Not Much Ado about Too much Adieu

I actually wrote this in the 13th but never got back to it. Suppose I should get it out there, eh?

As the seasons go, the weather becomes more mild, so does it seem that life does too. Summer is approaching, here for some and still far for me. Summer has always meant relaxation, endless free time, hanging out in the park, fresh veggies and fish, earning a little money here and there, catching up on books I've meant to read, and relaxing in the sun - because no one has AC in Washington so it's worthless to be inside anyway. And yet, I look forward to it as bittersweet. Over the last year or so I've found that I no longer enjoy those great amounts of free time, and enjoy life much more if I'm being kept at least fairly busy. In the time I do have I've fallen into the habit of finding something constructive to do, or to "better" myself somehow. I've started doing nearly daily workouts at home for much longer periods than I used to without equipment... I enjoy pushing myself to where my senses used to scream at me to stop, but then find I have a point of endurance just after that where it becomes much easier. I'd like to start running, and I kinda wish we still lived next to the bike trail, although I like this house better. I'm also finding more time for bible reading at random times in the day, although still not as much as I'd like.

Several of my friends are now back from "away" college now, although we still have about a month to go. It feels like we've waited so long that it kinda feels weird now to be so close to being done and move into the working world. Everyone's deciding what they want to do and I feel a little left behind in this, because I can't decide what I want to do. It kills - people ask what I plan on majoring in, what I plan to do as a career, and when I tell them I haven't decided yet I swear I see in their faces some disappointment as though I lack motivation or some other character. As of now though I plan on taking a class over the summer and work through next year before going back to a four year college somewhere, depending on what I decide I want to do (I'm already a year ahead in college anyway). This course of action seems to appease most people now, and to me it seems the best choice of path for now. Although, as I said about not liking to sit still anymore, I feel myself becoming ready to move on into the working world. That would mean no more summer mentality unfortunately, but I'm curious to see what that's like.

And hey, a lady would be nice. Any nice ladies out there? Figured I'd ask.

Today's song is:
"Yesterday" by the Beatles.

Earth Day is Bad For the Environment

So this week at the college is Environmental Week, and today they're giving away those snazzy free saplings people tend to give away on Earth Day. But then I started thinking about it, and I saw a flaw in this whole process. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but here in Washington when people are handing out free tree seeds or saplings, it's almost always pines you get. For those who don't know, pines are very much forest trees, and are designed as such. Pines don't fair as well when left alone or in small groups, and when they get big, they tend to topple when a big storm comes though. Dozens of houses and businesses get squished every year from the same thing happening over and over - either developers thin the trees out too much, or people/businesses plant them in rows or standing alone because they look nice. You can now figure out what happens then. Anyway, my point to this is, that people who get a free tree will tend to plant them close to their house - creating more freestanding pines. Then, the damage caused by the trees when they fall needs to be fixed by more trees, thus causing the one tree they planted to lead to several more trees being cut down.

See? See? Earth Day is bad for the environment! I'm gonna go burn some tires...


The song for today is
"Revolution" by Worth Dying For

In All Seriousness...

I'm afraid I might have fooled too many people with my elaborate April 1st guise. Sorry! Hopefully I caused some laughs, and hopefully I'm not posting this too soon and spoiling the fun for those who haven't seen yesterday's post yet. The National Guard, lip ring, and car crash all haven't happened. Yet. I have mildly thought about the Coast Guard, recently the National Guard, and possibly the Navy or Air Force, but these thoughts are very infantile and probably will never come to fruition. I will be leaving the lip ring photo up on Facebook though - I know there's a great deal of people who don't read this, and I'm hoping to get some laughs within the next few weeks from it.

As for a REAL update, school is going very well. Last quarter I ended with a GPA of 3.93, my best yet! That means President's List, and the quarter before that I got Dean's List. I'm on a roll! God has been good to me in helping me through school, as well as providing me certain other inspirations this year. Good ones, of course.

Speaking of such inspiration, I've also been able to work out at home regularly, and I must say I'm becoming rather happy with the results. Usually I need to also go to the gym or be doing a lot of physical work in order to concrete my efforts, but through discipline and doing various exercises I've been feeling more fit and strong, and have been able to push myself further and further. I've also dropped off of videogames significantly, and there have been several weeks in the past few months that I didn't play any at all (outside of short Facebook games). There are times I still get discouraged, who doesn't? But I always find something from God to look to.

God is good.


Again no need for a new song, this one deserves some more face time. Speaking of which, I've had a couple complaints about the music playing automatically. As a bit of a self-proclaimed techie, I often overlook the fact that some people don't know how to adjust the volume on their computer, or don't know what a giant red pause button looks like. As much as I'd love to tease you still-unnamed souls here as a proper stinging blogger or radio host would do, I suppose I will keep such words to myself. In the meantime, I'll make a poll on the side of the screen so that people can give some feedback. If I get enough hate votes I'll switch it to manual.

A New Month, New Adventures. An Old Month, Adventures Past.

So, as promised here's the update about what I've been up to, and perhaps a little about what's to come. After such a long post on the concert the other day I'm not entirely sure where I want to begin.

I guess I'll start with the most exciting news, which will be big news indeed to almost everyone. As only some of my closest friends have known, I've been thinking about getting into the National Guard for some time now. I'm sorry I didn't tell more of you, but I wasn't really sure and didn't want to get everyone excited over nothing. I've been talking to a recruiter for a few months now, and it sounds like a pretty sweet deal. My college gets paid for, and I'll be able to get work in this way, which are two huge issues I've been troubled about on what to do in the down economy once I finish Running Start. Working for the National Guard I probably won't have to go abroad but will be able to stay here probably for as long as I stay enrolled. Better yet, they don't seem to move you around quite as much as other fields of the military. I've thought about it for a long time, balanced out the options, and it looks like the best path to take. Soooo, to the exciting news. I've been talking to my recruiter more seriously over the last two weeks, and it looks like I'm in! All I need to do is finish school this quarter and he says he can sign the final paperwork as soon as summer starts, although I'll probably take a couple weeks off just to enjoy a little free time before I head off to boot camp and start working life. Oh! Duh, I forgot to mention where I was planning to work. The National Guard has a lot of options, but I ended up deciding to go into being a vehicle mechanic. I've always liked to work with my hands, and you'd be surprised just how much I get to work with the electronics on-board the trucks and tanks. I think it's going to be a good, varied job until I decided what I want to do in the long run. Ha, who knows? I might stick with this.


Guess what?? I got a lip ring! I know, I know, it's a little out of character you say, right? Well actually, my sister Emily did the exact same thing when she was in college, and I thought it'd be a fun last rebellious thing to do before I join the Reserve in a couple months. At that time I'll let it heal back over. It actually wasn't that painful to do, as you'd expect. The woman who did it for me was very clean about it, and it was pretty quick. Can't wait to show everyone on Sunday! XD

Next up is kinda embarrassing, but I feel obliged to cover it anyway. I got in a car accident for the first time last week while driving home from school. It kinda sucks, but at least I'm ok. The car's still drivable, with most of the damage just being to the body. What happened was, while I was turning left into a parking lot off of Meridian, another car didn't see me and tried to pull out into the lane I was pulling out of. Both of us hit the breaks and thankfully avoided anything worse, but it still sucks.

Aaaand that's about it for today. At least, that's certainly enough excitement.

Today's song is...
"Running Down a Dream" by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
I find it to be a good song for driving home on sunny days.

TL;DR, an Epic on a Roadtrip and Concert

I'm in the mood to get a new post up, but I only really have a few vague ideas of what I want to cover. Plenty has happened in the last month, so I don't think either of us will be too disappointed.

I've also been updating my good 'ole journal again in the last few weeks, which in an odd way takes up the writing energy I'd usually spend here. I like to keep journals not as some hive of secrets, but more of a personal history for me to look back on, see what I've gone through, and to see where I've grown. I actually highly recommend keeping a journal to anyone, it really is interesting to look back through the sometimes daily but often sporadic entries I've written over the last decade, in different journals covering anywhere from six months to three years. (I've only ever actually filled out one... I get a little twitchy towards the end and end up starting a new journal.)

(Ok, I changed my mind. I might consider writing about other stuff later, but this post is all about this weekend from this point on)

I went on a pretty exciting road trip this weekend, and covered nearly 300 miles in just two days! Gotta love spring break! Daniel and I were invited down to a concert in Portland by our good friends the Riddle girls, who live in in Vancouver. I got up, packed light, and met with Daniel at his house around 8am. Then began the long drive down to Vancouver, filled with good conversation, good traffic, and plenty of British rock as provided by a special weekend event on 102.5 KZOK, "Seattle's only Classic Rock Station". Things went well, and within a few hours we arrived at their house. It was good to see the lovely Lisa Dawn and Katy again, as well as the rest of the family. In fact, two of the older girls and their childerkins were visiting home and I got to meet them for the first time. The kids were very much rather adorable, although a little harder to understand than I ever remember my own nieces and nephews being. We headed out to Portland with one of the older girls, Clair, driving and being our chaperon of sorts, and Kelly joining in for the fun. On the way down we had some Taco Bell, which I don't think I've had since our last road trip! I love that stuff, at least more than other fast food. Here we ran into some trouble when we couldn't figure out where the concert was and got lost for a bit, but we found our way there in the end.

Once we arrived at the concert we got a spot in line provided by several of the boys from the Riddle's youth group - pleasant sorts of gentlemen. There were a lot of people waiting outside due to the fact that there was no pre-sale of concert tickets, something Daniel and I couldn't quite grasp. Some of the girls went off to use the restroom, and unfortunately met a line worse than ours. By the time the doors opened to the concert well over an hour later, the girls made it back just in time for us to go in and get our tickets. And by "tickets" I mean everyone dropped $10 in a bucket on the way in, which felt a little skeevy. It is to be noted that this all was budgeted to reach local people that otherwise couldn't make it, which also goes back to my thoughts on why there was no pre-sale. After about another hour of walking around and talking, the music started up!

The Sidewalk Prophets were the first up. They weren't bad, but not many seemed to know the songs and the music wasn't something you could just rock to.



Next up was Remedy Drive. Although this rising band is supposedly pretty big, I don't know if any of us had heard of them before this event. The others seemed more impressed than I was.

After that was Fee, another new band. This is where the party started. Good beat, good music, and people started getting into it, Fee made it start to feel like a concert!


After that was the very out-of-place Francesca Battistelli. True, she has a good voice and talent, but none of us were terribly excited that she got 4-5 songs in the lineup.


As if to shift us as violently as possible, Family Force 5 was next up, crazy uniforms and all. Quite to the surprise of us all, Lisa Dawn really liked this band. (There's some Family Force 5 as the second song for this post.) The only disappointment here was in that they had the base mellowed out a bit, which is very odd for such a hard band.

Second to the end, the David Crowder Band came in and rocked the house. Probably my favorite of the night (despite the pleasant surprise of Fee and the mad beat of FF5), I was quite exhausted from worshiping by the time MercyMe came on.


Although we had been looking forward to MercyMe as one of the familiar bands, they only played one song they actually wrote. Finished pretty well anyway.


Rather tired, we headed back up to Vancouver with some McDonald's for dinner on the way. With a sudden realization of a lack of foresight on the fact that we'd be home after midnight, we were graciously offered a spot on the floor to spend the night and some cereal in the morning to do us on our way. A funny thing about being young is that an exciting day ending with sleeping on the floor actually creates a strange sense of vigor in the morning, not ache and drowsiness. With slightly sad farewells we wished the Riddles goodbye as they went off to morning church and we homeward. As the strange phenomena is with home trips, we made it back in the record time of two hours. In even stranger phenomena, we once again saw a rainbow, although this time on the way home... this has happened on all but one of the times I've visited. The rest of the day after we got home was, of course, normal Sunday drabble not to be bored with here.

So yes, very fun times. But DANG. Anyone who read all of that deserves a medal. send me your name and I'll engrave it in a brick or something. For those interested in the meaning of the title, TL;DR is netspeak for "Too Long; Didn't Read," a term used for people who don't know when to shut up, much like me. I told you there would be no disappointment. ;) Hopefully I'll get another post up soon with pictures from the trip, but I didn't take any myself and am waiting for Katy to send me some. (*wink*nudge*)


Two songs for today! First up is...
"One of Those Days" by Joshua Radin.
I got it as an iTunes pick from Starbucks a few months ago. A little mellow, but one of my official favorite songs of 2010, of which there are currently only 11.

And as promised,
"Earthquake" by Family Force 5.
You'd never guess they're a Christian band, but they're good. I suppose it's worth nothing this is also on my 2010 list. Perhaps I'll post up the lists of past years sometime.

Washington Humor

I've been slowly working on a post about why our state of Washington is so darned amazing, since so many people seem to take it for granted, or even distaste. This is not that post, however. Just a bit of humor I found on a Facebook group, enjoy!


God was missing for six days. Eventually, Michael, the archangel, found him, resting on the seventh day.
He inquired of God. "Where have you been?"
God sighed a deep sigh of satisfaction, and proudly pointed downwards through the clouds, "Look, Michael. Look what I've made."
Archangel Michael looked puzzled, and said, "What is it?"
"It's a planet," replied God, "and I've put Life on it. I'm going to call it Earth and it's going to be a great place of balance."
"Balance?" inquired Michael, still confused.
God explained, pointing to different parts of earth. "For example, northern Europe will be a place of great opportunity and wealth, while southern Europe is going to be poor. Over there I've placed a continent of white people, and over there is a continent of black people. Balance in all things,"
God continued pointing to different countries. "This one will be extremely hot, while this one will be very cold and covered in ice."
The Archangel, impressed by God's work, then pointed to a land area and said, "What's that one?"
"Ah," said God "That's Washington State, the most glorious place on Earth. There are beautiful mountains, rivers and streams, lakes, forests, hills, plains, and coulees. The people from Washington State are going to be handsome, modest, intelligent, and humorous, and they are going to be found traveling the world. They will be extremely sociable, hardworking, high achieving, and they will be known throughout the world as diplomats, and carriers of peace."
Michael gasped in wonder and admiration, but then proclaimed, "What about balance, God? You said there would be balance."
God smiled and said, "There is another Washington...wait until you see the idiots I put there."


Meh, no song. This is just a short tidbit.

I SLAM Ubuntu

Nah, I just can't resist using wordplay in the blog title. This post is about Ubuntu, SLAM, and myself however.

Before I lose the average PC user talking about Ubuntu, let's start off with SLAM, or, the Student Literary Arts Magazine of Pierce College. Sound familiar? I kinda hope so, seeing as this goes back to my second blog post in October. Well the truth is, I've been putting off submitting my photographs until now. I've finally got a short Bio typed up, the photos selected, and everything burned on to a dvd. In all hopes, I'm not too late for the 2010 issue and some of my works will be good enough for the magazine! I selected 13 of some of the very best pictures I have ever taken, so hopefully I'll make the cut. I have a good shot, I think. =)

Now onto Ubuntu. You may ask "What is this new devilry?!" I tell you, it is magic. Ubuntu is an OS, or Operating System - exactly like how you may use Windows XP, Vista, Win7, Linux (Ubuntu is a flavor of Linux), or a Mac. What's special about Ubuntu? For one, it's free, compiled by an assortment of experts (similar to Firefox's roots). Another bonus is that it's totally open-source, meaning I can modify nearly every program or process to suit my needs. It's also very lightweight and fast. When I'm at school I use it for most mundane things like browsing the internet since it starts up significantly faster than my Windows 7, which isn't really that bad to start with. There are also a lot of visual effects and other features not present in Windows. Another notable difference is that while in Windows and Mac you largely use a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to do almost everything, Ubuntu allows you to do everything and then some by command prompt. This basically means that if I open up a Terminal and enter something like "sudo gedit" it opens up the text editor without me having to find the icon on my computer. There's much more to it, but you get the basic idea.

I'm also proud to report that I've fixed up my old computer to the point it can run games at a very stable level. It is to be noted that a month ago the same computer couldn't even idle for more than 15 minutes without crashing. That's three functioning computers I have now! ...Well, the last one's an eMachine, so it doesn't really count. If you own an eMachine, get a new computer - trust me.

My current workspace. Sure it looks cluttered, and admittedly having two mice and keyboards can get confusing at times, but it's very efficient.

I couldn't really remember any of the many songs that must exist involving operating systems and art magazines, so I went with the ever-classic:
"I Think I Love You"
as by David Cassidy and The Partridge Family