Tag: what i did

Hey, lucky me, one of my hotelmates has a computer with a modem… you’re gonna get updates while I’m at AX.

This morning I had brunch at the Cheesecake Factory… but we didn’t have cheesecake.

So today was the Fourth of July, and we’re in a hotel in Downtown Long Beach. We got the presidential suite, and we watched the fireworks in Long Beach harbor from the top floor. Then we pointed and laughed at the solid masses of people swarming back into their cars and trying to get on the freeway.

The convention starts tomorrow. I gotta start work at 7am. The time of no sleep begins…

It appears my email continues to work, even after a last-minute remote switch of configurations from my mom’s house last night. Yay. Now I won’t get quota errors or errors sent back to the sender because the DSL is down.

Nighttime for Andy now.

So here I am, at my mom’s computer at… well you see the time.

I just got back from another cousin’s wedding. Yes, there will be pictures. No, you don’t get to see them for a while, for I am to head out to Anime Expo! Head West, young man! (Okay, more like Southwest…)

The wedding took place at a very nice place on Palos Verdes overlooking the ocean, right next to the place where Marineland used to be. It only rained a little, and there was only a little bit of lightning.

I know I was going to say more, but I can’t remember quite what, I’m very tired at the moment. I think it had something to do with… ah yes, that’s it… well, one of the “it”s.

They had the traditional throwing of the bouquet, and of course the single girls all dove for it. Then us single guys were out there for the throwing of the garter (by the way, it’s about 11pm when this was happening…) and we’re all out there, and we get this plan. When the garter heads towards us, we’re all gonna dive out of the way, right?

Of course, the little kids don’t get it, and keep diving after it… and my cousin never managed to throw it that far. Comedy in real life is once again thwarted by… real life.

So tomorrow, we head off to the wedding brunch, then I get unceremoniously dropped off at the convention site. Yay. I’m not even at the convention yet and my feet hurt.

The nice thing about sleeping back home is that I don’t have to set an alarm, I just tell my mom to wake me. I know that if I get up after the second time she comes it and tells me it’s time to wake up, that gives me just enough time to do my morning thing and be ready at the same time as everyone else.

It’s a good thing, too, because I was awoken at 6:30 a.m. Sunday morning. As the designated driver, I got to drive the three of us to UCLA in my mom’s car, with my Uncle and Aunt in the car behind us. The trip was uneventful, except for the fact that I got to see some of the construction projects that had been started when I was still living in SoCal actually finished (the 57/91 interchange and the 5/91 interchange) along with some brand new construction. We manage to only make about one wrong turn that was easily correctable, drive past Scott and pick him up off of the street, park the car, and walk to the open field where his graduation is going to take place. We get there a little after 8am for the ceremony that starts at 10am. UCLA’s commencements are a bit more like Berkeley’s than UCR’s, though. They split it up by school/department, and have multiple ceremonies in multiple places over the course of a few days. We attended the Physical Sciences ceremony of the College of Letters and Science, which was large enough that the Chancellor attended. The stark contrast of the students, not to mention the crowd, compared to UCR’s ceremony was striking. Where I felt overdressed on Saturday, I definitely felt underdressed on Sunday, and I was wearing nicer pants on Sunday (heh)! There were quite a few more Doctorates, nowhere near as many Masters Degrees, and a fraction of the Bachelor’s Degrees. The difference that allowed us to be done in an hour an a half was that they didn’t actually walk across the stage. The Doctorates got hooded individually, but everyone else just stood up in place were recognized as a group.
Continue reading “Whirlwind graduation tour – Part Two”

I need a vacation from my vacations. Quite a bit happend this weekend, this is gonna be a long post.

It’s a three day weekend, right? So Saturday I spend most of the time packing up my stuff in hopes of getting it out of my room; this is after I’ve moved over my comic books (side note: when a person’s comic book collection weighs more than they do, do they get a medal or something?) and my few of my old boxes from before so I actually have room to manuver around in. I get a few boxes moved over, mostly stuff that goes into the garage, get really tired and play around and eventually get suckered into dinner and karaoke.

I sleep in a bit and go to a BBQ on sunday and get sunburned (not too badly, fortunately, just enough to have people say “you got a bit of sun didn’t you?” but not enough for them to say “Damn, man, doesn’t that hurt?”) , becoming very grumpy due to some over-the-top antagonism on Luke’s part, which involved me taking out my frustration on some other people and going into the corner and sulking, and playing some weird San Diego mutant of baseball which doesn’t involve running, and we did it with a wiffle ball. Then band practice and crashing at home.

Sunday, I was planning on seeing Pearl Harbor, but was so dang tired from the days before that I didn’t feel like driving up the city. So I decided to pack some more. I tackled the messiest corner, and managed to get most of my magic/gaming cards packed into four medium sized boxes (18″x18″x18″ each).

If there’s anything I’m taking away from this weekend, it’s that paper is damn heavy. In hindsight, I should have traded off number of boxes for space efficiency, because each of those four boxes was so heavy I could barely lift them, they were 75 pounds each, easy. Yes, I’m fairly weak. I get three of them into my car (the fourth wouldn’t fit) and unload them into the garage. I then park the car and try to get them up to the third floor where my room is.

It’s about this time that I started fantasizing about Star Trek transporters, pulleys, levers… anything that would keep me from actually having to get those boxes up the two sets of stairs. I tried rolling one box up, but about the time that it got to the second floor, it started coming apart. I pushed it along the ground to the base of the second set of stairs and left it there. After a short rest, I managed to carry the second box all the way up to the third floor in one go. After a slightly longer rest I managed the same for the third box, but it took two stops.

It was about this time that I laid down on the floor and literally fell asleep. When I woke up about an hour later, I decided to just leave that first box on the second floor and left.

I’ve still got a ways to go, but I managed to throw away quite a bit of trash from my room. Another life lesson I take away from this weekend: When a box sits in your closet for three years and you only add stuff to it, you can most likely throw away most of it… at least the stuff on the bottom. And so I did. I threw away quite a bit of old computer hardware cards that is so ancient, it is antiquated by single chips. There was an entire AT memory expansion card the size of a letter-sized envelope that was ONE WHOLE MEGABYTE, and an 80-column card for an Apple ][e, and an Epson Printer Adapter for an Apple ][e… etc. I even threw away a 1.2GB hard drive.

One positive from this weekend: I found the driver disk for my webcam, so I can actually use that again. There’s still a few pieces of MIA equipment in my room, though.

Tonight, I pack books. In small boxes. *sigh*

Well, once again, I went to the AAA to pay for my car’s registration, and once again I forgot that, even though my car has a “May” sticker on it, it’s considered “late” after May 2nd. So once again, I paid a late charge. But not nearly as much as the last two years.

Also, since something has to go wrong every year (two years ago, my insurance wasn’t paid, last year I needed a smog check), I get to the AAA and realize that I hadn’t renewed my membership. Fortunately, this year’s problem was quickly remedied. Also, I’m very lucky, because I just wrote two checks today and they were the last two from the book. I could have sworn that checks came in packs of 75, why did this one just end on an ’80’?