A Stranger's Remarks

Low Down on Delta House

2011-07-21T12:16:00.002-04:00

Hi internet! I got an email from someone today asking about life in Delta House while I was doing my masters at JIBS or Jonkoping University. So I was more than happy to give him the story:

Hello Dave,

Thanks for reading my blog. I didn't know other people read it other than my friends. I don't mind the questions at all.

About Delta House: I loved being down the street from the University. It's also in the middle of downtown where the most interesting things happen. You've got a grocery store around the corner, lots of places to eat out, it's near the lake and the train station (depending on how often you want to take the train anywhere makes life very easy), the night life is...a little too close. There's a club called The Velvet Lounge in the same building on the ground floor. In fact the same entrance to Delta House is used for bringing the kegs of alcohol in for storage. Anyway, that club can blast out some solid bass that can be felt in the floors above. I knew some to of the kids who were on the next floor up and when the club starts up their things would shake. It was pretty annoying, especially if needed to study. Bring some noise canceling headphones. I was on the third floor, and we could still hear it. I don't think the fifth floor, the top floor, was affected (which only houses three people with the nicest bathroom, btw). But we used to use the top floor as a party floor because they have the most open space out of all the floors.

The other four floors open up to a long corridor connecting the 14 student rooms, kitchen, bathrooms, and common area. The kitchen size is dependent on which floor you're on, and they got bigger the high the floor was, although the top floor doen't have an oven, so they use the fourth floor's. And the kitchens are set up pretty much the same with the same stuff: sink, three microwaves, three fridges, etc. The common area is a room that used to be a student room. I know cause they kicked out (relocated) the students who lived in those rooms. They had to set these up cause kids that used to live in another dorm adjacent to the Delta House, called the Alpha House (now nonexistent) complained about the living conditions to the news agencies. The story was picked up nationally, and was a huge embarrassment to the school. So building code people came in and helped get the living conditions up to code. The main reason for the common areas was to have a place to eat. People usually ate in their rooms or wherever. Not really a problem. Most common rooms were used more or less for drinking. They had tv's but they didn't work very well. We demolished the couch in our common room.

About the rooms. They're okay furnished: bed, closet, desk, the all powerful lamp (containing all the electrical outlets, internet jacks, and the only light source in the rooms). Not so bad, but the walls are super thin. If the guy in the next room snores, you're out of luck. And the sizes are mostly the same. This was a telecommunications office building before it was converted to a dormitory. On the third floor in the middle of the corridor was the bigest room of them all. This was a shared room, one that I was staying in, and we rocked delta from there. I had speakers, TV, PS3, a couch, and lots of room to party. Our room simply kicked ass. It was the common room on our floor.

They have clothes washers and dryers in the basement, which I think they've set up a reservations system now. Now when I was there. And you get in and out of the main door and the doors to the corridor floors with an electronic key, individual rooms with a standard metal, pointy on one side, key.

Here's the lowdown. Is it worth it? Well, it depends. I loved living there. The people on my floor became my family, my best friends. We were all international students, cause they only allowed internationals in there, but we all had to figure it out with each other. We had a great time together. There was drama, and lots of other stuff with people who didn't get along, and we were living very close to each other. You could have privacy if you wanted, probably not silence on command, and you'd have to deal with a bunch of drunk people every weekend. I did notice that some floors were quieter than others. It all depends on the mixture of people on each floor. If you're a social person and want to hang our with lots of people all the time from the moment you arrive, this is the place. You can always study at the library a few minutes away, or any coffee shop (lots of coffee shops [Sweden is up there on the countries that drink the most coffee per capa]) and most offer free wifi. I think internet is extra in the dorms.

If this doesn't sound like your brand of tea, then there's Raslatt. It's a good bus ride away and where many immigrants live. There you'll have a normal apartment with a couple other people. You'll only have to deal with them, it's very quiet. Not quite as social, people there tend to become much better friends with their program students. It is harder to find friends with like interests there, but it's more like normal life where you're in control. There are parties there that are fun and they even have sockertoppen which is an activities center of sorts where there's a pool table, kitchen, and some other stuff, but they usually throw some parties there that can be pretty crazy; but living in town I usually stayed in town. No bus ride there and back.

Well, there's my one sided view. I lived in Delta for a year, then moved to an apartment across the street from Delta and continued the same type of show with a better room where I could write my thesis.

My mom's cancer is in remission. Thanks for asking. She's doing very well; getting into cycling. She did a 50 mile charity ride about a month back and is now looking for a better road bike. She has all her hair back and doing very well. She has to go to the hospital every week to get a chemo shot, but otherwise doing very very well.

Sara and I got engaged on new year's 1/1/11. and we're going through the immigrations process for her to come to the United States of America. Hopefully she'll arrive in September. She's that amazing.

Well, I've been ranting cause this was an amazing part of my life. I hope that this was enlightening to you, and if you have any other questions or need any help, please let me know. And if you do decided to live at Delta, let me know how it is now. I was in the first wave of people who got the bugs out of the poor system. If you want to really focus on your studies, go to Raslatt and ride the bus everyday, but in this school I find that unnecessary. I was a masters student, and I know of other masters students in Delta who loved being there. Others who didn't as well. But I also know of a PHD student who love it as well. It all depends on what you want.

I think I'll post this on my blog in case there are others who are googling the Delta House in Jonkoping.

Later,
Eric

Here it comes: The Weight Challenge

2010-03-24T12:19:00.004-04:00

Good afternoon Internet family,

I'm sitting at school, JIBS 3rd floor in one of the study rooms, basically bored. I'm not studying for an exam like the other kids in the room are but waiting for my friend, Mike, to end his study session so we can walk around the lake for some exercise (the smaller lake, mjunkshon). The walk is like 5 kilometers, or 3.5 miles, and is great for the little challenge that I've accepted from Sara. Shat challenge you ask? Ready? Here I go: we've challenged each other to loose 5 kilograms in 4 weeks. And if we accomplish our goal then we do something nice or get something nice the other desires. So if she looses the weight then she gets to choose something that she would like me to do for her, whether that be buy her something nice, or give her a nice back rub, whatever. And it's not a competition cause we can both come out of this winners. So walking around the lake has been something that I've been doing to better my chances of getting her to do something that I want. I still haven't come up with anything yet, but I'll think of something good. Suggestions are welcome.

I've also been riding my back for about an hour a day (indoors cause this country still hasn't gotten the idea that spring should be warmer by this time of year) as well as getting into some pilates (I'm not gay, if that' what you're thinking) which really strengthen your core which makes everything in life a little easier, physically, including cycling.

Eating reasonably is the only is the only thing that'll hold me back from the goal. I'm into cooking for myself but I'm finding out that I do that I tend to make more that what I'm supposed to. I always start with the intention of saving the other half for another time, but it never seems to work out that way cause what I make usually turns out really good and I know that if I make it cold it'll never be the same again. Got to eat that stuff in it's prime. I've got to start sharing my meals I think. I was talking to one of my room mates about how I sort of want french toast tonight but then I have to buy a whole loaf of bread, which I don't do very often mostly because I feel obligated to eat all that bread before it goes bad, which is a lot shorter here in Europe then in the United States of America, and so I eat more than I want to. And the work for french toast isn't that much different whether I'm cooking for the whole building or just for myself. But breakfast for dinner sounds amazing right now, right?

I noticed I haven't been putting up any pics in a while and I want to fix that. If I remember to do that stuff tonight it'll happen that soon, but for now let's wish that I was better at contributing to this thing.

Later internet family.

2010-03-23T17:56:00.003-04:00

Hello Internet,

No idea when I posted something last so here's a quick update on what's up now: thesis work is going on with Amin, a Moroccan guy, who is assigned as my thesis partner cause JIBS is too cheap to let me write it by myself (probably a good thing, though), I'm dating a very lovely Swedish girl, Sara, with whom I'm madly in love with, and I found out my mother is in the hospital with a blood infection and double pneumonia. I think my mom will be okay though. It was really bad; she almost died cause her oxygen levels were dangerously low. She's been in the hospital since friday (now tuesday) and hopefully she was being released today if some of her test's results turned out the way they are supposed to. These types of disorders usually happen to really old or really young people, or people with cancer or aids or some other immune system bad thing. I found out that she was there yesterday from my brother, greg, while he was driving from SLC to Colorado. A little upset that the news didn't come to me sooner, but I'll live with it.

As you know Easter is coming up soon and I'll be celebrating it with Sara and her family up in Lidkoping. Her dad will be back from Afghanistan with his girlfriend, Suzanne. I'm trying to get Mike to come up with us but he's needing time to decompress so he might not come even though there will not be many people left in this town that know him. It would be a nice relaxing vacation away from people though. And he could walk the lake to his hearts content and hopefully earn back a few belt holes. Which reminds me that I'm on a challenge to loose 5 kgs in 4 weeks. It seems like a lot to me now but I think I may pull through it. Sara and I are doing it together and if we succeed then we both will get one wish fulfilled. I still don't know what I want but it's gonna be good.

I started writing a song today, not sure if it'll go anywhere but I like it so far and the music is just about written. I hope the subject I chose will stick. I need to start writing again. That outlet needs to be re-opened. Too bad my guitar sucks here. This summer I'm trying to stay here in Sweden with Sara and maybe start a life here. If that happens then maybe I'll have my stuff shipped out here, at least my guitars. My other stuff can stay put at moms and dads, like the tv and speakers, although I would really like them here, but there that whole electricity thing that's not compatible. Stooopid voltage change.

That's that update, hopefully it was filling. I'm about to start another episode of weeds after I take my contacts out and brush my teeth.

Good night internet.

From Christmas Eve

2009-12-24T13:46:00.002-05:00

Alright, so it's Christmas eve right now and I chose not to go home mostly due to financial reasons even though, now that I look back, I could've been back for like a month, which would've been cool, but anyway, I like it here in Sweden and I never really have any time by myself. So now I've been writing songs, cleaning the apartment, and doing what I will here. It's nice. And I'm not that lonely. I still have friends here. I'm dethawing a turkey right now for a Christmas party tomorrow. People drop by and we hang for a little while, plan trips and things. But this is the day that everyone celebrates Christmas in Sweden, meaning the Swedes. So those friends of mine that are Swedes or have Swedish boy or girl friends are out of town celebrating. I received such an invitation as well, but I chose to stay behind cause I don't want to be the guy in the corner, if you know what I mean. But I'm realizing that I miss my family, and I want to wish them a Merry Christmas! I'll call them tomorrow and see how everything's going. I hope they upload or at least share some pictures for me. Chatting with Blair now. Merry Christmas everyone!

check, it's cool

2009-05-15T07:13:00.000-04:00

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Save Chuck!

2009-05-10T10:41:00.000-04:00

Mystery Girl, where are you?

2009-02-27T10:31:00.002-05:00

Hi Internet. So it's Friday and I'm fairly hungry now. On a normal Friday at this time I would usually be pretty full from going to an "after work" (a cheap buffet starting at 4 o'clock offered at a ton of restaurants and bars around town). It's 4:30, btw. But today I'm waiting for my bud, Mike, to finish his accounting exam which I really hope i soon. The test started at 2, so lets all wish him knowledge and luck.

So yesterday I was at the grocery store with my bud, Mike, looking for his dinner. I had already eaten fresh tortellini with red pasta sauce, olives, and cheese and went with friends to get an after dinner drink. We stopped at Hemkop and while there I saw this girl who kept making eye contact with me. She looked a little familiar; maybe I've seen her in my building; not sure though. Anyway, Mike and I were chatting about whatever while walking around and we saw her a bunch of times which I didn't think much of till we were leaving when I realized that I was really attracted to her. Since then she's been in the back of mind. I've got to find this girl again.

Sports Week?

2009-02-11T03:21:00.003-05:00

Dear blogosphere. I haven't had any class this week nor will I have class due to a Swedish holiday called sports week. Not really sure it's a holiday, but I'm loving it. It seems my program is the only one who's celebrating it though, which means everyone else has class which also means that there aren't many people who are celebrating with me. Not that I'm doing anything for this week besides being lazy. I would like to imagine that I would sport it up were it not due to a bad right knee. It's been seriously annoying. Some days it hurts like a m@therf#$ker, and some it's fine. It's been acting like this since Paris (i.e. New Year's); very frustrating. I'm on a good streak and am being careful not to re-injure myself so I think it's best that I let myself get back to full form before I prance about doing sports like badminton and pounding shuttlecock.

But today I felt particularly lazy and feel that I need to change my ways. I was up a little past 8 this morning without an alarm clock, had a nice hot shower, and am still determined to use this day wisely. I'm going to go to the library and get some reading done and other stuff that I've been prolonging. I think I've got an appointment in the light room today, my first ever.

It is, however, snowing outside so we'll see how long this resolve lasts.

Later skater.

Missing America a Tad

2009-02-03T14:37:00.002-05:00

A huge blow happened today. Okay, so they've got a Subway here and it's the only restaurant in the whole of Sweden that I know of that offers free refills. I love free refills. It reminds me of America. But today I found out that because of the damn taxes in this country it costs more to have fountain drinks than to sell bottles of soda. So Subway is going the cheaper route. It sucks. Free refills is probably the biggest reason I go to that restaurant. My life crumbled today.

So I cut my goatee off. Yeah, there were a group of slightly drunk people in my room that were simultaneously chanting "Cut it off". I had no choice. Right there and then it came off. The result it mixed. Everyone at the party said I looked 2 times better, but they had to. If they said anything else they would look extremely cruel. Others say I look the same, where others say that I lost my identity. As for what I think...I'm not sure. I liked it there. I liked to stroke it when trying to look contemplative. But now I don't get toothpaste on it every day. I won't grow it back. It took too long to get it where I liked it and it would be pretty ugly up until that point.

There's a bunch new people on the floor. Mostly Americans, which makes it not so cool to be an American anymore. I liked being an ambassador of some sorts but now there's a bunch of undergrad aged students from Penn State here. Yeah, they came as a group, so they came with pre-made friends. So it's been about a month and we still haven't fully integrated friendships. There a girl, Lisa (she asked for a name drop on this blog), who's cool. she's sitting on my room mates bed right now. She's one of the few who've come over to the dark side. Everyone's nice, but still acquaintances.

Classes are pretty straight forward this term. Lots of reading; need to do more, but I've been watching the Office, the American one. You know how that is. We just downloaded it. It things like that made it super hard to do homework at home. Did I tell you we got a couch in our room? People are here all the time now. It's awesome. Really, it is, most of the time. I haven't slept much in the past few nights. But one of those reasons was because we watched the superbowl which is broadcast live, but it starts at midnight and ended at 4 in the morning. We went to a sports bar to watch it. But you know how Superbowl commercials are awesome? Well, they don't broadcast them here. Instead, in place of commercials they put on three Swedes pretty much explaining the slang terms of American announcers. And no, it wasn't Ed McMann (can't spell it), they were random dudes I've never heard of. One thing about this Superbowl was that I watched most of the playoff games. I finally found a way to watch American Football. There's this torrent community that's only for American Football. It was great. I rejoiced much when I found it.

Rock band 2 is here. It only took a little over a month for it too come. But we play it tons, and piss off lots of people on our floor as well as the floor beneath. It's awesome. We've got at least 200 songs on there. It's great.

That's it for now.

2009-01-31T14:07:00.001-05:00

superpoop.com

2009-01-26T18:58:00.000-05:00

Pics of Paris!

2009-01-04T12:37:00.002-05:00

Here's my Vacation of Paris in Pics:

From Paris!

I hope you enjoyed this journey.

Happy New Period of Time to Rock!!!

2009-01-04T10:52:00.002-05:00

Hello internet. Where to begin, where to begin. This very second I'm soaking my hat in warm water and detergent. You know the hat I always wear. Well, I don't wash it much and it shows. This water is now pretty disgusting with a color normally seen in a toilet. This hat has been with me through a lot so I don't care what it does when it's not on my head. I wish it would clean itself more often. Whatever.

So foremost in my mind is my trip back to Jonkoping from Paris. The day started at 3:30 when my alarm went off. I snoozed it. 3:40 and I turned the alarm off, got up a few minutes later dreading what was before me. Let me tell you that I went to bed only a couple of hours previous and was insanely tired at this point. The reason why I'm getting up this early was to catch a train to go across Paris to bus that will take me and a couple friends to the airport. This early the trains aren't that frequent. We said our goodbyes to people we may not ever see again in life and walk in the cold dark morning to the first train station. This train ride takes 45 minutes to get to the metro station we needed to switch trains. We waited at this train station for what felt like an hour. It very well could have been an hour. I was so tired I only hated it. Another 15 minutes on the metro, then an hour and a half bus ride to the air port. This airport hosts Ryanair, easily the cheapest airline I've ever flown with, and it shows with the airports it flies into. They're crowded and very ill informative. Two hours of this then 2 hours of flight to Skavsta. Here's where things went wrong. Remember two sentences ago when I wrote that we flew to Skasta? We flew there but we didn't land there. We flew to Arlanda, the airport north of Stockholm. What this does is totally screw with the travel schedule that everyone has to get to where they're supposed to go, including mine. At this point the mood of the crew I'm traveling with takes a down turn. Not only are we super tired but now we may have to eat our tickets and buy new ones to get home. I'm not sure how much money I've got in the bank. Parents were supposed to put more money in but I didn't know. So I only had a few hundred crowns with me and I didn't know what it would cost. I was going through a bunch of scenarios on what to do and not liking any of them. Ryanair was kind enough to provide a shuttle back to Skavsta which took us awhile to find and a lot of heat searching. Yeah, it's pretty cold here in Sweden now. It took over an hour to get back to Skavsta and by the time we got there we were over two hours behind our original schedule. This is where luck and kindness pulls its weight a little. I notice that one of the buses on my original itinerary was sitting next us and that there wasn't a time table of when I was supposed to take that bus. This was would be free and get me closer to home where I would at least be able to buy a cheaper ticket. An hour and a half I get to Linkoping and luckily for me the next bus was waiting to take me home. So no waiting in the cold. I show the bus driver my ticket that was for a bus 2 hours a go, but he was very kind and let me on the bus. 2 hours later and I was home. I was very glad to get back in Jonkoping and at this point I was having a hard time staying awake. I stumbled back to my door and I remembered that I left my card key with someone staying. They needed it cause they had to turn theirs in. I called this person and they were over a half hour's bus ride away. to be honest I wasn't mad. I was a little past feeling at this point. So I went to get a pizza which was the first thing that I had eaten that whole day. It was about 7 in the evening and very cold outside. Let me mention that this pizza was free. I had a card that got stamped every time I ate there and the eleventh was free. This was my eleventh pizza. I ate in the restaurant all by myself with no one else in sight, even the workers were somewhere else. I just felt weird. Anyway, I got home and my friend was there to open the door for me. It was nice to be in my room and to go to bed. I quickly got out of my cloths and headed for bed. Just before I was about to fall asleep I remembered that I was supposed to get a key to someone coming over at 10, about an hour or so away. I had to hold sleep at bay for just a few more minutes. There was a great battle between me and sleep this whole hour. But I did the deed and was off the dreamland. One of the longest days of my life.

I'll write about Paris later. Pics'll be provided as well, but later.

Almost Christmas

2008-12-23T06:50:00.002-05:00

So it's been an emotionally draining week. As you may have heard Christmas is in a couple of days and for normal folk Christmas is spend with families. Unfortunately I live way too far from home to travel there; it's mostly a financial issue. But it's more than that. I don't really know where home is exactly. If I were to go to my parents house I'd be going to see them and my other siblings. I didn't grow up there so there wouldn't be many friends. I could go back to Hawaii. Oh, I miss Hawaii so much. Go to the beach, feel the warmth of the sun on my face and the searing heat of the sand on my feet. Paradise. I really want to swim in the ocean. I've got family and friends there. That would be a better "home" for me.

The emotionallity doesn't stop there. Tons of people are leaving for good. So I'm staying in Sweden or around here for Christmas then off to Paris for New Year's. But being one of the last ones here means that I'm saying goodbye to everyone. Seriously, there are lots of people leaving and the bus/train station is right behind where I live so there've been tons of goodbye gatherings over there. Tons of goodbye parties as well. Saying farewell to close friends almost everyday for a week really drains you, especially if you know there's a very slim chance that you'll see that person ever again. And now Delta house is fairly empty. Out of the 14 or so people on this floor only 4 of us are still here, and us four aren't the chummiest of chums. We're acquaintances. It's alright, but a lot of it turns into boring small talk that I'm only trying to look like I'm paying attention so they don't get mad at me. I've got Yassine here, though. He's a friend of mine from Morocco. He's having a couple of people from his home country join him for Christmas and maybe go somewhere. So that's what we're going to do. We still don't know where we're going, but that's what makes it an adventure, right?

yeah, so this building is just about empty. But every time I go down to do some laundry there's a shit load of clothes being washed with more on top of the washers waiting. There must be a lot more people here than I thought. I rarely go down to the first and second floors. Come on people.

Also I've moving my stuff into a bigger room here on the 3rd. It's tons bigger but it's difficult to come up with a good floor plan for all our things. Mike is going to moving in here as well when he comes back and he's wanting to buy a couch and a card table for this place. So I'm doing my best to come up with a good solution. There's a few obstacles like those stupid lamps that cant' be moved more than a foot. I've tried a few things and I think I'm close to a solution. It'll be great. I know it.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of my internet friends.

Exams suck

2008-12-16T15:04:00.002-05:00

Hello all. So I had my big scary exam yesterday and it sucked. It was for a class called knowledge modeling. It was taught in the technical school. That is to say in a different school than the business school where I normally attend (plus I have a background in psychology). And the class was taught by three very boring technical school nerds. The classes were so boring that I only went to half of'em. The ones I did go to made me sooo sleepy that it wasn't worth going, even though I really tried to pay attention. They sucked the life out of me. So I studied super hard for the last couple of days. I only had a few days because my group mates and I were working really hard on presentations and papers for our other classes.

So there was this break I had between study sessions that was spent attending a Swedish culture thing where they were talking about traditions of a Swedish Christmas. There was a drink there called glog which is a lot like spiced cider. Anyway, I like the stuff but this time it wasn't sitting right. Soon after I finished the cup I had to run to the restroom to spew it up. It was weird. I've never done that before: drinking something just to pewk it out a moment later. The group went up to the study room in the library and keep joshing me about what happened making ralfing noises and picturing gross scenarios. I threw up again. That was a long day where I got about as much done as a pewking college student could. The presentations went very well the next couple of days, btw.

So the exam yesterday kicked my ass. I wasn't as prepared as I'd like to've been, but I think I passed. The think was after I had the exam I was super exhausted and headachey. We even had a big lasagna dinner that night with a bunch of people from delta. I was very tired and barely social. So went to bed early and slept till 11 this morning. So glad all that is over with. There's still more to be done during the break but I'm glad that day is over.

2008-12-07T08:13:00.002-05:00

Sunday. The day the week winds up to kick ass. Can you feel it? I certainly can. This week's going to be hell. I'll be so glad when it's over. I'm not going to type why cause it'll depress me. Oh, hey we had our Secret Santa thing this last week. I had Chara. She's from Oklahoma I think but I don't really hang with her much. Not close friends at all. So there was a little lack of motivation doing this one. I wasn't going to half ass it, a little, maybe, but I sort of when through the motions. so yeah, half-assed. I got her some play-doh, some bouncy balls, because they were cheap at the toy store, and for her final gift that I gave her a box of stuff from the Body Shop. They weren't terrible gifts but there weren't that thoughtful and I didn't work at making them so. You wanna know what I got? well, my secret santa was this dude from germany named Max. He did this theme of 2 girls 1 cup. don't ask. But what he gave me was 2 candy bars, 1 cup, and for the final gift he gave me a double dvd of swedish porn. Awesome? you decide.

We went out to the Bongo Bar after all that, Mike got really drunk. We took him home and watched Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. I had to explain that White Castle is gross. The worst fast food I have ever tasted.

We also went to a hockey game last week were our team got there asses handed to them. The team here in Jonkoping won their division last season and this game was against Finlands national champion. They won 6-0. The worst thing about the whole game was that the fans were almost completely silent for the whole thing. There was no cheering section. The Finns on the other hand were loud. How can a home game feel like an away game? It was terrible. I got some pics of that but Leila has my memory card. I'll post'em when I can/want to.

That's it for now.

Later

wish me luck for my week

Oh those shenanigans!

2008-11-27T03:36:00.003-05:00

So I'm taking another break. I'm almost done with my take home exam. I just need to adjust one more question and that'll be it. Done with the class. Oh, get this. yesterday we met with one of our teachers to get the grade of our big paper. we did a research project and we thought we did an alright job. I thought we did well and I've got some experience behind me to let me say so. we walk and and find out we barely passed. It was all bullshit. I swear. Our research design was done much much better than other kids I saw walk out of there with better grades. This isn't our only qualm with the teacher either. At the end of this meeting one of the guys in our group still needed to get his exam back. This was weird cause every one got their graded exam back like a month ago. So he gets his back and the teacher had dropped a couple points of the test. Points, according to my friend, were awarded to him earlier when the teacher showed him his grade a couple weeks before. So my friend got really pissed. I thought he was going to deck the teacher. There were some heated words, I left the room, and the guys had a short terrible discussion. This meeting totally ruined our scholastic day. We were going to work on some other stuff but after this meeting every one was bummed. We got nothing done; sat there for an hour or two. then we had to get out of there and stop moping and went to the coffee shop. Once there the mood lightened, we saw some friends there and the day seemed salvageable. On our way to said coffee shop I saw my friend Louelle who told me that I was supposed to make a pizza for my roommates birthday dinner. Okay, it was my roommates birthday like last Thursday and there were two failed attempts to celebrate, but we finally did it up right last night. there was a big dinner with great food. It was a good time. I also got my hair cut cause the girl who cuts hair was there and she had her stuff there. It's fairly short but I like it. I'll post some pics soon. after that my friend mike was really trying hard to get me and Leila to go out. We were tired but after about an hour of pushing we let in and went to a sports bar for a few drinks. I was good to get out, sort of. We just hung out and it was good, but I needed today to work on that take home exam as well as some other stuff later on today so I couldn't be out too late. Too bad, but we got home around 2:30 or so and after that we came home to some shenanigans. Vodka bongs, deep frying (we bought a deep fryer a couple of days ago), a water fight (my pj's got soaked), and people wanting to watch a movie. We started the movie but we got too tired. This was around 4 when people left my room and I went straight to bed. sleep didn't come so easy and I was tired, am tired. so I got up at seven (three hours later) and started stuff. I finished some of this exam and started my laundry. So far things are good. Not sure for the rest of the day, but for now I'll keep going.

When is it ever going to get done?

2008-11-25T06:26:00.003-05:00

It's so hard to concentrate right now. I'm trying to finish up a take home exam and I just realized that I don't have everything that I need here. I'm at JIBS and I need some handouts. I'm also needing food. There are other things that are making it difficult to concentrate which I don't want to discuss. But I need to get this stuff done so wish me luck.

Okay I'm back. Still can't think. I'll just chalk this up to my break. So yeah, i downloaded the current episode of Prison Break that we're going to watch tonight. I'm sort of excited for that. There's been a group of us who've watched season 3 together and now we've been keepin up with this new season week by week. It's fun to have this to look forward to every Tuesday but I think this may be the last episode of the series so "good bye" to this show. I know there'll always be others, but this one was sort of special in way because we did this way before we had internet. Also there are only a few more weeks till everyone leaves Sweden to go back to there own countries for good, or moves out of Delta house, or I just won't see these guys for weeks. Things are really going to change soon. It's sort of sinking in now. It's a good thing. I need some change right now.

Have I mentioned that there's snow on the ground? Yep. We got snow in November. I heard that it doesn't snow here much and it usually comes in January or something. Well, I'm not a huge fan of snow. It's cold and slippery. I'd love it if it were warm, like sand on Sunset beach. And there's this debate that snow is much better than rain. I'll agree to a point, but after the precipitate has fallen rain leaves a small trail while snow leaves a lasting impression that I usually can't wait to get over. The temp here is going to rise anyway. It's going to be in the positives tomorrow anyhow and all the lovely snow will be washed away by the awaiting rain that supposes to fall. It's not that I like rain, dislike it too, but I just prefer it over snow. This is a current opinion subject to change any second so don't battle me on this one.

Okay, I'm going to get some more stuff done for real this time.

Later tater.

Brave the cold!

2008-11-24T09:58:00.004-05:00

I had to come to the university to do some school work. Can you believe that it's 24 degrees today. I mean that's the high temperature. So cold. But I had to brave it to get stuff done. So much distraction at home, right? I mean when there's a tv going and a few people watching, what else is there to do? So cold, though. It's alright cause it'll be much warmer in a few days. It snowed a bunch too. I was just talking to someone about Hawaii just a second ago and I got a little jealous of all of you back there. I'm still really trying to get there this June. I found some cheap airfare back to the states which might be a good idea so i can maybe work? Who knows?

I think one of the major reasons why it's hard for me to be motivated here is that it feels that I've lost a good deal of my identity. I mean you are what you do, right? And I haven't been doing anything that I normally do. I haven't been riding my bike, I acquired a guitar very very recently, and other social activities seem so far from what I normally do. It may be a slight touch of homesickness but I don't I've every really had that in my life. If part of growing up is learning to deal with different situations then why am I regressing? Maybe I am growing up and I need some stability and I'm not getting that here. Everything, it seems, is up in the air. What I really think it is, now that I think about it, is that my needs are being met. I'm working on that too. Louelle is trying to get an apartment and I may room with her. Her dad is helping her and he's Swedish so this may happen. Finding a place is very difficult here.

I should get back to studying (I really mean starting). So I'll let you go.

Wish me luck.

What?

2008-11-24T08:43:00.003-05:00

I feel like I'm trying to be torn in two and I'm using most of my energy to keep me together. Such a taxing weekend. Things have definitely changed and they can't go back. And I'm constantly being reminded of the new situation. I wish the fog would blow away and I could see my true path. I'll just have to stay in confusion at least for a little longer. Just being drawn to something that could never happen. So close I can feel it but can never take that last step. My heart rate can't take it much longer. I need something to give.

Heart. Pounding

2008-11-21T06:10:00.002-05:00

You know those times when emotion seems to dictate every action in life? Well, that doesn't happen to me very often, but the last couple nights I've been over run. It's sort of exciting but I don't like it in the fact that I'm not in control. I'm not saying that I'm always in control but these moments are uneasy because of the distance from that control is greater than I'm used to. I think I'm more scared than excited; definitely more scared. But I have to experience life, right?

Road Trip, Baby!

2008-11-20T16:10:00.002-05:00

Oh, man. I know I'm not good at updating this thing but here's more. I think I say something like this every time I write something here. Any way, internet friends, here's the up side of the down low: Last weekend Leila, Jerome, Alice, and I took a road trip up to Gothenberg and Oslo. And, yeah, it was pretty fun. I was more excited about riding around in car. The US has such a huge car culture and I've only been in a car a couple times in the last three months, so this was sort of a big deal for me. I love road trips. This one wasn't that big. It was only a couple of hours drive to Gothenberg, where we stayed a couple of nights, and the ride to Oslo was 4 more.

Here's my view of the ride to Gothenberg:

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

We met up with Leila in Gothenberg later. So, yeah, Alice is from Latvia so she brought her car back with her like a month ago. It's her last night here in Jonkoping, btw. Anyway, this was our last chance to go on a road trip.

So we get to Gothenberg, found Leila, and stayed at a friends apartment. This friend of ours used to go our school but found a better college there. We met him at the big mall there so he could bring us to our place:

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

It was great to see him again. He was a guitar buddy of mine who has an electric. I'd borrow an acoustic and he would solo over me playing. It was great. So he lives with two other Iranians who used to go to school here as well. We dropped our stuff off and explored late night Gothenberg. We ended up going to a bar. we were all a little tires so just a few drinks, walking a round a bit, and back to the apartment.

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

We danced in the street:

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

The picture was taken late, but we did.

Here's a picture of Naheem on our way home:

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

so we get back to his place and the sleeping arrangements sucked. I slept on the concrete hard floor, not really sleep, but everything was sore when I got up. It was horrible. We were going to bring stuff to sleep on but the car was so horribly small that we only brought a blanket and a couple of tiny sleeping bags. Leila was disappointed because I was supposed to bring more but I was convinced to do otherwise. I really wish I listened to Leila.

But the next day i bought a guitar!

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

Well, this was the cool shop that I bought it at. Pics of the guitar will come a little later. I bought cause it was like 500 crowns cheaper than anything here in Jonkoping. That's all i really wanted.

After that we went to a Persian restaurant which was a very exciting thing for the Iranians. it was really good food too. It was my first time sampling this cuisine.

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

That was Leila's plate. It was really good.

After that we went to some discovery place where they had a zoo of sorts and other things. here's a few pics:

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

I'm noticing that the pics I'm showing are mostly of Leila. Let me explain that the other two on this trip are really really good friends who are practically joined at the hip. They're always together. So while they were together doing their thing, that left Leila and me to do what we wanted. I'm cool with that. I like Leila.

After that we were all very tired cause we all slept horribly. It also gave me a chance to play my new guitar, which was cool cause there were other musicians in the flat.

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

so that black acoustic is my new one. And that thing I'm holding is an Iranian drum that the guy with my new guitar owns. he's really good at the drum thing. At the time of the photo they were playing traditional Iranian songs. It was fun. Those guys were fun.

After that we went to sleep cause we wanted to wake up early to have time in Oslo after the drive. You know everyone we talked to said that Norway was super expensive so we bought food in Sweden to bring with us, and when we got there we barely noticed a difference. totally not worth sitting with bags of food around me for hours on our way up. So we get there and we didn't book a hostel before and it turns the first two we tried were completely booked. The next one we tried was in the best location, nearest to the center of the city, and we found a room with four beds. It was completely perfect.

Here's some pics of Oslo:

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

Can you believe they had doritos? I've been looking for those in Sweden for a long time. I also found Mountain Dew for like $4 per can.

We Also went to a museum statue place with a bunch of naked art:

From Gothenberg and Oslo trip

so that was the trip. we left for Sweden soon after those pictures were taken. The trip was good. The weather was fantastic. It was as good as it gets for that time of the year. Sure it was cold but the sun was shining almost our entire trip. And you have to realize that these places are known for being rainy and windy. We totally lucked out. Then we had a 6 hour drive back home. It went by fast and I was tried when we arrived. If I wasn't i would've gone to the switch party.

Wow. That was a long post for me. I someone appreciates it.

I'm out!

Here's my weekend

2008-11-04T06:57:00.002-05:00

Guess What! We finally got internet! It's been like three months in the making with multiple broken promises on the way. There've been a few sign put up by "the man" telling us soon, but that all turned to rubbish. So I payed for it yesturday (i went friday to pay but the place isn't open then) at noon and I had to wait till 4 o'clock till it started working. But once it started I've been off and running. I've downloaded a few movies, iLife, microsoft stuff, and the like. I've also looked at web pages. It's awesome. Rock band has gotten some songs. Oh, I found a guy who owns the drums and another guitar who lives close by and we've become friends. Mostly because I want the drums and this guys barely has any games. Here's some pics:

From Jonkoping

As you may have noticed some of us were in the halloween spirit then. We were there for a preparty. So one of those guys was Captain Planet, another a hippie, a zombieish thing. You can see that my face was black but I did that to put the emphasis on what was going over my head:

From Jonkoping

pretty sweet, huh?

I carved the sucker first and it looked like this:

From Jonkoping

live this in the dark:

From Jonkoping

It was fun. There's tons of people here who haven't done that sort of thing before. The whole halloween spirit, I'm finding out, is an American thing. It was sort of lame here. It was even hard to find people to watch scary movies with.

Here's an alternate costume. Me as a swede:

From Jonkoping

And lastly there was an animal party where we did an international cook off. I of course made some pizza and it was great. here's my creation:

From Jonkoping

There was a lot of food and my pizza was the last entre presented at the table after most of the other foods were eaten. We polished it off too and everyone was super full. Amazing party.

That's it for now.

Synopsis will be expanded

2008-10-30T09:39:00.003-04:00

Once again it's been awhile. Forgive me, baby. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I actually do and here's a very quit synopsis:

I carved a pumpkin last night, last friday was a halloween party that rocked and I went as a swedish zombie with super tight pants and tons of zombie makeup, I'm finally done with all the exams and presentations. this term I've got a class in the technical school and it totally blows. HUGE nerds teaching this class makes it the most boring class i've ever had. Maybe going to Gothenburg this weekend. More details with pics later. Short on time now and need to go to school.

It's been a stressful week

2008-10-18T02:18:00.003-04:00

So guess what happened? I'm here at the library on a Saturday and have been since 8:30 or so. The reason being for an exam I thought I had at 9. It turns out that it's 2 in the afternoon. let me tell you this place is a ghost town this early. It wasn't that bad of thing to get here this early. I get to study a bit more for the exam and get all the bandwidth I want, which can sometimes be fairly narrow. I am a little tired though. It was a Friday night with the club downstairs pounding the bass through the building. And I stayed home to hear all those bass notes while I tried to sleep. there was a party at a friends house that I really wanted to go to but couldn't.

So yesterday I studied, the day before was spent trying to do homework but got very sidetracked by other people doing stuff and inviting me to go along. Like there was a Dutch cultural presentation that pretty much had to do with cheese and people not talking about their country. Then I found out that the landlord of the building that I lived in bought us all tickets to a hockey game that night. It was cool. We won in overtime. I forgot my camera but there was a ton of picture taking going on. I'll try to get my hands on some of them. There's photos of me trickling down off of Facebook if you want to see more. I'll try to remember to take my camera places. After the hockey game we were wondering around Jonkoping looking for food. There was absolutely nothing open, except a candy store and we didn't want candy. So someone made food back at the building and we stayed up till like 4.

The night before was the celebration of a frenchman's birthday were a few french guys made dinner and everyone else brought stuff to compliment. Louelle and I bought a cake and it was soooo good. It was chocolate with more chocolate stuff on the inside. They got some good bakeries here.

Yesterday I took a break from studying and went to an after work, which is an all you can eat buffet for only buying a drink. They do this at just about every restaurant and club in town. They all do it at different prices but the food differs quite a bit. The after work I went to was at a sports bar based in Boston. The food is still very a Swedish version of American food. Like their pizza looks sort of what my pizza looks like but mine is way better. Their buffalo wings still lacked kick. It's still worth it when you're only paying like 50 kronors.

Last monday we had presentations to do in our class for our paper that we wrote on a successful innovation. It turned out that I didn't need to do all of it. That was sort of the original plan cause I'm a native English speaker, but Faustina did the bulk of it cause she wanted to get some experience cause she's never done a powerpoint presentation before. It all went fine for us, but there's this one kid from Pakistan whom everyone hates. He left our group alone but he asked very rude questions to pretty much all the other groups. This is him:

From Jonkoping

This photo was covert. What he's actually doing in this picture is looking up info on the net about the topics of other groups are presenting on. He's looking for hard questions to ask to rock the boat. He's a jerk and we all hate him. It's that he's a power freak. When he presented he got really defensive when people were asking him questions with points of views that were not succinct with his own. btw, he gave the guy presenting with him only one slide and he took up way too much time with his slides to a point where the teacher asked him to wrap it up but he still took like 5 more minutes.

From Jonkoping

Here's a pic of a friend of mine in my program. He's from Nigeria and this is the first time I've ever seen him eat anything in his life. And we've been out for lunch a bunch of times with groups from our program. It's rare. Savor it. His name is Olawale and goes by Wally.

Here's a pic of Cider, the cat we adopted from the side of the road who lived with us for a couple of weeks.

From Jonkoping

I should go back to studying.

Later

2008-10-10T04:33:00.002-04:00

Hi friends. there's always so much to say but always so little time/will. Okay, here's something I'm a little embarrassed about. there was this dude that came up to me on the street claiming that he lost his id and bank card and needed to get to another town before his exams. In hindsight this was obviously a scam. but at that point for some stupid reason I didn't question it and I gave him enough money to get back to his town. Don't ask how much, that's the embarrassing part. I explain my laps in judgment because at right before I met him I had finished a group meeting where we almost finished our paper and I was on some sort of a joyous high. Previous meetings have resulting in just about nothing. I was also super tired. I'm like always tired here, btw. Mostly resulting from a dance club right under our residence forcing us to stay up past 2 every night. Anyway so i give this guy some cash and we exchange phone numbers and email address. The guy told me that he was going to move to our town and that he'd pay me back later but I didn't think I'd see him again. Unfortunately he called that night to hang our and try to see if he could sleep on our floor. so I let him up because he says that he might have to sleep outside cause he couldn't get a train. so he comes up to my room and is a little drunk and keeps ranting about a girlfriend that he's broken up with. Well, he's a bit creepy and was very glad to see him go. Everyone on our floor was creeped out too and we were glad see him go. He called back the next morning trying to get back in but I wasn't there and wouldn't let him in even if i was home. By that time I pretty much knew I was scammed.

When I wasn't home when he called I was on my way to little town that's famous for making hard candy. the weather was beautiful, we bought some candy, i forgot my camera, we took a fairy to a peaceful island, and had a lovely day.

Another thing that happened was that I found out my camera wasn't broken. I think I mentioned it earlier, but I wasn't able to view pictures in the viewing screen in picture taking mode but could when just looking at pics. So I went to the mall here and it turns out that the person who borrowed my camera was drunk and tried to delete a photo and got into the settings and changed a few things. On the candy town trip someone dropped a camera and broke it a little bit and I went with them to fix it and this is how I leaned that I'm an idiot.

Here's some pics.

From Jonkoping

Here's my first pizza. I think I promised this picture awhile back

From Jonkoping

This is my roommate from Scotland, Euen. He accidentally cut the tip of his finger off while cutting some bread and had to go get stitches and the emergency room.

From Jonkoping

this is my bed. Since we have a tv in our room our room is pretty much the common room in the building. It's lots'o'fun. There have been small skirmishes over attempts to get optimal sitting position.

I'm resolved to take more photos now I know my camera isn't broken

Hey, Swedish

2008-10-02T07:32:00.001-04:00

toothpastefordinner.com

It feels like school now

2008-10-02T05:17:00.002-04:00

Man, where to begin. Did I mention that my little TV couldn't get fixed so I had to buy a new one. It sucked too cause I had to ride my bike out to the repair shop after they said they might be able to fix it. It took me my second attempt to find it and when I got in they guy told me that it would cost about the same to fix it as it would to buy a new one. So I decided to look around. I looked at a few stores and found some good tvs at decent prices, and then i found this german electronics store. It was huge, even by american standards. Bigger than a big Best Buy with more stuff and fantastic prices. they even had rock band set up and it was connected to one of the biggest televisions I have ever seen. Of course I sit down at the drums to show off my skills, really just to play. I haven't played in so long. Anyway, I was there playing the Nirvana song on expert as per usual. I pretty much rock the place. But here's the thing, when I turned around there was a lot of people who were watching me, who weren't there when I started. I fest sort of cool but there wasn't any reaction to anybody so I put the sticks down and wove my way out of the crowd trying to not to smile too widely. It was a little awkward. So I took a bus back the next day and got a 32 inch tv for the same price it would've cost me to buy a comparable sized tv to my last one. Good purchase and it looks great in my room. And the next day I figured a way to get Swedish programming in my room. So my room is pretty much the common room now, which is cool to a point. last night we were up to like 2:30 watching the third season of prison break. We have four more episodes to go. I'll probably happen tonight.

So there's lots of school work. I should probably be doing school work right now, but I wanted to update my internet friends. And one group is still a headache and the paper is due next Wednesday. I'm so tempted to just write the thing myself and leave the rest of the group in the dust. I know it's an exercise to get me prepared to work with coworkers in the future but it's still very frustrating.

Oh, and I lost my nice umbrella yesterday somewhere which is a real bummer. Seriously, i bought that thing for when we went to Europe a year ago and it was a good one. We had some good times together, mostly because I didn't get wet when I would've with out it, but now it's gone. It made me sad for a little bit. oh well, such is life.

So there you are for now. I hope it was good for you.

group projects blow

2008-09-24T07:05:00.003-04:00

It feels like a lot has happened since my last post but nothing seems to be at the forefront of interrestingness. There is a big one: I practially broke my tv and it sucks. I got a package from my parents not so long ago. There was a bunch of close and books but also my external hard drive. And when trying to plug this hard drive in I accidentally grabbed the plug to my tv and plugged it directly into the wrong voltage outlet. If you don't know much about differing voltages in different countries then tough. I'm not in the mood to explain it. Point being it fried my tv a little bit. It sort of still works but not well. When I wrongfully plugged it in a ton of smoke came flowing out of the tv. It wasn't even turned on. So I unplugged everything and now it's broken. I've got a phone number to a repair place and i'll try that today. It really sucks.

I'm sort of in a not so good mood because I just got out of a group meeting with people who are hard to explain things to. This is what the deal is: we're researching an innovative technology that has been successful and reporting on it, or at least that was what we were supposed to do. What we were doing was basically reading up on an innovative technology. You know what, I don't really want to go to far into it. But what happened was I had to rock the boat a bit and get our project going in the right direction. It confused just about everyone but in the end I think we're going to be okay if everyone pulls their weight. It wore me out. And they want to meet so early in the morning when we don't have class or anything. Okay, 11 o'clock isn't that early but the meetings slip into lunch time. That's not right in my opinion unless there's food present at our meetings. I'm just tired and hungry now.

One more things. I'm teaching little kids at church. 5 and 6 year olds. In Swedish. My first attempt was last Sunday and the teacher for the 4 year olds didn't show up so I had them too. the total number was only 5 but it was still tough to teach little kids in a language where I really have to strain to understand, especially the 4 year olds. It went okay, could've been better. Next week will be so cause I know what I'm up against.

okay, more good stories to come.

Points!

2008-09-17T07:23:00.002-04:00

Hello internet. I'm sorry to inform you that my health is back in the decline. It's okay, though. It's not as bad as it was before but I'm really missing when I could I could sing without restraint. I was going to go out last Saturday afternoon and test the waters of playing for money, but it was a no go. The sun shone and people were there. The friend that I was going to go out with slept in so we didn't leave on our scheduled time. There are other excuses but won't write them. The fact that the weather is turning angrier also pulls the tide against us. Mark my words, it will happen.

I'm not sure if you've read my other posts but a few posts ago I wrote that I was annoyed at the fact that some dirty, stinky liquid was flowing out of our trash in our kitchen. It happened again this morning and I moped again. This time though we cleaned the whole corridor and this time there's a "we". Help was there and it made it good. One cool thing though is when I was mopping the kitchen Bob and the Landlord came in. Bob is the super of our building. But I sure as hell got some points from the higher ups today. Score! They came in and we discussing our trash situation, which for us is just a big black trash sack. They were finally going to get us a can. I stealthfully got this information by knowing Swedish unbeknownced to the others. I thought it was a little rude to be discussing our living situation in from of a few of us using a language they thought we didn't know. but that's how it is where we live; they don't ask our opinions on anything.

I've been procrastination enough. I've got a bunch of work to do. I'm making American pizza again tonight. I'll let you know how it goes. All the sentences in this paragraph start with "I" except this one.

Bye

How could you say no to a face like that?

2008-09-15T09:34:00.003-04:00

Last Saturday I was on my way to a grocery store when a furry little creature ran across the bike path. A friend whom I was with almost crashed and I went looking or the animal. It turned out to be a kitten. Probably 5 weeks old or so. He was so little and it was very cold outside then and the cat was shaking. We hopefully did the right thing and just left it there. Just kidding. We picked it up, put it in one of our cloth grocery bags and went shopping. The tiny cat, then called Osker, became fairly restless and tried relentlessly to get out of the bag. I felt bad when I kept blowing in his face to scare him so he'd stop. After buying food we took him to the vet. They were barely any help at all. They kept us waiting for like an hour. On another note, while we were waiting there was a short movie that looped every few minutes and it showed a dog after it had been is some sort of traumatic accident all bloodied up, then taken to a vet and operated on. It was pretty disgusting. But that's how things are here in Sweden. On first aid kits it shows very graphic pictures of wounds that the certain bandages are for. Back to the vet. The only information we got out of them was the phone number for the police because they would take the kitten, not the vet. We thought that was strange so we left and tried to think of maybe someone else who would want a cat. We brought it back to our apartment and all the girls on my floor fell in love with it. Being a few days later, the cat is now named Cider, has food and kitty litter in her own room, and gets tons of attention from the girls on that end of the hall, the opposite side of mine end. One of the girls has decided to keep it. The problem is that we aren't allowed to keep pets. I don't really want to keep it. The main reason is that the cat smells and it lives in the same room that I keep my bike in. There may be a mysterious call to the police that a stray cat may be on my floor.

I also took my long board outside this weekend. Before this I used my board only to go to one end of the hall to the other. It's fun and I've gotten others to try their hands at boarding down the hall. A friend of mine, Dave from Australia, and I went to the bus station parking lot. It was fun. The roads are in good shape here but its getting cold. I'm not sure if it hit 50 degrees today. I went home to put shoes on (I've been wearing my slippers most of the time, a.k.a. flip flops, sandals, thongs, etc) and a scarf. I'm not excited about the cold. I've heard it doesn't snow much here but rather cold rain. I get shivers even thinking about it.

One last thing. I shaved my room mate's head a couple of days ago and it was very disgusting. He's the kind of guy who showers when he feels like, and no, it's not every day, or every two days. I'm not really sure how often it is but when I shaved his head he had a ton of flakes under the canopy. His hair wasn't that long to begin with, but oh man, it was gross underneath. I didn't say anything to him at the time but darn sure I washed my hands for ten minutes after wards.

"What did she say?"

2008-09-10T10:35:00.003-04:00

Today I had to explain a "that's what she said" joke to a French guy and an Iranian. I don't think they appreciated it as much as I did. Many times regional humor doesn't transfer over and it makes me a little sad. It'll take some times but I'll indoctrinate them to say the same awful jokes that Americans use to amuse themselves on a daily basis.

Speaking of America, I made an American pizza for lunch today. Swedish pizza has thin crust and weird toppings. Also I don't know how to make them that way. Neither American off hand but I looked up some crust recipes and had at it. Let me tell you everyone on my floor was stunned when they saw me at work. Mostly because I've never cooked/baked that much here, but it was something that sort of took up all the kitchen. Our kitchen isn't that big for the 15 residents living there. It turned out okay for my standards but everyone that tried some liked it. I put pepperoni, olives, and mushrooms on it. I introduced black olives to some people in the process. One problem was that the pizza stuck to the pan. I didn't oil it enough, apparently. It wasn't a big deal but I know I can do it better. So in a few days I'll have another go. I've got some pictures of my pie and I'll post those later. btw, I think my camera broke a little. It doesn't show what the lens in looking at on the view screen, but it'll take pictures and put those on the view screen. When I set it to video, that'll show up as well. I'm hoping it's a minor problem.

Well, the weather's been uncooperative lately. It's been cloudy and rainy for some time. There was supposed to be a bonfire last night but it was canceled. I actually couldn't go because I got stuck doing laundry. Doing laundry takes FOR-EV-ER (name that movie). They only got 2 washing machines, one dryer, and one drying closet. I think I've mentioned this before but it deserves another rant. The first annoying this was completely my fault. I put my detergent in and my close and I pushed the button to turn it on. It turns out that I didn't push it hard enough and didn't actually turn it on. So I come back a half hour later and I find my close on top of the washer with a note stating that I forgot. When I first got down there and saw my close I thought they were washed and needed some drying. They felt dry when i touched them and thought the washer was working really well. Then I saw the note and got a little mad. Why couldn't the person just start the washer? They were nice enough to write a note, so why couldn't they be nice the other way? I'll tell you. Getting laundry done in that place is a battle. If someone takes too long or doesn't use the machines properly they close are out of there. Another girl came down one time and found her clothes on top of the dryer. They were in the drying and drying, but for some reason, someone took her clothes out to dry their clothes. It could have been that the dryer stopped before the clothes were dry. This dryer is the worst possible dryer on the face of the earth, or at least I'm pretty sure. I gets the clothes really hot but it doesn't seem to do that much. I had clothes in the dryer and drying closet and I keep taking close out of the dryer to put in the closet to dry them faster. I rambling because it took me 5 hours to do three loads of wash. FIVE of them. Actually 6 and a half if you count the first time I put my clothes in a washer. I really hate doing laundry here. If they were American sized washer I could probably fit it all in one load and be done in a little over an hour. This country doesn't have laundromats either.

Now I'm a little tired cause I had a group project meeting this morning and lots of American pizza in my belly. I'll go read stuff now hopefully go to bed early.

How many states in the USA? No way!!!

2008-09-08T08:09:00.004-04:00

I've asked a ton of foreigners a very simple question and have repeatedly gotten the wrong answer. And it's the same wrong answer given by Australians, Germans, Portuguese, and more. My simple question is how many states are there in the United States of America. Unsurprisingly, Americans seem to be the only ones who know the correct answer (I had no idea that Australia had 6 until recently but I don't care though and neither should I because it doesn't affect me), but the surprising part is how adamant the foreigners are at professing their correctness. The number of states they say is 52. It blows there mind that the actual number is so round. I had a discussion late last Friday about this. Unfortunately I didn't have a map so we searched the entire building till we found this tiny German world atlas. My rivals counted the number of states a few times before they said they had to consult the internet. They were apparently too tired at the time to trust their data collecting skills. I still don't see how they all said the same number. I'm wondering if there's an American television show they've all seen that taught them wrong. It sort of blows my mind how they all say 52.

Saturday something very cool/American happened in the streets of Jonkoping. There was a cruise of old american cars. A cruise is when a bunch of cars usually numbered in the hundreds take over the streets to show off. This cruise included old American cars for the 60's. I knew it was coming but until one of my flat mates yelled down the hall about the goings on. A few grabbed chairs and headed to the street. It was pretty cool. Lots of old chevys, a few muscle cars, and maybe two or three European cars. A few of us wanted to be part of the action so we kept asking for rides. It took awhile but we got a nice couple to let us sit in the back of a cool sea-foam green chevy convertible. We were essentially in a parade, waving and being waved at. It was smashing. While we were in the back seat I was interpreter between the Swedes and my friends. They told me that there were 200 cars in this cruise and they get only one day a year to show them off properly. It was a pretty cool thing to be apart of.

I think I'm finally over my illness. Which reminds me: I came home for lunch today and when I walked into the kitchen I found that our garbage was leaking something kind of liquid that had crawled over half of the floor. There was also a couple of people in the kitchen preparing food and barely acknowledging it. I went straight to the garbage and took it out and proceeded to mop. I was sort of in a bad mood before this because my roommate lost his key to our room and we can't lock it cause he needs to get in too, and I had found out that the key copy place won't copy our keys. I was also in a frustrated mood earlier because I'm in a newly formed group that will present an IT innovation, the whole class does it, but I was the fifth guy in our group of 5 friends who need to get with another group. this is fine with me but the group that I with now works a different way that I do. We had a meeting on our project and just about nothing got done in half an hour. Anyway, the floor got clean no thanks to the others living there.

A couple photos

2008-09-04T09:26:00.002-04:00

From left to right: two Iranians, Leila and Nahim, a German girl, Julia, and a Mexican named Mary. The Iranians live on my floor, the german from two floors up and Mary lives 20 minutes away by bus.

From Jonkoping

Here are some friends of mine. Tsiory from France and Benny from Germany. We're at the lake enjoying good weather.

From Jonkoping

Cheers

2008-09-04T08:25:00.003-04:00

For lunch today I ate at a place where the Swedes think is better than McDonalds. It's called Max Hamburgare and it was terrible. The thing about hamburgers here is that every restaurant uses the same meat. Everything about it is the same: the size, taste, everything. They only change it with different toppings. There must be one company supplying the meat for hamburgers in all the non-fancy restaurants. Although the hamburgers in the nice restaurants fail to compare with a nice Carl's Jr. 6 dollar burger. With this in mind I've vowed to show my flatmates what a real American hamburger tastes like. I'm going to get a bucket grill from Ikea, season the meat of my choosing, grill it up, maybe saute some mushrooms and onions, and feast.

You know I was looking at some of my earlier posts and I've noticed that my writing was fairly poor and I want to address this. You see there aren't very many native English speakers here and we have people from all over the world with many many accents which makes understanding English some what of a challenge. So what I've noticed is that I've unconsciously dumbed-down the way I speak: taking out the idioms, using smaller words, using five words when I would usually use ten. That sort of thing. But now I'm trying to get back to my normalcy. Maybe teach some of my friends how we really speak in USA.

Another thing someone brought up was the most of the Americans here aren't what they expected us to be like. There's a girl from Texas on the floor below me and she was described as being very American. And I asked the person making this comment why they didn't think that I was "very American"? The reply was that I didn't act like what they saw in the movies and American television. I still haven't met this person from Texas but my knowledge of people from that state gives me a few hints as to why I may not seem as American. Also I don't think that average Americans study abroad. When I told everyone that education was free here they were blown away. I guess it's not common knowledge. But there's still the fact that schools in the United States are some of the best in the world. Many people I've met here agree completely that the schools in the US are dominant.

Another 2 cents. This school teaches in English, right? Most of the teachers here are Swedish. But their English isn't as good as I would expect it to be. I'm making a higher standard for professors. They translate many phrases directly from Swedish and it doesn't work all of the time. And pronunciation sometimes sounds like someone scratching their nails on a chalkboard. Take the word diameter for instance. During one lecture this word was used fairly often but the teacher put the emphasis on the first "e": diamEter. It may be a regional thing but it drove me crazy that day. Normally I wouldn't care so much but these are my teachers teaching complex ideas to multicultural students who will learn how to say these words and phrases this way and perpetuate false grammar. Such is life I suppose.

I was going to put some photos up but another problem with this university is that when everyone is on the internet it gets a bit slow. I'll get it done some other time.

It's almost made up

2008-09-03T09:34:00.000-04:00

HowManyOfMe.com

There are
8,378
people with my name in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Still Cruizin

2008-09-02T11:38:00.003-04:00

I can't believe it's September already. Time has flown by. It feels like I've been in Sweden for months, like I've figured out most things already. The days here have been fun like last Saturday we experienced the best weather here. The sun was shining with hardly any wind so my flatmates and I spent the entire day outside. It started at the farmers market where I got some nice pastries, then we went out to lunch at a nice place close to the lake where we ate outside, had some nice hamburgers, and just chilled for a while. We checked out the lake after that and just enjoyed being outside.

I think Monday I went to play tennis with one of the guys on my floor. He's really good at tennis and has been an instructor at times. In Sweden if one wants to play tennis or basketball or just about anything one must rent a court or something to play. I like the american style where there are places to play sports everywhere. Tennis was fun but i think I strained a muscle in my leg. it's not bad. That night there was a pajama party at a sports bar not far where i live. It wasn't the best party but I had lots of fun.

it's about time for me to go. Until next time...

Makin sweet sweet music

2008-08-29T06:40:00.003-04:00

So yesterday a German friend of mine, Benny, and I went to a music instruments store a few yards away from our dwelling and walked away with some stuff. Benny bought his very first guitar and I bought a nice pair of bongo drums. We rock. On our floor there are actually a lot of people who play guitar so Benny thought of this as an opportunity to learn, something he's always wanted to do. I agreed with him and helped him pick out a guitar. The guitar he got was a Hohner which is a german company and it came with a book to learn guitar which teaches in both english and german. It was meant to be. The guitar also came with a harmonica and one of the those things that goes around one's head to hold the harmonica up to the mouth handsfree. It's pretty rad. So I've taken it upon myself to help teach Benny and he's doing very well for owning a guitar for less than a day.

My bongos are sweet. I tend to play a lot of tahitian beats on it but it works and it sounds very cool. Our floor now has plans to play on the streets and get some money. It's gonna happen as soon as my voice comes back. I'm still pretty sick but slowing getting better. A Thai friend gave me some Thai medicine and I think it's working. I think I'll be good in a couple of days.

It's sunny today, btw.

Sickly frustratind day (and its only noon)

2008-08-28T06:37:00.003-04:00

I am sick. I think I have one of those sinus headaches or something. It's pretty stuffed up in there. It even hurts if I roll my eyes too far to the left or right. And I'm not sure if I've mentioned that I have a new roommate but yeah, not more privacy. It's okay the guy seems okay. He's from Scotland and sometimes he's hard to understand. Yesterday he was asking me something along the lines of whether it was hard rain coming down or not. He had to rephrase his question a couple of times before I understood. I am sort of sick so I blamed it on that.

So guess what, I outside the place where I'm supposed to show my documents to prove I'm here but they closed at 11 this morning. This is pretty lame. Oh and I had to get my password validated again. It apparently expired yesterday. Luckily I got to the help desk before the rush. It still took like an hour to get it done.

It's sunny today. maybe I'll go and lay in it somewhere. That's what the swedes do but it's only in the mid 60's.

I'm going to start taking more pictures. I hadn't really cause there's a bunch of Asians covering that but I'll post some soon. I promise.

Cloudy times in Jonkoping

2008-08-27T09:00:00.002-04:00

So I've been around a bit. I've figured out how to do most everything that I need to. I even got my computer fixed. Yeah, you didn't know? It broke on my way over here. Luckily there's a mac place here in this town that told me how to get it fixed. My hard drive broke some how so I lost all my data, so i had to buy a new hard drive and have that mac store install it. There was a store around the corner to buy a new hard drive so it worked out. I cost me about 1000 kronor which is about $120. Not bad. I also knew someone with Leopard for my OS so I got that rolling now. So I'm typing on my computer which is a lot easier than the weird Swedish ones with extra letters and different spacing.

My schedule is pretty sweet so far. Classes are only on Monday and Tuesday and the rest of the week is free. I'm sure I'll get a lot busier as the year goes on but it's pretty nice not to have anything substantial to do today. It's a good thing too because I, along with most of everyone on my floor, am sick with a bad cold. And on top of that my legs are pretty sore from playing soccer on Monday. I don't play soccer or really run at all and me being American and trying my hardest not to look like a complete fool I ran as hard and long as I could to help my team. My team lost but it was fun. Some of those swedes are really good. Two days later and I still sore. To add a little bit more to that: I did my laundry yesterday. here's the situation. The Delta house is where I live and it is newly renovated office made into student housing. Making an office building into a resident building takes some changing. One of those is the drainage. In the Delta house we have two washers and in the morning when people are showering, others doing their laundry, and everything else, the water can't drain properly so it pools in our laundry room and this happened a few days ago and they shut down our laundry room. Plan B is to do laundry over at an adjacent building's facilities. And this is what I did yesterday but this involves taking the elevator to level 1, walk through their corridor, turn into this green house looking building that connects the two dwellings, head down another set of stairs, down a long hallway to get to the laundry facilities. It takes a bit of time to get there and it really sucks when you have sore legs and coming down with a cold. I found out too that the washing machines take like two hours to complete and they're really small and there a lot of people that want to use them. laundry is not fun here.

At this very moment I'm at school in the business building. I'm here on an errand to show the school that I actually belong here by showing them my transcript, passport and other things. The weird thing is that it is now 3:14 in the afternoon on a Wednesday and I missed the office hours. The office closes at 2:30 and I missed it by 15 minutes. I think this is ridiculous. Every where in this school has very short office hours, like a three hour window. It's hard to get things done here. I'll just come back tomorrow.

So I got a new roommate the other day. I had lived in my room for over a week without a roommate and I was getting pretty used to it. Then one day while riding my bike home I found some of my flat mates who told me that I was no longer alone in my room. I was a little disappointed but it's alright. The guy is named Euene from Scotland. I really haven't talked to him much but he seems alright. He moved in Monday and I don't think he's unpacked yet. I'm sure it'll all work out.

So nothing too exciting, I'm sure this post is rather boring but if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.

I made it!

2008-08-25T06:50:00.002-04:00

Okay, ya'll. I made it to Sweden but it was one of the longest, most stressful trips that I have ever taken. Getting to Sweden wasn't bad it was taking the train from Stockholm to Jönköping that was horrible. First of all I brought way too much stuff with me, much more than everyone else from out of the country. This is how it went: I had a big suitcase (70 lbs) that everyone has and a rolling carry on (40 lbs)like a normal person, but I also had a travel backpack (50 lbs) and a bike case for my bike (65 lbs and large and awkward). This is a lot of stuff to be dragging around a big train station. So much in fact that I had to have help from very nice swedish people to take my stuff from one floor to the next because all of my stuff wouldn't fit in the elevator at the same time. And on the trains there isn't really a good place to put all this stuff so they were in the way of most people so I sat and watched my things when I was super tired from traveling and would've just rather've slept. But I made it and have gone through the introductory week which consisted of a lot of partying and boring lectures to get us ready for what is to come. My first class starts tomorrow and it's my only class for the week. I only have'em on mondays and tuesdays. so it should be alright.

Everything moves slow here in sweden in reference to paper work. it's going to take a week for me to open a bank account, and three weeks to reissue my personal number (ss # in the states)They're still doing minor construction in our appartment too that is taking way too long. I still don't have a place to do my laundry yet.

Sweden isn't a bad place. It's been really fun so far but we'll see how things are when classes start.

2 More Weeks!

2008-07-31T14:23:00.002-04:00

hello readers. Guess what! I've got two more weeks in this country till I head over to Sweden for s'more school. Time flows by like a ranging river sometimes. And yes, I'm looking forward to it but also a little nervous/scared and stuff. There's a bunch of stuff that needs to happen before my nerves settle down a bit. First of all I need to sell my car. Btw, the same day as my last post I tried to roll my window up by pushing the button and it sounded like it was going to go up but no, and now it cost me about $500 to fix it. Geez. Couldn't it've waited a few weeks. I don't really mean that. It would be cruel for whoever buys this car. If anyone of you out there in internet land would like a different car you can buy my '98 Audi A6 from me. It's a great car; my favorite one that I've ever owned in fact.

The second thing that needs to happen is actually traveling over to Sweden. I've done this a couple of times before and I've glad I have because I know what I need to do to ge where I'm going. But i also know that it's going to be a huge pain. You see, I like to ride bicycles and I want to bring one with me when I move. The thing is if I want to ship it, it'll cost me more that it did to fix my car window. And if I bring it with me on the plane it'll cost a lot less but would mean that I would have to drag it in its bike case along with my suit cases from the airport on a subway car to the train station, through the train station to get my ticket, then to the train platform, then onto the train, then off the train in Jonkoping. That might not sound like much but remember I'm dragging pretty much everything I'm moving to Sweden with. It's a lot. And this is probably what I'll have to do. Not really looking forward to that.

After that just settling in and hopefully I can get a job over there while I'm in school. And hoping that my swedish comes back to me. I've been brushing up a little and I'm amazed at how much I've forgotten. It's coming though.

On a different note I'm finally back to the cycling weight that I was at before my accident which is about 155 lbs. Although a week after my accident, surgeries and other sufferings I was all the way down to 143 lbs. Getting hit by a car is a great way to loose weight.

Another note. I've been wearing contacts for the first time in my life starting from the middle of last week and I've never seen as clear as I do while wearing my glasses. I'm going in tomorrow to see what they can do. It's just a little frustrating, that's all.

Weird day

2008-07-22T20:57:00.002-04:00

Okay, it's been awhile. I know. And there's been a lot that's happened too, but I really don't want to reach that far back in my mind to type everything noteworthy. As for today, however, I feel fine about explaining. Today was a little unusual. It started out fine; I went for a bike ride like i usually do. A 25 miler that I try to do a few times a week. I saw a group of emergency vehicles while out. They were surrounding an accident. One that involved a compact truck and a motorcycle. It looked bad. The moment i saw it I remembered what it was like when the few times I had been in the focus of those vehicles. The emotions flooded back. It was kind of weird. I kept going and made it back home fine. Watched a little of the Tour and was about to go and get my car washed when it started raining, hard. I didn't think much of it till I got out of the shower, walked downstairs to the basement where my room was, opened the door and saw water pouring out of the window. I immediately closed the window and tried to grab anything valuable off the ground. Mind you I was completely naked while frantically searching for things. A few electronics got wet. I'll try them later when I know that they're completely dry.

At that moment I didn't have time to do anything about the water because I had an appointment with an optometrist. I finally entered the world of contact lenses. Right now that world kind of sucks. I'm really terrible at taking them out. I was staring at the bathroom mirror for the last few minutes trying to take them our. I'm doing alright at putting them in but taking them out is a bitch. It's still an exciting world; I'm looking forward wearing sun glasses while cycling and such, but I'll be glad when I'm better at this stuff.

So I get home and the work starts. We pulled out a wet vac to try and suck as much water out as we could. It got a bunch out. I must have filled the thing up a couple of times. That thing sucks well. Right now we have a few fans trying to blow some the rest of the water away. I hope they blow as well as the vac sucked.

I got another scar. Well, a potential scar, probably two. Last week I was up in park city with my family for a week. I went down the Alpine slide way too fast, approached a tight turn, and when I went through it I went too high and rolled out of the sled. I slid for a while till I could get back in but by that time I had some good burns on my left arm. All my other scars on my right arm. You could say that I've got a lot of work to do to even the arms out.

so there you have it. Everything I want to type right now. btw, check out the new batman movie, it's ill.

Best Boise Bevy Broadcast

2008-06-07T13:30:00.003-04:00

It's finally June. There's some great stuff about June. First of all it was my last day of work at Hartvigsen on June 5. They totally get a summer break. It'll be my last day of work for a long time; I don't know when my next job will be, seriously. In a couple of months I'll be off to Sweden for 2 years and I don't know if I'll work there. I would like to, but only Sweden knows for sure. So yeah, I'm unemployed. It feels wonderful. So what am I going to do with all my extra time, you ask? Well, I'll get to that later. I'm still writing about June, remember? Another glorious thing that happened on June 5 was that it was my two year anniversary for when I dangerously hit a van and severely injured myself. I was feeling pretty crappy that day with a headache so I didn't do anything to celebrate. I should've the next day (yesterday) but that day was another special day. It was my brother's last day here before he left to go report for active duty or something. He recently graduated from the ROTC and now he has to do real work. June 21 is also my birthday, btw.

Back to my brother. His name is Greg. And since he'll lose a few freedoms doing army stuff full time he wanted to do some stuff before he got reeled in. One of those was to go to Boise to visit his best friend from high school. His name is Robby. So one Sunday Greg left and I wanted to go with. We have a brother that lives in Boise to. His name is Nick. Got all the names straight yet? good. Cause I'll stop all that. It's annoying me too. Alright. So we drive up there Sunday night, we see Robby first, then I get dropped off at Nick's cause that's where I want to sleep. I got the couch which really screwed up my back, just a little. But most people work Mondays, but not Robby, so we go dirt bike riding that Monday. Here's some pics:

That's Greg and Robby.

Robby

This is me, and let me explain some things. I was not expecting to go dirt biking that day. That is the reason that I am wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I had to borrow shoes from Robby cause I didn't know what we were doing. All my stuff was at Nick's and we didn't want to go back to his house to my stuff. I didn't even bring pants. Anyway, check out the wicked air I got on that little bike.

Okay. I crashed once. I was going off a jump, hit the breaks a little hard because there was a turn a little after one lands, and I hit some loose dirt right there too. I'm also not that experienced on dirt bikes. I had a ton of fun though. There was something good that came out of my fall. Because I didn't want to ride anymore I was able to take a bunch of pics and video of the other guy's stuff. We made a movie out of it too. We did it on Greg's computer and since it was his he made it crappy. I got the same clips on my computer and I'll make it super awesome and I'll post it here later. That is, if I have time.

That day after the dirt bike riding we also did some awesome stuff. We got cleaned up and went go kart riding. Something that I could do well. Not as well at Robby; he was a member at this place, but I kicked Greg's butt pretty hard. I also got some of the top lap times in that place for the month and stuff. It was fun and we were the only three riding. We didn't see anyone else go through those doors. After that we went to old childhood favorite PoJo's. It's an arcade place where we used to go when we were kids. Oh, yeah, I should mention that my family used to live in Boise for a couple of years. We were like the only people there at PoJo's too, which makes it kinda fun too. We all put $10 down and it lasted a couple of hours. I got a stuffed dolphin with my tickets. I think I left it in Greg's car, and now he took off with it (son of B!tch).

The day after that it was raining, and hard at that. But that didn't discourage us; not at all. We went frolfing (Frisbee Golfing) at a course they got there at a park. We hadn't done it before so we did then. We went and got the special frisbees, which are a bit different to throw than normal frisbees. So I really sucked at it. the worst by far out of the three of us (Nick is still working). I'd like to blame it on the fact that I crashed the previous day and my arm was a bit swollen and it hurt a little to throw the thing. So this park has ditches and things where our frisbees went a few times. It was all good though, it was part of the fun:

That's Greg getting his frisbee.

We all got emergency ponchos on too. I'm Red, Greg was Blue, and Robby had Yellow. What better way to attention as newbies. robby kicked butt at frolfing, btw.

After that we were hungry and what better place to go than a place that serves 1 pound burgers. You know, one of those places where if you finish your meal you get your picture on the wall. And yes, I finished my burger, but sadly didn't finish my fries.

Notice the difference in my brother Greg before and after. I think I could've finished my fries if we sat there long enough, but Greg wanted to do more dirt bikin before we left, that day.

Let me remind you that it was raining hard most of the day. So we got to the place where we were to ride, almost got stuck in some puddles, started heading back, got blocked by some cows crossing the road, see an opening in the clouds, and head back to the spot. I need to explain that Greg used to have a dirt bike but recently sold it and bought a bullet bike. He really missed his bike and really wanted to get it back but knew he couldn't ride much in the military or the base he was going to something. So he was a little more excited to ride than anyone else. There was some cool rainbow action going on too. No, not what you think. Well here:

Nick was there this time and he rode a bike for his very first time. I didn't ride though. We were heading back to Salt Lake and I didn't want to get muddy. There were more pictures takes but my battery died the pics were all on Robby's camera, we gave it back to him through windows of two moving cars. Awesome.

So we dropped Nick back at his place, I borrowed the first season of Dexter on DVD, which I finished last night. And left for Salt Lake. Good trip.

Good news all around

2008-05-10T15:28:00.002-04:00

Again, it's been awhile since my last post and I apologize. There's been some really great things that have happened but I'll start where I left off. I believe the last chapter in this series was when I was down in St. George going to see a WMMF show. So here it goes. We drove to Vegas for the show. Nice drive. We were all prepared to find where the show was going to be at. We were totally expecting a concert with a lot of people being there and according to google maps we drove into this little coldisac where there were a few people standing around and hardly any parking. This couldn't've been the place. So we scramble to find an internet connection which led us to a casinio where I had to dish out some money to one of those kiosks that charge an insane amount of money for the time you get. So I'm looking up the concert and I'm not finding a thing. No where was it posted that What Made Milwaukee Famous was playing in Vegas that day. so I keep checking and clicking on everything that led me to believe that there was a show at all and the more I read the more I thought that we were at the right place that that this was going to be a special show. We head back and we see a group of people dressed in black and we talked to them to get the down low. It turned out we were in the right place and the show was going to start in an hour or so. The show was actually a live internet broadcast. About a half hour before the show we go in and we were the only people there not the band or the stage hands. It felt weird. Others showed up a few minutes the thing started but the total fans not working or playing on stage was 7. SEVEN! It was awesome. It was like a private show just for us. We were standing feet from them playing with no chance of people standing in our way (except for the camera people). The best show ever. They played for about an hour, all their best songs, and afterward they all came over and talked with us that were watching the show. We had real conversations with them. The drummer took me on stage to show me his drum set that he bought a few months before, which was his first pro drum set. Here's some pics:

After the show Ashlee puked at In & Out Burger and we headed back to St. George where my car hit the 100,000 mile mark.

My grandfather's wife finally showed up after about a 2 years wait. She had to get her citizenship stuff in order cause she Filipino and they got married in the Philippines. Lots of forms and what not. When she got here she was really shy. It must be a big culture shock to move like that. I'm sure this was her first time here in the US of A. They stayed a few days then left for the warm weather of Las Vegas. The same day they moved out I took over the room. I cleaned and painted it the very same day

and it so far looks like this:

It's cozy and I like it.

There was an 80's party last weekend that was fun. My neighbor, Ashlee, graduated from college and this was part of her celebration:

check out my jacket. I got it at savers and look a bunch of white out to it. The skull on the back turned out amazing. I even surprised myself it was so good.

After the party we wanted to strut around in public so we went to a local Leatherby's to show us off. The whole place was staring at us. It was fun. A great night.

Some good news that I've been looking forward to for a while now was received last Wednesday. I was accepted to grad school in Sweden this fall. I was super nervous about it, but I got in and all is well. I'll be heading there in August. But first I need to apply for a student visa which can take months to get so I really need to send stuff into the Swedish embassy as soon as I can. But yeah, I'll be living in Sweden for a couple of years. You all have to come and visit me while I'm there.

Well, I'm off to a soccer game in a few hours and then to a comedy show. Should be another good weekend.

Even more updates

2008-04-06T12:13:00.002-04:00

So yeah. It’s time to update the blog again. We’ll start at Easter. This was a pretty fun time because both of my brothers that don’t live with us came to visit. Nick, my older brother, who lives in Boise, Idaho was flown in by my parents and Greg came all the way from Logan (an hour and a half drive away). This was the first time we had all been together for awhile, I think since last year spring some time. It doesn’t happen very often and it didn’t last long either. Nick was only here for a couple of days. Not a whole lot was planned and there were things that were scheduled prior to the visit that couldn’t be altered so it was a lot of hanging out at the parents place. We played a lot of Call of Duty 4, skated around the neighborhood, and played some Frisbee.

I got a black eye and split lip playing frisbee. Can you believe that?

Other than that we did stuff that we used to when we where little kids before we moved to Idaho: we went to ice burg.

It’s a little ice cream place where we used to go on special occasions when we were kids. They make the best shakes and malts there. I hear they make some great good there to but I have yet to remember that place when I go to lunch. I work a couple of blocks away. We also did a game of bowling where everyone bowled their worst games ever.

It was super fun though. I think my dad was the only one who bowled over 100. Since Nick was here for only a couple of days the week went by very quickly before he had to leave. We had pictures taken and that was that. We didn’t do much for Easter. We have one tradition that we followed which is to place clues around the house that lead from one place in the house to the next until the clues lead us to the Easter baskets. The baskets and the clues were put together really fast but no one really cared. My little, four-year-old brother was the only one excited. The rest of us were pretty tired from staying up late playing video games. Good times

The Friday after that I went to see an apartment that one of my friends had moved to recently. She moved out of her parents place and into a fairly nice little place about half an hour away. Once there we couldn’t figure out how to get rock band working; well, the problem was that we couldn’t figure out how the xbox connected to the tv. It was really counter intuitive. None of us smart guys could figure it out and was frustrating. So we went dancing at Studio 900. And I’ve gone dancing a little bit but once there I was not in the mood at all. The dj sucked. He played a few songs like three times with very little transition. I could’ve done better than he did. They tried a few rave things too turning off all the lights and such. They had a guy get on a ladder in the middle of the dance room and he threw out 50 1’s and a ton of fake 20’s. the place when crazy but I got me a one dollar bill. Totally not worth it though. The people were vicious; grabbing whatever they could. Someone knocked my hat off me and I almost got knocked down. But I got my dollar. This one:

I also bought this cd and am officially awesome:

My little brother Alec turned 4 a little while back. We went to Chucky Cheese's. It was packed but it was a lot of fun for Alec.

Another thing I did sometime was go to a 1920's themed party. So we went to a costume store to be cool like that. the party was at some rich girls parents house. the place was huge with old art work all over the place. It was pretty awesome.

So right now I'm in St. George, Utah staying at a friend's sister's place on my way to seeing a What Made Milwaukee Famous concert later this day. I've got more pics and stuff to put on my computer, so don't worry. I'll update you on this trip too.

Why?

2008-04-06T11:43:00.002-04:00

I just saw this video at macrumors.com and it reminded me of another reason why I don't like this country sometimes. This guy in the video is talking about how most of the developed world considers our top consumer internet speed to be the poor mans way to go. Our technology here in the states is not as great as it could be and the reason why is money. The people selling us our technology tells us that what we are buying is great and their top of the line stuff is the best. What they don't tell us is that they have access to much better stuff that they will release when they feel necessary to keep making top dollar. Most people just don't know any better and this is our reality. We are slaves to these corporations. Life can be greater than this but we are kept in the dark. And you know there isn't anything we can do; it's all up to big brother in D.C. but it's clear that those stuffed shirts are paid to go the way of the corporations. Too bad. That's my two cents.

Sweet

2008-03-15T18:59:00.003-04:00

I finally got it back.

My guitar has been in the shop for... lets see... I brought it in December 27 and got it back yesterday, March 14. Yeah, too long. I think the guy gave me a discount because of it. I brought it in to get new tuners and to get the electronics fixed on it. The major problem was that the guy had to drill holes in the head to fit the new tuners in. The problem was that the guy had get a friend of his to come to his house to hold the guitar while he drilled the holes. When I first dropped it off I was told two weeks. I called a few weeks later and the guy still needed to find someone to hold the guitar for him. Then weeks turned into months and this loser still couldn't find someone to go to his house to get this done. I'm not sure how long it took till he got it done till another problem arose. There were a few times I called when he was on his breaks and didn't get through. Anyway, I find out that he got it done sometime and had been trying to call me. And each time he called he kept getting someone else, and this someone else was getting a little peeved from what I understand. So I called him last week and he told me it was done but I might want him to work on the frets. I told him okay so my guitar would be in good shape. So I went in yesterday to get it and he showed me how the phone number wasn't working. Guess what. It totally worked. My phone was ringing and his jaw dropped. So I got it back and it looks great and plays great. It's like having a new guitar. I haven't played this one for a while now and its fun now. I hope I can get some new music out of it.

There's other stuff that's happened. Work has been going well. Except that last week a kid broke my glasses. Yeah, it sucked. I was getting a kid out of his wheel chair and another kid was a few feet away from us and he threw a ball at my head and caught my glasses right at the hinge on the right side of the glasses. It didn't hurt, well my patience really took a shot too. I was pretty pissed and the kid knew it and he was suddenlly really nice. Well I got them fixed the same day but there wasn't any fund anywhere in the school to compensate. Working for schools really screws ya.

Last weekend I took the funbus to Wendover, a town right on the Utah/Nevada border where people go to gamble. It was awesome. It's a great deal to. You pay $15 for the ride buck you get a ton of it back. When you get there you get this booklet full of coupons that make the trip: one for the buffet (normally $12), a coupon redeemable for $5 cash, a $5 coupon for starbucks, and a few others that I don't remember. So I want with Ashlee, Heather, and Sterling. Here's a few pics from the trip:

There ya go. It was a good trip. didn't gamble much. I'm not that good at it and didn't want to loose a lot of money. We did however look around the casinos and the town. It's a small town. We played billiards for a while and we were all pooped about an hour before the bus was going to leave so we just watched a lounge band while we waited. It was all worth it.

The day before we went my cousin Abby got married and I attended the reception at the University of Utah's museum of fine art. They set it up all nice. Here's my cousin and my sister:

Here's my fam

Nice time

I think right after the reception my neighbor Ashlee tried her hand at making a three layer cake and this is what she made:

It turned out well. The frosting was a little thick and was hard to put on but the cake was good.

That's about it for now. I'll keep my camera going.

Until next time.

More Fruit

2008-03-04T20:30:00.002-05:00

So Saturday last week started out with me not taking a shower all day with the thought that I would ride my bike sometime. this didn't happen because of all this:

I had to take my three year old brother to Primary activity where he colored in a book, got fingerprinted, found out his weight and hight, and had an Easter Egg hunt

Pretty soon after I got home I watched the live action pilot for the Tick:

And in the middle of watching this a friend of my little brother came in to start the project that we were to embark on. You see, my little brother plays the drums and is in a few bands I think. One of these bands had been in the local battle of the bands a few weeks back and they came out fourth. This was good enough for them to make it to state and one of the requirements was to provide a recording of them playing the two songs they were to perform. That day we were getting the tracks of them playing. It's kinda fun doing this but it's also a lot of work. Here's some pics of them while they're laying it down:

This is the lead singer, obviously, who had a really flemmy throat that day and was not happy with his performance but had no choice since the project needed to go forward. Oh, the songs were due on Monday so this was the only day to get his track.

One of the guitarist. I think his name is Alex. I've got a 50% chance of being right because 2 out of the 4 people are named Alex in this band.

This is the guy who wrote one of their songs. I thinks it's pretty good. this guy has mad skills on the guitar.

Here's my brother drumming. The pics were presented in the opposite order that they played their tracks, btw. I forgot to take a picture of the bass player, probably named Alex. But here we all are before we picked up the singer. This is us at Carl's Jr. where I got a chili cheese burger, chili fries, and a Captain Crunch shake. That was my payment for being the sound guy recording their stuff and mixing it. Damn good deal if you ask me.

I just looked at the pic. I guess the bass player wasn't with us and that there are actually 5 people in the band. After they left I was mixing for a while till I went to one of my co workers place to meet her husband. We talked about music, I showed them the stuff I did that day and what not. Here's my co workers husband and for the life of me I can't remember his name. am i a bad person?

That was pretty fun hanging out. Then I went over to another house and watched the Darjeeling Limited. Not sure if I spelled that right. The house is owned by Dan and my old friends from Hawaii were there: Steve and Joel as well as another roommate, Mike, the guy who is not gay (probably). Downstairs they've got a projector that projects on a wall that is made to be a viewing screen. It's tight yo. and that's joel in the banana chair.

After that I stumbled in my car and made it home without passing out. It was a long fruitful day.

Leap day

2008-02-29T20:53:00.002-05:00

I bought a hat today. Check it:

Almost got this one:

Got some chinese

And skated

Good day so far

Here come's the new year

2008-02-29T12:43:00.002-05:00

Hey ya'll. I can't believe it's been so long since I've been blogging. Here's down low on what's up:

Okay, if you remember a couple of posts ago I was reminiscing about Built to Spill. Well, a couple of nights ago I went to see them play. And. It. Was. Awesome. They played at this dope club downtown called the Depot. The place is hot. But not only where BTS the headliner but the Meat Puppets played right before them. If you remember the Nirvana Unplugged album you might recall the MP sitting in and doing some guitar work with them on stage. I know that Built to Spill is very underground but the Meat Puppets had some nice lime light in the day. And I saw why. They put on a great show. they even played some Nirvana covers.

So when Built to Spill played it kicked my ass back to the day when I loved them to death. They were playing all the songs that I forgot I loved. There were some long jam session songs going on and a bunch of people smoking weed everywhere. It was a good time. Then I had to wake up early and go to work yesterday and (barely) do stuff. But It was sooo worth it.

The next show I want to go to real bad is What Made Milwaukee Famous who are coming at the end of next month. I've been waiting for a while to see them, and since their new album is coming out in four days, they be touring an they be coming here. I'm even a part of their street team so I might be seeing their show for free. How'bout that?

Other prominents: I'm working at Hartvigsen. It's an elementary school for mentally handicapped kids. I work with elementary kids in a motor development class. We work on things like learning to put wait on their feet when getting up from their wheelchairs, learning to count objects, ball catching and throwing skills. All sorts of skills with all sorts of kids with various sorts of severity in their development. I thinks it fun. A lot of it is structured play with kids all day.

I almost became a flight attendant for Delta. They flew me out to Atlanta for a very short interview with like 200 others that day. I didn't make it but it was a fun experience.

I'm now driving an '98 Audi A6. Pictures will come later. I like the car, it's good to me.

I got these shoes:

Yeah, their kick ass.

My little brother and his snowman that he built with my dad:

There you go. I'll try to do better with updating stuff. Who knows how I'll do. Oh it's finally getting warm outside and I've been out riding my bike. No accidents this year so far. Lets keep that record going. That's to all you jerk drivers!

2008-01-14T10:34:00.001-05:00

2008-01-14T10:25:00.000-05:00

Built to Spill

2007-12-31T03:56:00.001-05:00

I tried to find a better clip with moving pictures but the best I could find was just the song:

But this is very reminiscent for me. This was one of my favorite bands back in the day and this is one of their great songs. I stumbled on an article somewhere about them and I instantly remembered my like for this band so I had to find their music again. So here's a taste. I hope you enjoy.

I like Christmas

2007-12-31T02:53:00.000-05:00

I just yawned and my eyes watered. It always happens every time I yawn and this time I wandered if that happens to everyone. Hmm. So there's a bunch that happens but where to start or do I even want to write about everything in my head or what do I want to share. Here's one thing, and I don't know if I've shared this before but here it goes: I'm try get a car, and I know this guy that's a dealer that goes to car auctions and gets cars cheap and doesn't mark them up very much. The thing is that you can only choose what's at auction. So I'm pretty much looking for something like a Honda Civic with good gas mileage and will run well. Here's what's happening: I also want a Saab and this guy knows it too and when he gets to these auctions he'll see one, call me up, and I'll tell him to go for it. He does but there's always something that comes up that prevents me from getting this car. The auctions are almost every Wednesday, not last because of Christmas, but the one before that this guy, Dan, was bidding on a nice '04 Saab 9-3 and yells out $7000. The auctionier hears $11000 "sold". So the car was supposed to go through the auction again after all the cars went through but didn't. So I'm still carless and it's driving me crazy! This Wednesday better be the day. My parents got a car from him the first week they called him. The very same auction as the story above.

About Christmas. It was great. My whole family was there except for my older brother who couldn't get two consecutive days off of work. But we were all there and every one of us got what we wanted for Christmas. I got some bike stuff that I've wanted for awhile. Tools mostly so I could take stuff apart and see how they worked. It's been fun since Christmas. My next brother down the line got snowboarding stuff like a nice wax iron he's been wanting. My next brother got a nice crash cymbal for his drum set. My sister got a nice longboard, nicer than mine...different, but more in what I would want; it has a fin on it one side that's just padding. It's pretty cool. And my baby brother got a bunch of toys, a little bit of everything. Christmas still isn't a big deal for him. I doubt he understands it. And did you know that he's so spoiled that every Sunday when we're in church my grandfather gives him new toys and a bunch of candy as soon as we sit down? Well...it's cleary not fair. Didn't mean that. But I do think that it makes getting gifts less special.

I just looked at the tree in this photo and I must apologize for it. We usually take time to make the tree look nice for Christmas but for some reason this year no one seemed to care. We've been busy with other things and never got around to putting more work into it.

Oh, my grandfather's wife should be coming here from the Philippines late next month or early February. I took way to long to get her visa. But when she comes he'll be moving out. He married her like a year and half ago, more, I think, and all the paper work and examinations and other bs has taken too long. I think his new wife is a little older than my mom. It's creepy.

Let me tell you a story about a couch. I thought it would be nice to replace an old futon couch that was in our tv room in the basement. It would be a Christmas present for my family so I wouldn't have to get them all individual gifts (I got them other stuff too). So I head over to Ikea with me mum to have a look see. We found one we (I) liked, went over the self-help area, and asked to get this sofa. So over at Ikea they sell their couches as a canvas and the buyer will usually pick out a cover they like to go with their decor. We'll come back to this. So we ask for help and a guy helps us get what we need to bring this couch home. This guy sucks at his job. He finds the place where people get the packaged furniture and tell us to take only one box when I thought it was in two total boxes, which I mentioned to the guy, but he reassured us that it was only one. We get home and I was right. We went back the next day to get the other box. No problem. We get home and we find that one of the major pieces has a rip in it. We take it back and git it replaced. No hassle. There is the matter of the cove,r though. It didn't come with a cover and they were out of the one we wanted. When we where there to get the ripped piece replaced we asked about it and a customer serviced guy, who also didn't know his job very well, told us to come back two days later and if they didn't have the one we wanted they would sell us the one in their showroom at a discounted price. We go back again and tell them what we were told. They didn't do what they said. I had my brother, Greg, with me on this trip and he sort of yelled at one of the young associates but those guys wouldn't budge. They told us that they were expecting more shipments of the cover want next week, which means that we need to call them up during the week, ask for the cover, and go over there again to get it. Do you see how long this paragraph is? Just to get a couch. We'll have to take a total of 5 trips to get couch all put together. It's actually put together now and it sits in our tv room, but without a cover. It's still comfortable but the cushions slide out because that's something the cover will handle. I'm so sick of this stupid couch.

Here's something else. I'm not sure if you remember how much I was looking forward to the game Rock Band, but they sent me the wrong one and after many emails they still haven't gotten back to me. But one day whilst I was waltzing around a Target store I came across an isle end where they had a big stack of game bundle for the ps3 and xbox. I was literally stopped in my tracks. I had been asking around for that game for a long time at many places and here it was at Target, just casually at the isle end. I had to buy it and it was sooo worth it. The game is all that I imagined and more. It so much more fun than guitar hero that words don't describe it. Come over some time and try it. It's awesome.

This is a terrible photo of my sibling playing it. If you look at the white couch you will be looking at an Ikea couch without a cover on it.

There are other stories but I don't feel like typing anymore. And I'll add more pictures later to show ya'll what I'm talking about.

Laser Cats 2

2007-12-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

Holiday treat

2007-12-14T15:48:00.001-05:00

chicken dance

2007-12-14T15:30:00.000-05:00

Big move

2007-12-13T13:47:00.001-05:00

So it's been about a month since my last post. Sorry to all you faithful readers. A lot has changes since the last post, probably the biggest change is my move back to Utah. It sort of came fast. I moved back here the day after Thanksgiving, mostly because I could take advantage of the long weekend and fly my brother out to Michigan to help me move. We got it going pretty fast. I made the decision to move out on the previous Monday, made all the calls needed on Tuesday, flew my brother out on Wednesday, and moved on Friday. Packing all my crap and stuff in between was fun with a holiday in there but I don't really have that much stuff. But it was enough stuff to where I had to rent a moving truck. Those suckers are expensive. You know if you rent one you have to rent it for a week with no discounts for returning it earlier. It kinda sucks. I moved to Michigan with my stuff in a minivan; far cheaper. Good thing a van hit me over a year earlier so i could afford it all. The ride was fun with my brother there. Much better than me doing on my own, and it was long; some of it really boring, like driving through Nebraska and Wyoming. Driving that van wasn't that cool though. There obviously isn't a rear view mirror so changing to the right lane takes some close attention. One time my brother was trying for the right lane and a minivan was there in the way. He didn't see it but I did and was telling him that when he was entering their lane. He barely got in there when the van started freaking out. He first swerved right to avoid us but he turned a little too much; he then over-corrected and almost hit us. I think he slammed on his brakes after that and the result was him spinning out. I mean a complete 180. It was pretty cool. It was my brother's fault but the guy made some poor decisions. My brother didn't stop but he felt real bad. We drove all the way to Nebraska and got a cheap hotel room. Oh, my brother has an Iphone which came in handy when finding that crappy hotel. It was cool for a bunch of things, mostly the internet, but I had fun playing with it on the road. In Nebraska I downloaded a couple of audio books that made the trip better. I got I am Legand, like the new movie coming out which will be interesting to see their take on the book. They're going to have to change a bunch of stuff to make that movie interesting. The book was good but I don't see it in a movie. The other book I got was I am America (and so can you!) by Stephen Colbert. He read it for the audio book. It was great. If you haven't read or listened to it I highly recommend it. Maybe for a loved one for Christmas that you could borrow some time (although the book speaks strongly against lending).

So I'm here in Utah again. I'll be getting a car soon. My brother knows this guy that helps people in need...of a car. He's this super hero guy who helps the everyday joe. This guy knows how much cars are marked up by every dealer out there and he tries to make a difference. This is what he does: he finds people that want or need a car, they give him the specs on what they want, then he goes to these car auctions that only dealers can go to gets cars for these people. The HUGE difference is that he only charges like $500. Dealers, on the other hand, mark up cars by the thousands. He's a good guy and he'll get me a good deal on a something next Wednesday. I almost got a fairly new Saab 9-5 but I forgot to tell him the price ceiling I wanted. Next time, hopefully.

There's other stuff too but I won't bore you now. I'll take some pics and post them soon too.

Later

My own little world

2007-11-15T23:44:00.000-05:00

It's getting cold here in Michigan. Today I walked to the grocery (food) store. When I walked out of my house I notice that there was some precipitation coming out of the sky. It was hail; small ones that didn't hurt but were accompanied by a little bit of rain. I walked nonetheless. I was wearing a jacket that I got from my grandfather. One that once belonged to an officer during world war two. I know this because I ripped the ranking patches off a few minutes before I left. Someone once told me that there was a law forbidding a non-militant from wearing those types of patches on military clothes out in public. So just to be sure I ripped them off. It was a warm jacket and this was my first time wearing it this season. As I said its getting cold now. The walk was fine. There's this band that I started listening to that I can't get enough of, Every Time I Die. I've been listening to them every time I go walking. Their sound is loud and fast, and every other music seems boring after listing to them. There isn't a band out there that I can compare them to but I'm looking. I bought these headphones a while back before we went to Costa Rica that use the same material as ear plugs to surround the headphone part that goes in ears. So when wearing them I can't hear very much outside my head. So when I'm walking and listing to Every Time I Die through my headphones I'm in my own little world. Wearing my warm jacket from WWII and enjoying fall is great. It's getting cold but there're things to enjoy.

Have I mentioned that I got another job? Yeah, I'm working at this vintage clothing store in downtown Ann Arbor and I love it. It's weird too. I got the job about a week ago, had two days of training and now I work two days a week, Monday and Tuesday, and I open, close, and run the store all by myself. I like it a lot. I get to meet tons of interesting people. Like on Tuesday I met this girl from New Zealand who was at the store her first in America. She was so happy to be at our store cause she thought everything was super cool. She was in love with American culture even our accents. I sold her a cool jacket. It was awesome. And at my job I play dress up all day. I've taken some pictures of myself wearing some clothes but I don't like any of the photos. I'll take some more next week and post them.

Rock Band comes out next week (the video game) and I'm excited. I've got it preordered and am so ready to play it. I hope I can get people to play with me. Everyone seems so busy with their lives now. But I'm okay if I have to go solo.

What to do? What to do?

2007-11-01T11:47:00.000-04:00

A couple of monumental things happened since the last time I blogged. Maybe not monumental but some fun things that happened. The first being that Halloween has come and gone but not without a bunch of fun in between. Last week Friday we had a party in our house, our house's first, and it went pretty well. Here's some pics:

this is me. Pretty scary, huh? The stuff on my teeth to make them look yellow felt like I had to brush my teeth real bad.

Here's Ellie. She was a rockstar.

The guy in the middle is Ellie's brother, Gus. He's a rockstar too. I don't know who those others are.

These guys are dressed like Marty and Jennifer from the Back to the Future movies. the guy has a tape walkman too. I thought it was clever.

The party was awesome. We had some loud music and danced the night away. I was playing the dj most of the time too.

For the party I made a guy, Alexander, out of some of my clothes that I hung from the banister. I took him apart today and forgot to get a picture of him. He was creepy, mostly because I found an old mask from years ago that I used for a head. It looked real enough to make your heart jump to see him when not expecting it. After the party we took him down and did more scaring with him. First I think we put him Liz's bed, under the covers so you could only see his head but only from looking straight down at him. That night when she came home she knew something was there; not really believing that it was a person, but not really disbelieving it either. She threw her bag at it just to make sure, but she said she was too scared to take the blankets off.

Alexander then found his way in Ellie's bed. I don't remember if she got scared that time. But after that Ellie threw Alex over the railing to the ground floor. I picked him up and positioned him in the corner of the tv room where he creeped everyone out. I put him in a curled up position to make him look a bit more real. It looked real enough to make your head turn and wonder for a split second if he was going to eat you. It was here that he had the most effect.

His next move was to Ellie's closet where he stayed for a few days, I think. It kind of creeped her out. She then put it in my bed where it had zero effect and I took him apart today. He was a fun guy for not being able to move.

The other monumental thing other than Halloween was that Guitar Hero 3 came out last Sunday. Ellie's brother, Gus, who is shown above as the other rock star, bought it that very Sunday and brought it over to our house.

Unfortunately Gus doesn't own a gaming console and his love for Guitar Hero was so great that he had to play it that very day. His only solution was to buy it for someone else's console and come play it whenever he can. It's cool for us that live here because we have Guitar Hero 3 in our house. The game comes out for computer sometime next month, and if I don't buy Gus's game Gus will take it in for store credit and buy the computer version of the game. I'm up the air about buying it. Guitar Hero is a fun game but I'm waiting for Rock Band, which is very much like Guitar Hero except it adds drums and vocals to the mix. One dilemma is guitar compatibility: both Rock Band and Guitar Hero have their own guitars that work with their games and I'm trying to figure out if they are cross compatible, i.e. if Guitar Hero's guitar will work with Rock Band and vise versa. If they are compatible I think I would buy Gus's game. That way I would already have a guitar for Rockband when it comes out. I'm definitely going to buy Rock Band and the bundle that it is selling comes with the game, drums, one guitar, and a microphone. The bundle could use a second guitar to play the fourth part, and acquiring it through Guitar Hero wouldn't be bad. It's sort of cheaper to buy guitars in a bundle cause it's a bunch cheaper that way. Games are usually $60 and the guitars are between $60-80. Guitar Hero 3 bundle was $100 for the game and the guitar. The thing is though that I don't know the compatibility yet. Neither company has come out and announced any compatibility. The other thing, though, is that Rock Band's guitar is supposed to be much cooler than Guitar Hero's: they made the guitar look and feel more like a real guitar and theirs can do more on their game. So if I got a Guitar Hero guitar it wouldn't be able to do all the cool things that it could on Rock Band. What to do?

My hand hurts

2007-10-23T19:11:00.000-04:00

There was one thing that I forgot to add about Ceder Point: while there i was wearing a shirt that lots of people took notice of. During the day I saw tons of tons of people staring at my chest. I bet you're wondering what they were staying at. Here a link to the shirt:

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/gallery-panflute.php

What I wanted to add was that while in one of the large lines for the newest roller coaster they got there I was stopped by another patron in line saying something along the lines of this: "Hi. I've read your shirt like eight times and I have to ask you what a panflute is."

I would try to describe it but I'd rather just show you by pointing you to a panflute shop in the amazing internet:

http://panflute.net/shop/index.html?http%3A//panflute.net/shop/main.html

You don't need one, btw.

I had a little mishap on my bike today. The weather was a bit foul today, raining most of the morning, and I had an appointment with my financial adviser. I didn't think I was in any danger but things just seem to happen when you least expect them to. I had to travel down state street where there's a decent shoulder/bike lane and out of nowhere my front tire slid to the left side hurling me to the ground. The first thing I noticed was that my head had hit a two-fist-sized rock. Don't be too alarmed. I was wearing my helmet. But I hit this rock pretty hard and I was surprised there wasn't any serious head wound. My bell was rung pretty hard. I also sprained my thumb on my right hand. This seems to be the only lasting injury that I acquired. The sprain is kinda bad, but I'll be over it soon. After I fell I got back on my bike to go to my appointment.

The appointment was the one where I actually wrote out checks to get my investments going. I'm excited. I wrote out bigger checks that I would have ever dreamed of writing while still 26 and not bounce. I'm really hoping this is a good move. I'll have to wait years to really know, but I'm optimistic. At least I think I think so.

Back to Ceder Point!

2007-10-22T17:47:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I went on a 40 miler on my bike. The thing was that half of those miles were heading into a 20mph wind. Another problem was that I wasn't planning on going that far and hadn't eaten very much food the last couple of days. Getting to that half way point was tough but turning away from the wind was amazing. But by the time I got home I was super tired, so tired, in fact, that when I got home and laid down to do my stretches I feel asleep. I went at it a little too hard. While down something weird happened; I remember hearing snoring and I thought it was one of my housemates in the next room, but it turned out to be me.

The day after that we went to CEDER POINT! It was awesome. And it was really hot for October, around 75 degrees or hotter. I'm not sure how hot it got, but it felt like summer. It didn't matter though, cause it was super fun. We went on a bunch of roller coasters. My favorite is Millennium. This roller coaster starts out with this huge drop of 300 feet and continues for probably a couple of minutes with a bunch drops and loops and pure fun. It even makes people's nauseated stomachs feel better (based on a case study [you know who your are]). We went down there because Ceder Point is doing there Hallo-weekend thing where the theme park is Halloween themed and there were some discount tickets. We jumped on it and it payed off.

And Tomorrow I'm meeting with my financial adviser who's going to invest my money into a bunch of mutual funds. I'm excited about it but also a little nervous, mostly because I'll be writing a huge check over to this guy that I don't know that well. And I've never had this amount of money or even close to this amount of money. I'm basically jumping into foreign territory. And I hope I'm not going to be one of those people that check the ticker every minute. Just slap me if I do. Maybe.

Back from the rich coast

2007-10-17T23:26:00.000-04:00

Guess what? We went to Costa Rica for the weekend! Why? Because it was cheap! Ellie found an amazing deal to go down there for four days, flight and hotel, for under four hundred clams (under 200,000 colons [Costa Rican money {Christopher Columbus' last name in Spanish}]) and, boy, was it worth it. We stayed in San Jose which is sort of in the middle of the country which means that we had to take day trips out to other pieces of the country. We arrived Friday night after only about six hours on two planes and one layover. Tired and hungry we left our hotel in search of dinner. Unfortunately we didn't have any colons at the time and didn't know any Spanish, or very little Spanish. So we walked around a little bit and decided to eat at one of the many Burger Kings we saw in the country. We made that decision based on the fact that they took my master card. It was a bad decision; the meat tasted weird, so after that we didn't eat any more American based fast food.

Day two we went our to the beach. Because we didn't know any better we took the scenic route, which wasn't bad, but slow. By doing this we saw a lot of small towns and went over a bunch of mountains and things on sometimes very scary roads including this bridge:

We safely made it to a beach but the sun lazily didn't show up

The rain started falling and it chased us back to the car. It did it's damage cause we were soaked by the time we got back. We thought there was damage on the rental car we had too cause when we started driving the whole car would start shaking. We had no idea what was going on. It wasn't a flat tire or anything obvious to two people who don't know much about cars. We looked pretty hard around the car and couldn't find anything so we decided to find the nearest office of the rental agency. But on the way Ellie, who was driving, noticed that the hand brake was still on. I laughed and laughed. She didn't so much, but it was still pretty funny.

The next day we went to see a volcano. The roads going there were friendlier than the ones from the day previous so we got there in good time. This day was sunny and it got hot and humid. It was better than rain though. Here's some pics:

Here's the volcano. I've been told that we were lucky to see the top of it. Most of the time it's said to be covered by clouds. So we were happy.

We drove to the base of it in the national park and hiked around to a recent lava flow.

It was pretty cool. It was also nice to walk around a bit cause we were in the car quite a bit to get to these places.

After we got back to San Jose we got hungry. It happens. So we look in a travel book to find a good place to eat and head out to find it. The thing about San Jose is that they don't name their streets; they do number them but they don't post those numbers often enough to know where one stands. It took awhile but we but we found the place we were looking for (it was raining pretty hard, btw) but it wasn't what we thought it would be (it was a crappy casino restaurant) so we went down the street and found an Irish Pub. It looked fine inside. I ordered a Reuben sandwich thinking I was going to get a hearty piece of food. I have never been more wrong in my life. It was the worst reuben ever. I don't even want to talk about it, but suffice it to say that it only had one thin piece of meat and no sauerkraut. Maybe that was the night before, but it happened and it sucked.

Finding stuff in that town was hard. I just remembered that the reuben was the night before. The volcano night we hired a taxi to take us to a restaurant we saw in the book. So we go down to the lobby of the hotel and ask for a taxi. Somehow we get some guy who wants to be our taxi (not really a taxi) and we're trying to tell him where we want to go, but they don't name their darn streets and they don't assign numbers to the businesses. He still wanted the address. So we did a lot of pointing and we finally got through to each other and we were off. It was kind of weird, and I'll admit that i was a little scared when he took us down this dark alley way in the opposite direction we wanted to go, but we soon got around to where we wanted to go. We didn't find our restaurant but found a good Italian place.

So now it's Monday, our last full day in the country. We were a little tired of driving so we spent the day walking around San Jose. I bought a Costa Rican bike jersey with bike shorts as my souvenir. Ellie got a bunch of stuff to for her and her family and friends. It was a nice day, not too rainy, but nothing touristy was open, like a few museums that we wanted to check out. It was okay, we had fun walking around checking out the local shops.

That's basically it. I did buy the new Stephen Colbert book and read it on the trip and I do declare that it was a good read. It gets my seal of approval.

thanks for reading.

Costa Rica, Baby!

2007-10-10T11:05:00.000-04:00

So I finally got some money from getting hit by a car and I bought a TV. Check it out:

So that's our living room. Let me tell you the tv is awesome. I've been told that its a guy thing but those who have seen this thing appreciate it. It's accepted unisexually. I got the full high definition of a beautiful 47". I love playing my PS3 on it. The games are sooo cool. I was playing a regular tube tv, not too big, and the difference is night and day. It's so rad. We rented Kingdom of Heaven from Blockbuster the other day and the picture is amazing. I love it.

And this weekend I'm headed over to Costa Rica with my friend, Ellie. She found some great deal and we signed up. We're going to be there from Friday, this Friday, to Tuesday I think. I'm excited. The weather is supposed show us some T-storms but I don't care. We're going to Costa Rica!

I'll take tons of pics, Ellie will too, and we'll be happy to show anyone who wants to see them. It should be great.

I've also had the thought to buy a truck out here for the winter. It's like 48 degrees outside now. So I would buy the truck now and use it to bring my stuff over to Utah where my parents live before I leave for Sweden, business school. And one night I was lying in bed and thinking about getting a truck, I was supposed to go look at one the next morning, and I was thinking that I don't really want a truck. I'm not really of that persuasion. I had also talked with a brother of mine that has a connection for getting vehicles for fairly good prices. There were a lot of things going through my mind that night and I had one of those epiphanies where I thought that it might be better for me to move home. There were a ton of pros and cons that I don't want to get into now, but it's still a viable option that I'm thinking about. so who knows, I might go back to Utah soon.

Money!!!

2007-10-03T15:37:00.000-04:00

Man, I can't believe it's October already. September raced by. So guess what? I finally got some money from my bike accident. That's right it's almost all over. There are a bunch of bills to pay and the lawyer is trying to get those dollar figures lowered so I can get more money later. But the settlement is all over, no more negotiations or anything. Soon all the bills will be paid and I can say goodbye to all the bad stuff that this has caused.

So what am I going to do with the money, you ask? Well, there isn't really much that I want, other than invest it so I can save for whatever life throws at me, but there is something. I'm told it's a boy thing, but I've been looking into getting a big, flat-screen tv. The main reason i want one is because I have a PS3 that doesn't look that great on a tube tv. Plus if I get one then we can watch movies and sports in HD and we could throw parties here to watch the Office or whatever. So I've been reading a bunch of stuff and decided on getting 1080p tv that's 40 inches or more.

After reading a bunch of stuff online I went to Sam's club to look at some. It was dangerous. I came really close to buying one. It was 50" and would've been awesome to play stuff on. I even asked a guy to get it for me, which would've entailed getting a forklift and pulling down off of some high shelf. During this time Ellie and I discovered that the box would definitely not fit in her car. So we told the guy and he said it was okay, cause if we wanted it we would have to wait a while to get it access to the forklift and everything. So that was the day the check came in the mail and I was a little sad that we drove home without the spoils. But it gave me time to look around and become more educated.

Today I rode my bike over to BestBuy to ask questions and to see if what I was reading had any truth to it. Once again I got really close to buying one. I was shown more of the capabilities and the difference between 720 and 1080 and getting to know the other brand, or at least seeing them. I actually told the sales guy that was helping that I wanted to buy it and have it shipped to my home. He was helping others as well as myself and that's what made him loose his sale. When I was looking at other stuff I remembered that I could probably get a really good deal on the same kind of tv at Sam's. I felt bad to not buy from that guy. I was there talking to him for at least a half hour. We were talking about gaming and other stuff too. The guy was cool. So I'm opting to save a few hundred dollars by opting for Sam's. I think it was a good choice, but it wasn't fun to tell the guy that I didn't want the tv anymore. I tried to come up with excuses but I know he knew that I didn't mean what I said when I uttered them . So I've emailed Liz, the other girl that lives with me, to see if she could call her dad and have him drive us over to get a tv. It should be good.

Another thing that I'm thinking about getting is a truck. yeah, a truck. I know, and you're right. I'm not really a truck guy. But here's the thing: I'm planning on moving in less than a year and I don't want to rent something to do it. I also need something for winter. So I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. It would be great to have the utility of a truck. And if I go to Sweden next year my family could use it. They've used a minivan for everything that a truck would be great for and this would help them out. So I'm going to look at a truck on Saturday morning to see if its in good shape. And right after that I'm going to the Michigan game (my first).

So things are going well. I'm glad to have money now. I highly recommend it.

good future?

2007-09-26T23:59:00.000-04:00

I figured my resting heart rate recently and couldn't be more pleased: 48 bpm. It's finally getting back to where it used to be. You know, before the thing. The rest of me isn't back yet but I'm not dead yet so I'll keep working on it.

But speaking of numbers, I should be getting a check in the mail with a bunch of'em. Last week I got one check that I couldn't keep. It was made out to me but it needs to go to a bunch of things; my lawyer and bills and things. So I had to sign it as well as a few other documents. One thing I had to get notarized which required a trip to the bank. While I was at the key bank where I do business the guy who had the fancy stamp noticed that i was going to get a great sum of money. We started talking a little about investing. Now, I really don't know much about this stuff so I pretty much sat there and absorbed a bunch of stuff about mutual funds, stocks, etc. I thought it was interesting, so interesting, in fact, that I made an appointment with another guy who knew more that this guy did. This meeting took place yesterday. I met with Eric, who is an employee of Key Bank as well as other places. He gave me the skinny on mutual funds and threw a bunch of numbers that made me excited about investing money. It came down to this: if someone has some money that they can hold off on spending for more than a decade then if they invest that money they can make a lot more money. There's risk and stuff but stuff generally goes up over the long run. so now I have another appointment with eric and we're going to start this investing thing. With that said I it's obvious that I'm finally getting some cash very soon. It's finally happening.

Another great thing that's happening that I'm excited for is that NBC's the Office is starting up its fourth season tomorrow. My friend, Ellie, bought not just seasons one and two, but three as well in a lovely three package pack of all the available Office seasons. We finished watching season three last night and very ready for what's to come. Will Pam and Jim finally get together now that the other obstacles are taken away? What role with Ryan (the temp) play?

Other than that I'm noticing that Michigan is starting to cool off. I hear from a lot of people that they love the Fall, but what I'm thinking when they say that is that this is just a short step to Winter. I've heard the horror winter stories and I'm wondering how much warm clothing I'm going to need. I prefer summer. I love being war, hot even, I really don't mind. I'd much rather have that than freezing, humid cold. I can get through this but we'll see how miserable it'll be. stay tuned.

Good things to come

2007-09-16T17:15:00.000-04:00

Hey blog family. Let me tell you of a great example of resilience -- my current tube of toothpaste. I brush my teeth at least once every day this tube keeps on giving the goods. I bought a tube probably a month ago expecting it to give out but it hasn't happened, but everyday when I try to squeeze some more of the stuff out it keeps on coming. I wish we all could be more like my tube of toothpaste (You can quote me on that).

Not that much new going on. I have, however, starting my bike on longer distances; I found a great 40 mile loop that I've been riding. It's from here in Ann Arbor over to Chelsea which is 20 miles a way the route I go, then up to Dexter (another 10), and back to A2 (the last 10). It's pretty cool. The ride is more backroads which are a lot less trafficy than the road linking Dexter and Ann Arbor. These are roads the I love riding on. They remind of the roads that I used to ride on when I fell in love with riding my bike long distances way back around Fruitland, Idaho. So I've done this ride twice before and last week I racked up a 100 mile week which I haven't done since before my accident. So I'm happy that my body can do this stuff again.

A few days ago we took another trip to Ikea, you know, the big Swedish furniture store that most people love for their stylish northern European designs as well as low prices. I got a few things that I've been wanting for a while, one of which is another couch (loveseat really, but I'd rather write loveseat in parentheses) for our ground floor TV area. I got the cheapest piece of sh!te they got. It was only like $150 with no color options and it's not the most comfortable thing but I like it anyway. The back to the thing is nice and firm and gives good support for trying to sit up, which I really like. I also got a couple of rugs, and a lamp. One rug for my room and other for the same TV area. I made me happy getting that stuff so we can make our house a little more liveable and less like a college house.

Not much else. Did I tell you guys about my idea of going to business school in Sweden? Yeah! I've even emailed a school there and they wrote me back that they won't need a GRE or GMAT score and that they're increasing the number of students from the US. I think it sounds great. I wouldn't need to pay for tuition, but I would have to pay for room and board on my own. So I'm going for it. I want to do business school sumwhere so why not sumplace cool? If I would make it in that school I would probably do my best to try and live over there too. I love it there and I think it fits me more than the US does. But we'll see what happens. Applications will be accepted at the beginning of the year which is when I want to apply and hopefully I know soon after that of whether I get accepted or not. Cross your fingers.

Sum more good news is that my settlement with the other guy's insurance over how much I'll be getting is just about over. I'm talking about finally getting cash money for getting hit by a car. The day is almost there. I can feel it. All the bills will be paid and I'll have some financial freedom. It feels good.

Labor Day is awesome

2007-09-05T22:38:00.001-04:00

There this guy at Smithy, the place where I work, that has been there for a couple of weeks and I found out he was a guy yesterday. I seriously thought he was a woman for two whole weeks. Here's the deal though, I haven't really had any contact with him the whole time, I just passed him in the warehouse there and I'm stationed mostly in an office. The reason why I thought he was a she was because he was so fat and the clothes that he wore were very androgynous. He also had longer hair. But the kicker was that he was fat. When a person gets really big they tend to lose their gender or the characteristics of their gender. I think it's sad. The way I found out the truth was because I was working on something in the warehouse and this guy walks near me and was looking at what I was doing, he said mumbled something under his throat in a deep voice, and he had stubble. I really hope he's a guy, not really. More for me being right than anything else. With the evidence that I wrote down the verdict isn't that conclusive, is it? I'll keep working on it.

On another note Labor Day weekend kicked ass. Liz, another girl who lives in the same house as I who is also a good friend, invited me, Ellie, and her boyfriend Ryan up to her family cabin by Hubbard Lake somewhere in Northern Michigan. It was awesome up there. The cabin had a bunch of beds, a pool table, and some grand parents there that rocked. The grandma kept making tons of great good that we all constantly ate. I'm sure I gained a few pounds from it all. The lake was fun. We did some tubing, water skiing, frisbee in the water, swam, and found a platform that we could almost tip over with all four of us standing on one corner. A few rounds of king of the platform was played which gave us a few injuries. I got a bruise on my left arm from my elbow to my wrist from falling on it and then dragging it on the platform till I slid off. It still hurts, but I'll be okay. Ryan got kicked in the balls accidentally, and Ellie bled in a couple of places, all in good fun, of course. It was hard to leave but by the end of the weekend we were all sore all over and burnt in other places. The weather was great most of the time too, just some strong wind on Sunday. It was all pretty great. Here's some pics:

Great stuff.

I've also heard from my lawyer and he says that he and the other person's insurance company are now negotiating on a final settlement sum, which means it will all be over very soon. All the bills will be paid and I'll get some money.

Right now what I want to do most is go to business school in Sweden next fall. There this school that doesn't want a GRE or GMAT score and is increasing the number of US students for 2008. I'm going to shoot for it. Wish me luck.

There more stuff going on but I don't feel like typing about it right now.

Peace.

Nice weekend

2007-08-27T14:11:00.000-04:00

Man I hate stupid cars. I just got back from another ride and while out there there was a car was a little in front of me and turned on his turn signal so I slowed down so he could make his turn. He was slowing down too and we got to his turn and he had plenty of room to make his turn and I was stopped on my bike so he could go. He didn't. He was waiting for me. So I went even though I was letting him go. He shouldn't've gotten in front of me and turned on his signal. I know that he was being nice and if I were a car he did the right thing, but at the time he pulled up right in front of me and turned on his signal. Most times cars don't really see me and so I'm the one who has to watch out for them. Another reason why it was frustrating is because I was pretty tired and has some good momentum and this guy completely robbed me of it on my way up to another hill. It was a good ride otherwise.

A couple of days ago I finally beat Resistance: The Fall of Man on my PS3. I had the game for a while now and it finally got done. I was a little proud of my self but it was a lonely victory. I would tell people and no one cares. I really don't expect them too, really, but it was something that took me months to do, not working consistently on it, but I did it. I also bought another game from the playstation network. I think it's called rub a dub. What you do is guide a rubber duck around a pool to where baby sized rubber ducks are who are in bubbles which are suspended where they are. Once you're duck touches the bubble the baby sized duck is in it will follow you around where ever you go. The more bubbles you touch the more ducks you have following you, and you need to lead all the ducks to a drain where they get sucked down. The catch to this game is that you control your duck by tilting the pool and you do that by tilting the controller, so you don't push any buttons. Your duck jumps too by pulling the controller up quickly like flipping a pancake. So this game is a time game. It seems really laim but it's addictive. Come over and try it.

I've been playing guitar hero a little bit too. But the more I play the more I want the rock band game to come out sooner. I comes out the 20th of November and should be about $200 for the game, 1 guitar, drum set, and microphone. I think it's a great deal. A really crappy electronic drum set, the cheapest I've seen is about $200. All games for the PS3 are $60, normal wireless guitars for GHII are about $70 I think, which comes to $150, and that meas that the drum set and mike come down to $50 for the both of them. I think it's a great price for the peripherals. Although it is a lot of money just to play a game, but if the experience is that much better than the other guitar hero games, which I really think it will be, it'll be worth it.

I also watched some Ultimate Fighting over the weekend at the Buffalo Wild Wings place downtown. I think that stuff is awesome. I mean two guys go into the octagon and one of them gets beaten so much that he has to give up or the ref makes him, usually. The main event for Saturday night's was this 44 year old guy against a twenty something year old from Brazil. the Brazilian got his nose broken up disgustingly good. His nose was bleeding all over the other guy's back. It was gross. and after he had his nose broken he didn't fight with as much zeal. But it was fun getting to see his butt getting kicked.

that's about it for now. Your stay classy, internet blog readers.

What am I trying to say?

2007-08-22T23:03:00.000-04:00

Not a whole lot has been going on here, just things changing slowly to where they need to be. Here at the house we got rid of cable tv. We feel that tv sucks creativity out of life. It's so easy to turn in on and be entertained and that's what we're culturally programmed to do. We are living in a day of entertainment where everything has to be entertaining or we don't pay attention to it or don't even like it. I hear people complaining about things they don't like and don't want to do it. Sometimes in life you do things you don't want to do, actually all the time. I wonder sometimes if there is more pain in life that we would accept it better.

There is another blog that I stumbled on and keep reading because I think it's interesting. The writer is a young mother who became pregnant at 19 and was forced to marry the father, which wasn't a terrible thing, but parents made them choose to get married right after they found out that this girl was pregnant. This blog describes the joys of being a mother and dealing with money issues in their happy lives. The father is going to school so the mother is doing much of the house work as well as taking care of the child. In there also is a very open minded person who is finding the best way to do what she needs to do without following the norms of the culture around her. She is very strong and is a great mother. When I read the posts on her blog I see how she deals with all the trials that she goes through in her own way. She wishes things were better but she does the very best she can. Life for her is very consistently painful and she is still very used to and and very happy. Sometimes she compares herself to others or where she wants to go and when she does this it brings her down a little bit. Her strong self reliance is why I like reading her blog.

I really don't know what I'm writing. I'm actually a little bored now. Normally I would be sitting in front of the tv and let that trance wash over me and let my brain take a little break, and I'm glad I'm not there because I can use my time more effectively doing something else. I've been reading more which I like to do and I've been playing my guitar more, I've also been playing my playstation too. There a game called Lair that's coming out soon that I'm looking forward to. It's set in the middle ages and you ride and fight with dragons. It looks cool so go check it out. I think it comes out September 7th I think, which a few weeks later than posted on their advertisements.

Yeah. So we put the tv downstairs as well as a couch and a chair. One of my friends in the house also bought a couple of turn tables and dj mixer. She's going to be kickin it as a dj soon, as soon as she figures it out. It's cool that other people besides me will be hanging out in this level, but it's also kind of sad because I had been the only one doing stuff down here and now there's some ugly furniture here and more people. It's better though.

Yesterday I went up to the outlet mall they got up here. It's pretty big it was hard to find anything good. I guess that's how it is at every outlet mall. Someone told me that Gap makes clothes exclusively for their outlet store which seems weird to me. It seems that outlet malls are selling some of the stuff that stores couldn't sell in their normal stores which isn't bad in any way, but what trickles down to the outlets are a bunch of clothes that I couldn't wear. I try to have my own style and express myself in what I wear and the stuff I saw yesterday doesn't even come close. In my mind there are certain levels of fashion that the normal person shops at: for instance one level is buying clothes at the trendy places where it doesn't really matter what they're selling as long as it has the trendy name brand on it. Another level is buying clothes at those same stores but only the sale items to still fit in but not buying the stuff that you really want to buy because you don't have the money. Another level is shopping for clothes at Walmart or Meijer or Target. And I'm not judging anyone for shopping at any of these places. Everyone has motives to shop where they do for their own reasons. But there is the point of self expression. I think everyone should do it and not be afraid to do it. I know many people are and just want to fit in. I went through a faze like that and I think that most people do. And getting to my point that the more people shop at the outlet stores the less expressive they can get with their clothes. I don't extend that only to outlet stores but to the big chain stores that are in every town and city from coast to coast. I also know that it's how a person wears the clothes that dictates who they are as well. Getting more into my point: I see people becoming faceless consumers caught up in what the big companies are selling and not thinking. I also think that not watching tv helps a great deal with this.

Is anyone reading this? I'm surprised if you are. I feel like I'm rambling. I am actually, but I'm also thinking about stuff and not letting my brain slow its mental capacity by letting it watch tv. So I like where my life is heading. I will, however, miss some programs.

I almost died a few minutes ago, no joke

2007-08-16T10:48:00.000-04:00

I just had one of my closest death defying nde that I've ever had with only walking away with a little scratch. So I was riding my bike and I came to the intersection of parckard and state, I was traveling up packard and turning onto state. At this intersection there's this third street leading to a residential area and I would be passing at the mouth of this street to get to state street. At this intersection cars go pretty fast so I take the sidewalk for precaution. And as I was coming off the curb at the mouth of this third street a car comes screeching past and I end up running into it. I get thrown off my bike by the bounce of us hitting and land on my back. The first thing I think of is what hurts so I can tell how injured I was. Geez, I ran into a car again. The last time that happened I was in the hospital for a week and recovering for a year. It turns out that I only had a lightly scraped up left elbow. My left hand would've been scraped up too and my butt if I weren't wearing cycling stuff. I next check my bike and miraculously it's okay too. I did find some kind of jelly on the tire but the wheel was fine. After I ascertained that everything was fine I notice that the car that I hit had stopped so I went to go talk to them. When I step up to the passenger side window a huge dog in the back seat starts barking at me and lunging its head out the back window. There was an old guy, well, about 50 driving and young teen girl in the passenger seat. They were pretty worried but I put their worry to ease by explaining that everything was alright. They drove away with nothing more than a good story.

It felt kind of weird to get back on my bike after that but that's what I did. I was on my way to return something to my old roommate in my old apartment. After I had gotten there and left the thing I was standing around outside the place letting the accident sink in. If I had been a tiny second faster I would have been seriously injured. But to have that happen, me being thrown off my bike, and walking away with a scratch was miraculous. I really feel like should've had an ambulance ride today.

it was here btw:

http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?q=Ann+Arbor,+MI,+USA&ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=42.270878,-83.740245&spn=0.001937,0.003648&t=h&z=18&om=1

At the daily grind

2007-08-14T22:22:00.000-04:00

So today was one of those rare days that I worked. Weird. Okay, so now you're wondering what I'm doing with my life. Well, here I go: if you've read any of my blogs you know that I was in a bike vs. car accident and was out of the workforce for over a year. I also relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan where I've been looking for a job other than food service. It seems that others have had that plan here because there are very few. While looking for a job a good friend of mine (I will call her Ellie to protect her true identity) has a father who owns his own business and they've let me do some office work there till I could find something else. Really nice people who I am very grateful to. So I was doing stuff there until I had the opportunity to work at Urban Outfitters for two weeks while there was an art fair where the streets downtown are blocked off and the art dealers go crazy selling art. Urban sells a lot of clothes then too so they need help. I was one of those helpers (peons) but this was done in the hope of getting a job later on. You see lots of people wanted a job there and having poor people jump through hoops to see who can jump the highest will separate the kangaroos from the turtles. I happened to be a kangaroo but they are busy at the moment in a transition period in the store after which I was promised a job. During which time the office job that I do was running out of money to pay me so they let me work only on Tuesdays. That gives me plenty of time to walk around naked around our house (knock before entering [for your sakes {I don't mind}]) and ride my bike.

Back to why I mentioned this: I was working on a project for a few hours and the stupid computer decides to end the program that I was using, and no, I did not save my work before the computer kicked me in the balls. It also made the decision to log me out too. Well I tore that Mother F@#ker a new one! Actually my boss said that it was okay and that she won't make me redo it. Phew. Don't you just hate computers?

I forgot to mention that a few days ago that I got my reverend card in the mail. That's right, I can legally marry people. My little card says so. All you have to do is go to a website, type in some info and you're a reverend. You have to pay for any kind of proof like a certificate or wallet sized card, but it's real. I'm a reverend. It says Rev Eric Smith right on the card. Go ahead and let me know when you want to get married. Go on, I'll marry you. Just you wait.

Oh yeah, and my lawyer wanted pics of my scars and my friend, "Ellie" is borrowing it while also being on the other side of the continent. So at work I had a co-worker take some pics. Here are my favs:

You can see the titanium plate on my collar bone.

this one shows that the scar tissue on my arm has adhered to the muscle and there for it dimples now.

It's all pretty disgusting isn't it? Oh and the farmers tan is from wearing cycling jerseys when i ride my bike. No laughing. I'm serious.

So that was my day. How was yours?

Bad things happen in and around the dmv

2007-08-13T23:17:00.000-04:00

I went to the DMV today. I hate going to any DMV and this time doesn't break the mold. So this is how it went: I woke up up an 8 or so with the determination to go around the opening time which is at 9. Let's just say that I didn't make it over there till around 11. When I really don't want to go I'll come up with excuses and procrastinate by doing stupid little things. But I really needed to go. My license expired on June 21, my birthday of course, and I had been putting off for a long time. I ride my bike everywhere so I didn't see the need to hurrying in getting a new one. But I know it's an important piece of identification and I do drive occasionally. So I check the internet where it's at and I try to find out what I need to bring and what I need to do. All the DMV's or Secretary of State buildings that I've been to have been government buildings. I drove around a little bit looking for such a building but I came to find that there were strangely a lot a cars parked at one end of a strip mall. Yeah, they put the dmv in a strip mall. Weird. I walk in and there's a line of course and just a few seconds after I get in line a lady who works there came up to me and asked if I had all the documents I needed, i showed her what I had, and she tells me that I need another form of ID. I had my other drivers license and my passport which I though would be sufficient but I had to go home and get an old student ID card to prove who I was. The drive there and back sucked. I just wanted the whole thing over with as soon as possible, and the more time that I spent driving the more time I could have been in line widdling it down. So i get back in line and wait more that two hours or so till I get to the front of the line. And when it was my turn to get helped I felt like I had been on a journey and I looked around at all the other people still in line, they were looking back at me with some jealousy, and I was happy for a second.

One thing about dmv's that I don't like is that no one is happy to be there, that is till the get to the front of the line. No on likes to go, the people working there have to deal with people who have been waiting hours to see them, so the employees morale isn't that high, and what gets done there is all just a formality to what people do everyday of their lives. It's all lame.

Something weird that I should have noticed a long time ago but hadn't was that my birth date on my old drivers license off by a few days. I found this out when I went to open a checking account at a bank and they where taking in my info and the license wasn't congruent with a form I filled out. Here at the this dmv they made a little stink about it. I ended up waiting a while till they could confirm the right date of my glorious birth. The lady was a little bitchy too. I got a terrible picture taken for my little driving card and I was on my way.

To try to cheer me up I stopped at a deli that I love. It's called Dimo's. If you haven't tried it, go! They're only open for lunch and they're on E. Stadium. The food is great and you get a ton of it. I ate half for lunch and the rest I had for dinner. It's run by a family from New York so you get that demanding New York attitude with your sandwich. It adds character to the place. I highly recommend going.

Once again I did my ride to Dexter to get my frustration out and I had a near death experience (nde). It happened on my way back to Ann Arbor on Dexter road just in sight of the Maple traffic light (near the dmv, might I add) and some idiot coming from the opposite direction was making a left turn. He first veered into the other lane of the two lane road before completing his turn and just before he turned all the way in he sees me and slams on his breaks. Good thing too cause he would've ran me over. This was a lot like the accident I had a year ago. Stupid drivers. Just look where you're going. I know most of you don't think of looking for cyclists but just try to, please.

things to get excited for

2007-08-12T14:37:00.000-04:00

I'm not that big of a gamer but I do own a PS3. It came about mostly through my little brother who's in high school who's into that sort of thing. But there is a game that I'm a little excited for: rock band! It from the guys who made Guitar Hero I and II. The developers got off that train, gave the reigns to others to make the third in that series and went on to make a new better creation. Rock Band is Guitar Hero expanded. It incorporates other instruments to make up a band. So it's got guitars, of course, but also drums and vocals to make it a complete band. I just saw a video of it being played, wait, here it is:

It's kind of long video but it got me excited about it. If you don't really know me then you probably don't know that I've dabbled in music. I've been playing guitar for a while, played in a bunch of bands since high school, learned the drums on the way. I even started my own music club at college (I teach guitar too). So making a video game out of it rocks in my mind. that way I can rock with my friends who don't really play. I'm a huge fan of the Guitar Hero games too. So yeah, it comes out on November 20th so come over to my house after that so you can come play.

And how am I going to finance this purchase, you may be wondering? No, not the credit card. I've been in contact with my lawyer in Hawai'i (you've gotta separate'em) and I think the settlement thing/money should be done soon. Hopefully by this month. I got a letter from him the other day and he's asking for a lot of money. Six figures of course, and the lawyer gets a third of what I get cause he's doing the work and I probably wouldn't get nearly what he's asking had I not gotten a lawyer. But yeah. I'm getting some big cash soon. It might make it worth getting run over by a van, maybe.

Another fact that you might not know about me is that I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). And I got a new calling today. I'm going to start teaching a class for our Sunday school, gospel principles, starting next Sunday. I'm excited for this too. I don't think of myself of much a teacher so this is going to be challenging and fun.

Another more journaly thing I'm adding now. Yesterday I saw the Hills Have Eyes II for the first time, it wasn't that bad or scary, really. My friends and I went out to rent it, but this rent came about in a round about kind of way. I DVR'd what the cable stating said was the new version of the Hills Have Eyes II, so I gathered a few people around the TV and the movie turned out to be the old one. It wasn't scary at all. It wasn't very good either, so you can't just call it quits when you're about to watch a scary movie, you're all prepared and ready to go. So we had to rent it. It wasn't that scary, but it was put in the "fun" movie category.

that's about it for now. Just enjoying summer.

P.S. No one here seems to have a digital camera. I actually have one, but I lent it to a friend who is on vacation at the moment. My lawyer asked for pics of my scars to help in the settlement thing. People, got get a camera and capture memories. You'll thank me later.

Blogger here I come

2007-08-11T00:22:00.000-04:00

So I'm going to try and do the journal thing with this blog and I hope I don't offend anyone who reads it. No one's forcing you to read this so I don't apologize if it's boring.

It's Friday today with no plans and the first thing that I like to do a day like today is ride my bike. I've started to ride more distance rides to get back into shape, or more closely to where i was before my terrible accident. What accident, you ask? I guess now's as good a time an any to type it out again. It's been a while since the last time I tried and I think I've figured out a bit more:

I was on Oahu, Hawaii, just a few weeks after classes had finished and I was waiting for commencement a few weeks after that. I was riding my bike sort of far, probably about 150 miles a week on rides from 25 to 50 miles a pop. I was on such a ride on June 5 on Kam highway headed North. It was in the morning and the high school/elementary/middle school complex they got over in the next city was being fed kids from the many parents dropping them off. They got one traffic light over there that's at the mouth of this school. The time was 7:30, school starts around 8 and there were cars backed up pretty far from this light. What do I care? I ride on the shoulder so I don't have to deal with stupid car drivers. I'm going along, kind of fast, and a car coming from the other direction turns left and I ride into the side of it. I later learned that there was a preschool that the car was turning into, it was actually a Honda Odyssey, and a truck had made a space for the van to go through and had actually waved the van to make the turn. So when the van gunned it to make the turn so the other cars in back of them wouldn't get mad, the driver did that right when I was getting to the same spot.

So now you're asking what happened. I'm gonna tell you but it's not for the weak of heart. As I see this van getting in my way I had the time-slowing-down-thing happen and I know I didn't have time to touch my brakes and I remember thinking of the acceptance I had that I was going to hit them. After that I don't remember the events the occurred directly after but I do know that I was conscience. I do however have the accounts of some of the many people who saw what happened, or I've pieced together most of the story, I think. I ran into the side door of the van and from what I can tell I think my head broke through the window (I had a helmet on) and got cut up on my face, all over my right shoulder, and my right arm. Now I don't remember this but people tell me that I was sort of panicky but dazed. I even stood up after the impact but fell straight back down. I don't remember any of this but when my memory does kick in it's when I'm on the ground at the site of the accident with the paramedics surrounding me. It felt like coming out of a dream and entering a horrible nightmare and a flood of pain clouded everything. I soon got into the ambulance and was on a long ride to the hospital about 45 minutes away. At the hospital I learned that I broke my neck, shattered my collar bone, severed my radial nerve at the bicep on my right arm and deep lacerations on my neck, right shoulder, and right arm.

I was in the hospital for a week, then released to family, and eventually went to recover at my parents house in Salt Lake City, Utah where I didn't grow up or really know anyone. I wore a neck brace for about 4 months, a full arm brace for 3 months, I couldn't move my wrist for 4 months due to the severed nerve, and lots and lots of painful physical therapy.

It's been over a year now and I'm still not back to normal: I don't have my hand working as well as it did, but that might eventually come back, very very slowly, and my right arm is still weak. but no one can really tell anything is wrong, but I have some awesome scars on my neck and arm that everyone asks about. It's like having tattoos with cool stories behind them; great conversation pieces.

Back to what I was saying: I just barely started riding again. I'm living in Ann Arbor, Michigan and am exploring. I found a short trip that I've started going on regularly, from here to Dexter, which is only about 9 miles away. It has a nice shoulder and it isn't too busy with traffic. The only road worthy bike that I have now is just a single gear road bike. I like it a lot. I bought it mainly for commuting around town but it's a great bike; simple and fast. It's a Specialized Langster if you were wondering. It's a great little ride to try and get my endurance going again. I'm trying to do it a least three times a week.

You may be wondering if I'm scarred to be riding a bike. The answer to that one is "yes". I know how little a mistake it takes for me to get me severely injured again, but I love to ride.

One great thing about the accident is that I'm going to get a bunch of money from it real soon i think. I just moved to this house close to downtown and I need to get some furniture for it. I want to get a good bike, and who knows what else. So I spent some of the day planning how I want things. I'm living with two other girls who had lived here before I move in, both of whom are friends, who occupied the upstairs and now that I moved in we have opened the whole house up, both floors. And they're used to living upstairs and they both spend their time up there but we have a whole house, not just one floor. They have some ratty furniture that's up there too but I don't really want it down here. I sort of want to life in a nice place, not so college anymore.

After that I sort of hung out. I still don't know many people here. One of the girls is out of town for a while and the other one has a boyfriend with whom she spends a good deal of her free time with. So it was a quiet evening for me. I really don't mind it though. I like the quiet of just me.

well, this is my first blog here and hopefully i keep it up. thanks for reading.