Author: Gene

I’m leaving for PAX on Friday. Yes that’s this Friday. I’ll be leaving in the morning to because doors open at 2 I think. Anyway, if you wanna see me and hear my wisdom you have only until then. Please remember to bring a sacrifice or you won’t be let in. Also, if you want to volunteer to drive me to PAX that will work as a sacrifice.

Now messages for everyone.

I finished my GRE. Now I dun have to worry about that. I have to wait for my Analytical Writing skills to be judges by a panel of profession judgers, but I’m sure I did fine.

I have work tomorrow. Final week and such.

PAX is very soon. How exciting. I dunno how I’m getting there these days. I have a couple leads other than my mom, but I sorta suspect I’ll end up falling back on her. 🙁 She wants to go to Seattle anyway I’m sure.

Sandra and Doug Lewis came to Ellensberg to meet us. My mother and father decided to take me up there a day early and stay in a hotel so we wouldn’t have to leave so early in the morning or something. They brought one of their old bikes for me, so that’s cool. I haven’t ridden it since I got home, and technically it’s a woman’s bike, but I’m sure it’ll work for me.

Oh, the place we stayed at was really interesting. It’s just the old fixed up house of this farmer guy. It’s outside of the great city of Thorp, WA. Anyway, 3 rooms, kitchen, bbq, yard, living room, games. It’s pretty different.

Work today was fairly busy. Nothing to write about unfortunately. No mess ups or drills. Nothing exciting. I was thinking some time at work I might take some pictures so I can post some of the stuff I’ve been babbling about every day for so long.

I get another 3 day weekend. I can’t go work because I’m taking the GRE on Monday. So I have to study over the weekend. It’s sorta lame.

I’ve created a Froogle list, like 8, which you can view on my profile. It’s pretty boring right now. Probably forever will be. I’ll try to update it whenever I think of things I want though. Such things don’t come to me often though.

The headset Woot items I bought earlier came today. They’re pretty cool I think. The microphone won’t work on Pedro for some reason. I think Pedro’s always suffered from this particular affliction. I dunno what to do about it though. I’ve fiddled with setting about as much as I know how. I hope it get fixed sometime though. I wanna use my voice.

I’m tired.

First day of work w/o Veronica around. She took the key with her apparently, so I had to get let into my “office” and the lab by April. She’s the non-sciency one of FEQL in charge of secretarial type things.

Dr. Felsot was late so I didn’t get started doing any actual work. So I was cramped for time and at 50% staff. I didn’t quite finish all my work. It’s ok though cause he had to stay until like 7 for some meeting thing, so he hopefully did enough after I left that I can keep going in the morning w/o him if he’s late again. I think if nothing else I’ll have plenty of dishes to wash.

The excitement of today, besides me officially doing every part of a plate extraction by myself… except for a delusion… still haven’t done those, was a sample fell into a water bath because a vacuum thing broke. Kinda sucks. It was on my watch and you never like to lose a sample, but Dr. dude said it wasn’t my fault. We could have technically recovered it but he decided it was too cumbersome to do so.

My sister goes back to Ohio tomorrow. Her plane takes off at like 6 am or something.

No friends have come over to bug me yet today. Consequentially I did some GRE studying. My brain still feels at diminished capacity because of this strange illness thing I’ve had, but I think it’s good that I study some. Been a while since I’ve done anything even slightly academic.

In blogging news, Adrienne Mills, long time friend of my sister and pictured below, has started a blog. I encourage you all to harass/encourage her so she joins the blogisphere for real. Oh yeah, and she just had a hair dye thing that she’s sorta unhappy with. Pretend like it’s totally visible in the picture.

Also, where’d he get that hat?

elftor.com

Today at work I did the usual plate extractions and dish washing. The interesting thing was that they did this terrorist attack drill. Dr. Vance was the terrorist guy and he went around handing cards to people telling them they were shot and then “shot” himself. So I’m told. I didn’t actually see any of it, I was in the lab doing actual work. Apparently mostly it tests the ambulance people’s response time. Dr. Felsot got shot in the leg, but probably survived to take over FEQL.

Boating panned out as you can see. I was taking a bunch of pictures to attempt to get a shot of a crash, but failed. The battery was lowish so I couldn’t just constantly leave it on. I went on two skis. I failed to get up the first two times, which is kinda embarrassing seeing as how I haven’t failed to get up on two skis in years. The second time my quads really hurt, I think in response to biking yesterday, and the cold water. I wasn’t sure I was gonna be able to do the skiing thing consequentially, but the 3rd attempt went well. I had a long fun run and let ago and coasted gently back into the cold water. It actually was much less cold than I expected. After I went we inflated the Hydroplane and Adam’s friend’s little bro rode on it. Adam did a good job driving the boat, so the Hydroplane got some good air a couple of times. The kid went on like 7 runs total. Holly actually went out on the Hydroplane to, but not really. She’s a sissy girl and wouldn’t let us flip her into the river like she should have.

Pat leaves tomorrow. Adam leaves soon. Summer is almost over. D&D is awesome.

I have to take the GRE on Monday so I’m trying to work in some study time before then. I don’t think it’s going to happen until Pat goes back to school though. I’ll survive. Study usually makes me do worse on tests anyway.

So at work today I broke a funnel thing and a vacuum flask thing. Not cause I’m klutzy, but because I’m dumb. I was trying to carry 26 pieces of glassware at once. 24 is a cinch, but 26 apparently is retarded. Just so you know. We did another set of plate extractions, as usual. I also photo copied some data, which was neat. I’ve never really used a copy machine, not a big fancy one at least. I also did some data entry and some special clean up stuff. The special clean up stuff kinda sucks. We’re testing for a different pesticide from before, so we’re using different standards, so we made new standards, which means we don’t need the old standards. Isn’t that a nice sentence? So anyway, that means I have to empty, acetone, wash, and then acetone about 70 little vials. Oh, after I remove their labels. I got to the wash step today. I’ll finish the rest up tomorrow morning before we get started doing other stuff probably.

When I got home from work Adam and Pat were already here. Adam was a bit of a surprise. He’s been in Utah forever and I didn’t really think he’d make it back before the end of summer. They were playing Double Dash so I made fun of their n00bness and stuff. Then Aaron and Donny showed up. Aaron and Donny and I went to Hastings to look at the awesome Used D&D book selection while Pat and Adam went to get Adam’s bike from his house, for the bike adventure, to be discussed in the next paragraph. At Hastings, we discovered by reading, it’s one of the things we do, that used books were all on sale at 3 for $10. We carefully asked a salesperson if this included D&D books, and then bought all the used books they had, almost. We didn’t buy duplicates. It was sweet. So now Aaron has 6 D&D books, which he says he’ll probably give to me soon, which is nice.

After the purchasing we went to Pat’s house. I ate some pizza and then Pat and Adam and I ditched Aaron and Donny and went on a mountain biking adventure. We drove to the freeway that’s sorta by our houses and biked around on these little paths in the fields between the freeway and Canyon Lakes. They were pretty fun. The beginning we went uphill, which was tiring, but it worked out I think. We did a little loop, and then found a paved road. We took that up higher so for the last 20 minutes or so of the ride it was almost all downhill. Refreshing. The paths were very narrow. I had trouble staying on them sometimes, and had a fight with a sagebrush about whether my handlebar could go where I thought it should at one point. The sagebrush one. Just barely though. The paths also had really deep sand/dust in places that made peddling very difficult and fish-tailing happen. It was very exciting.

Now I am home and plan to sleep soon. Aaron and Donny went to see Scanner Darkly I believe. 28000 words isn’t that much. I could do it. 😛 See Donny’s blog for information on why I would say such a thing.

Cyrano de Bergerac is what my sister and I saw. That’s the play about me, only with a big nose. I liked it quite a bit. Some sword fighting, and some of the lines were really nice. Plus Cyrano is like me, and therefore very enjoyable. Best quote from the play:

“Call it a lie if you must, but a lie is a sort of myth, and a myth is a sort of truth” -Cyrano

In other news, I’m home. Martha’s friend is pregnant. Don’t worry, she’s also married. Martha is freaking out cause she’s her age. It’s very sensational.

Also, Skepticality has released a new episode. I haven’t listened to it to see if it’s any good, and I dunno if this means they’re coming out with them regularly now or not, but cool anyway.

Today’s matinee was entitled, King John. It wasn’t hammy. It wasn’t very funny either. It was well done I thought. The story was pretty similar to Henry though, so half the time I sorta thought I’d already seen it. They didn’t really act out any battling, which was abnormal. They did do a single one on one fight. The battles were indicated with a projector showing WWI footage on the entire set. I guess that’s cool. That’s the distinctive thing about this play that springs to mind anyway.

My throat does not hurt today, but my sinus area is still a little odd. Kinda tickly.