every morning i walk towards the edge and throw little things off

It has now been one year since I graduated from MSU. I'm not sure how much progress I can say I've made except that I'm about halfway through my Master's degree now. I swear I'll be done with school after this degree. I'm only halfway through this silly term, but it's getting close to the end of the year. Unfortunately I have a damned quantum final on my birthday, but I have plans for that. I'm not one that suffers things like that quietly.

I've had my iPod for over a year now. I've managed to keep it fairly scratch-free, so it looks nice. It's gone a bit mental though. It keeps locking up when I'm skipping through songs rapidly and I have to reboot it repeatedly, and if I leave it hooked up to the computer it will claim to not have any playlists one it until I reboot it again. I also found out that something else I thought was a defect was actually a feature. As if to prove a point, my iPod decided to crash and lose all its songs, requiring a ponderous reloading of 16GB. I bought some new headphones for the iPod, a different brand this time, and it has a wider response range and I'm impressed with the results. Especially for $5.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children finally came out on DVD. I have to say...the English dubbing didn't really work as well as I was hoping. Especially when they give Cid a Southern accent, and Cait Sith is Scottish? I think it was almost more confusing in English than it was in Japanese. The movie just doesn't click with me.

Corvallis has once again proved itself to be commercially useless, this time for restaurants. Eugene, which is as far away as Salem, has the nearest Chili's. Both cities have an Olive Garden. We don't even have a Denny's or IHOP (guess what, Salem again). There are no Big Boys in the state, and apparently National Coney Island is a Detroit thing. The nearest Cracker Barrel is in Idaho, 350 miles away, with the closest one after that in Montana. All the restaurants we have are either college food (pizza, Chinese, McDonald's) or uppity fancy places.

The new series of Top Gear started today! I really wish Honda would bring the Civic they have over here because it's a million times cooler than even our new Civics. They're going to review a C6 Corvette Z06 among other things, they don't usually review American cars but this one they can't just ignore. The new series looks awesome.

whatever lies beyond this morning is a little later on

The weather right now is fantastic - a little cloudy, breezy, around 60 degrees. I was actually here in Corvallis exactly a year ago for grad school visitation, so this weather is partly what sold me on coming way the hell out here. Exactly a year ago today was the Newport trip. I'd certainly rather be out there than here in the apartment, but I have a bit of work to get done today.

This week is the last full week of labs, the term is finally winding down. I do have a couple major things to finish before the end of the term, but they're at least pretty well spaced out. I'm very much looking forward to coming home for spring break in just a couple weeks and then having a changeup of classes for spring quarter.

crushed, pt. II

Oregon's weather right now is fantastic. It feels like a spring day would in Michigan, and it's early February. The sun is out all day, the days are getting longer, and the temperature is high enough I didn't wear my jacket.

Today I harassed several distributor branch offices and eventually Dr Pepper / 7Up itself, and found that what I feared is true - there is no distributor of Crush in Oregon. DPSUHQ told me the nearest distributor was around Seattle. However, L swears she's seen Crush somewhere (not in town though). Incidentally enough, my parents sent me a couple six-packs of Crush that arrived today, so I related my troubles about how impossible it is to get Crush to the other PSMs while drinking Crush. Now they think I run some kind of Crush smuggling ring.

Tomorrow is Friday. I am more than ready for it to be the weekend. However, tomorrow has a greater distinction than that - I will be a quarter of the way through my Master's program. Already! I am probably going to Salem tomorrow to celebrate with things I can't get here in Corvallis - a Best Buy run and a Papiano's pizza. Then there will be much gaming. No exams to grade this weekend.

peaceful day

Today was mildly productive. I finally got around to calling some of the apartment places in Corvallis. The situation out there is better than I thought, I'm catching the peak time between people moving out and people moving in. Hopefully I'll find something good. I have to do more calling tomorrow.

The A/C in the Malibu is dying again, I'm pretty certain there's a freon leak or something. So it's going to have to go back into the shop and get looked at again.

I'm typing this outside on the deck, in the hammock. Life is good.