly. We also ended up going to Jolly Farmer to stock up on Jones Soda (which I haven’t had in forever since our Sheetz at college stopped selling it – GRR).

Finally after about a three hour trip we made it home with the movies (The Breakup, Drillbit Taylor, See Spot Run, and Swing Vote) and made a regular fun night of it. All of the movies were pretty good, even if a couple of them had massive skipping issues. Both of them stayed the night and went home the next day. The only thing that would have made it  better would have been if Steve could have come too.

But now I have a crapload of work to get done this week, so I should actually have something to do.

This is MY House

Sometimes I feel like he isn’t all that happy to have me home. By the way he looks at me, or when he’ll roll his eyes when I call him “baby”. I’ve completely disrupted the lifestyle that he’s gotten used to for the past few months and it’s leaving him exhausted and extremely irritable. Like HOW DARE I come home into HIS HOUSE and mess everything up.

Before I got home Pudge enjoyed a quiet, lazy lifestyle. He only had to keep track of two people and got to spend most of his days napping alongside my grandmother. He had his 11 o’clock graham crackers, and life was perfect.

But now I’ve burst back in like a proverbial monkey wrench in the machine that was his universe. Instead of one sleeping human during the day, he now has to pay attention to one awake human and one who doesn’t sleep as much as she once did. And heaven forbid that either of us do anything while not in his presence. We might have food of some sort and if he can’t get in on the action then SURELY HE WILL STARVE TO DEATH.

But the poor thing just cannot keep up with everyone and so now about 10pm he has fallen into his “leave me alone” mood and spends his time sleeping next to the front door until my mother goes to bed. Then he lays on the first landing because I’m still downstairs and that means he might miss an opportunity for food.

Each and every day he drops sooner and sooner though. I’m sure someday soon we will have a Pudge-free day because he no longer has the strength to drag himself out from under my mother’s bed.

If You Can't Say Something Interesting… Don't Say Anything At All

It’s been nearly a month since I last wrote anything here. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to come up with anything that is even (in my opinion) remotely interesting to write about. Even as I type this I really have no clue what I’m going to be writing about. I guess I can just do a general update post… Or something like that.

I guess the biggest news would have to be that I’ve now officially graduated from college. The ceremony was on the 16th, so I’ve been home for about a week now. I finally have my degree (Information Technology and Marketing) and now I need to decide what I’m going to do with it. My overall GPA fell just short (like 0.04 short) of honors (damn you liberal arts requirements!), but I did manage to get distinction in my field. The job market is pretty much crap right now, so I may end up taking a temporary job until I can find something more permanent. Unfortunately, my college didn’t provide the greatest education possible. For IT, I learned stuff about A LOT of things, but never really learned A LOT about any single thing (except for PHP, but that was all self-taught). So I’m hoping that I can find at least something that will be a good fit for me.

Over the next couple days I have some work to get done when it comes to the Internet. By June 1st I’d like to have a new layout up here and do some restructuring/content adding, get a template around for my new blog My Grown Up Life, officially launch WhitneyFay.Net, and start The She Geek up again. This means that I have a crapload to do, but I think I’m up for the task since there is virually nothing else for me to do here at home except interview for jobs (and I actually have to find jobs I’m qualified for in order to get interviews). I’m also going to jump on the “bag blogger” bandwagon and say that I’d really like to start posting more (but I’m not so sure that it will really happen). I’m hoping that getting all this stuff done will renew my interest in the Internet even the slightest bit, because as of right now I really don’t even know why I turn my laptop on anymore other than to play Age of Empires or The Sims. It’s just so boring.

So yeah, that’s about all I can write about, and even this little bit has taken me almost an hour to completely pound out. To be fair, it’s mostly because I’ve been watching MTV’s True Life: I Live Another Life on the Internet and have been getting distracted. But hopefully I can find something interesting to do, since last night I was so bored and desperate for entertainment that I actually gave Twilight a second chance.

Wewt for the Weekend

Typically my Monday mornings consist of me either working while trying not to fall back to sleep or studying the back of my eyelids until about 11:30 when I either have to get up or miss class. But this morning I am surprisingly working AND very awake, which is incredibly strange seeing as I have not gotten to bed before 2am the past three nights. It has been one crazy weekend, but its been some of the most fun that I’ve had in a long time.

It all started Friday around 4 when a few RAs in our building held a cookout on my dorm’s patio. They cooked up steaks and had potato salad, watermelon and soda for people to have. Got to see some friends that I haven’t seen in a while, and just generally chill while we ate. Nicole and Steve eventually joined us, and having them around is always fun times. Mike and I left early because I needed to take a book back to the library, and we eventually moseyed our way down to Ellis, our student center/cafeteria only to find out that there was some sort of Spring Bash going on and dinner would be served outside. Our office of student activities had also booked a band from Boston to come and play. So we thought ‘why not’ and decided to stay down there and eat some more since we hadn’t had much at the cookout. We got ahold of Steve and Nicole and they came down to chill and listen to the band for about an hour.

After we were all sufficiently stuffed and sick of music, we decided it would be fun to just go for a drive; and what a drive it turned out to be. Originally we decided to head out to Raystown lake and walk around a bit since Nicole had never actually been there. It was beautiful out, so even after we left, we didn’t really want to go back. That’s when we saw a sign for the town of Everett which was about 40 miles away and this strange, desperate urge to see it overcame us all. So we decided to drive to Everett. Along the way we took a few detours to go see the Lake Raystown Resort (which culminated in a hilarious episode of us getting stuck in a parking lot and me screeching at Mike to turn right and then “NO WAIT ITS ONE WAY!”), and both the old and new college Field Stations (the roads that you drive on to get out there are SCARY!). Once we were on the road again I started playing with our GPS since my Blackberry had no service (we were really in the middle of nowhere).

Eventually hunger and the desire for drinks led us to a town called Saxton where we stopped at a seedy little Martin’s gas station with an outdoor bathroom and everything. We all loaded up on snacks and drinks, since at this point we were unsure if we’d EVER make it to Everett, before getting back on the road. Eventually though we did make it to Everett, which is a pretty kick-ass looking town if I do say so myself, and after a bit of finagling of the GPS, figured out that it would be quicker to go through Altoona to get home than to return the way we came. Of course to Mike and Steve, Altoona meant Taco Bell, so at around 11:00pm the four of us rolled in to pick  up some greasy pseudo-Mexican food. I ended up driving the rest of the way back to campus so that Mike could finish the 10 tacos that he had ordered, and when we got back, there was music playing somewhere on campus. Of course we had to investigate.

After scouring campus and finding the source of the music, we ended up chatting with a few friends before making our way back down to Ellis. We then proceeded to play pool in the cyber cafe until around 2am when everyone was too tired to continue on. We headed back to our rooms and most of us slept until about 2pm the next day.

Saturday was mainly filled with me working on my IT Research thesis and watching Dead Like Me with Mike. I just love it when I get him interested in the same shows I’m obsessed with. We didn’t really go anywhere or do anything since Saturday was also an event called Pig Roast. Basically 90% of the student body goes up to Raystown Lake and gets drunk. Then they come back to campus and proceed to cause chaos. Mike and I went to dinner early hoping to avoid the drunken idiots, and only ended up staying about 15 minutes. As we were on our way out the door, the cafeteria staff was calling security since one particularly dumb student had decided to carry a fifth of vodka into the cafeteria so he could drink it with his meal.

Sunday was also spent working on the thesis, which in the end turned out to be about 45 pages long. Pretty impressive when you examine my standards. I’m just happy that it is finished and I can hand it over. We ordered wings from All American since the night before some girls on my floor had done the same and I was now craving them. Steve and Nicole joined in and we all sat around for a while watching the Dead Like Me pilot and season one deleted scenes since Mike and Steve had never seen them before. Mike and I also ended up watching Wall-E and Evan Almighty later on at night before finally pouring ourselves into bed around 1:30am.

So all in all I have no clue why I am so awak and cheery this morning, but somehow I don’t really have a problem with it. I’ve already started working on my Networking lab for later today, and I’m hoping my Security class goes quickly. Everyone is starting to wind down for the semester, and I’m now officially ready for it to be over so that I can enjoy my week of relaxation before the actual big day. Mike and I are starting to plan all of the things which we want to do during that week, and I’m not sure how we’re going to fit them all in. We may have to stick around and stay at my aunts for a few days after graduation so that we can finish up any last things that we want to do here before heading home…

As much as I want to graduate, this has been my home for four years, and I’m really going to miss it.

Symposium Day

So today was the Liberal Arts Symposium here at college. Basically what happens is that all classes are canceled, and several students from various disciplines present the research and projects which they’ve been doing. Some students make posters to present their information, others actually do 15-minute presentations. I was lucky enough to be required to do both this year after having escaped having to do anything for the past three years. I had to do a poster for my Innovations for Industry class (on the content-management system we’re building for a local sheriff’s office), and a presentation for my IT Research (senior thesis on Cyber-Bullying) class.

Neither of my activities were in the morning, but I ended up wakingup around 7:15 because Michael was snoring obnoxiously loud. It just gave me more time to worry about my upcoming presentation, which wasn’t exactly a good thing. After getting some lunch, I headed in to hang up my poster on the wall for the poster presentations. Spent some good old time talking with Marie who luckily got put right next to me, and then had to head out to do my speech. I think the speech went well even though I thought it was going to be horrible since I was so nervous about it (I’m usually not that nervous, but this particular speech helps to determine if I graduate with distinction in IT or not) but it wasn’t bad. People seemed really interested, and asked some good questions. It was actually pretty awesome. Right afterward I had to head back and man my poster once again so I could answer any questions that people might have about it.

After everything was said and done (around 4 this afternoon) I just came back to Michael’s room, changed and flopped on the bed. My legs and feet hurt SO bad, even though half way through the day I had changed from my high-heels into flats. My legs continued to hurt up until about two hours ago when I took some ibuprofen. I’m not sure if I would have been able to sleep had I not taken it, they hurt that badly.

I also managed to finish up one of the layouts in my “possible” folder today during my free time so I decided to  pop it up here. I’m still not 100% sure that I like it, but I don’t think that it’s that bad. The header/navigation was VERY different when I originally put the layout up, but I couldn’t stand it so after about 8 code-tweak attempts I ended up with what is there now. So I hope at least someone other than me likes it.