To Do vs. Did

To Do:

- Go to class.
- Come home, eat lunch and study.
- Finish two papers that were due on Monday.
- Study a bit for test on Thursday, maybe go out for a drink in the late evening.

Did:

- Went to class.
- Came home, watched half of Newcastle v West Brom game.
- Went to coffee shop with roommate and his youngest boy.
- Helped friend move couch upstairs.
- Tried to recruit players for our indoor soccer team.
- Helped roommate cut some insulation for the basement walls.
- Showered to get fiberglass off my arms, ankles.
- Helped (kind of) friend change all of our locks (long story).
- Walked to store to copy keys.
- Currently watching Blazers game and typing a blog.

Will I ever write these stupid papers? I can't wait to have a job that doesn't involve homework.

Moonset

This pic is not from my cell phone, but a fancy-shmancy digital SLR camera. The problem is that it was early in the morning and therefore still kind of dark, and yet we were traveling 70+mph, so slow shutter made it blurry.

Anyway, this is Salt Lake City on a beautiful morning in March during a spring break roadtrip to Texas.

cell phone pic of the day

I have recently realized that I have a large collection of pictures on my phone, most of which I don't remember even taking. Some of them are kind of cool for having been shot with a crappy cell camera, so I thought I'd post a few every now and then.

Here's the first of the series: Downtown Portland, overlooking the Willamette River from the Broadway Bridge. Date: Unknown.

Aggghh

I was warned that getting through the paperwork connection with graduation at PSU is an arduous and maddening process, but I really thought it wasn't going to be a big deal. I applied for graduation for fall term back at the deadline in, like, July or something - quite awhile ago. I didn't hear anything other than receiving a degree application charge on my account until today. And it says, 'thanks for applying for a Bachelor of Science degree!' Or something like that. But I didn't apply for a Bachelor of Science, I applied for a Bachelor of Arts. Christ above, I don't even pretend to have the credits for a science degree. Of course the email gives no direction of who to talk to and even if it's too late to do anything about it. Uggggggg! I hate bureaucracy!

Meanwhile, I'm taking 20 credits this term - a ridiculous amount at one time - to try and finish this degree I apparently didn't apply for. This doesn't help my motivation to study any.

The good news pertaining to all of this is that even after this term I will still have about 12 months of GI Bill leftover. As it pays quite a bit more than my tuition costs, it's sort of like a job. And if I go traveling, that means when I come back I can sign up for a postbac at PSU or the community college and have an instant job. Bah, and if this stupid Bachelor of Science crap persists, then I guess I won't even have to bother with the postbac thing, it could just be a regular undergrad degree schedule.

Rainwater

Apparently the downside to ecobuildings is that you can no longer drink out of the toilet bowl. Damn environmentalists!


Found in a toilet stall on PSU's campus.

Worlds Collide!!!!

An old army friend ran into me today on campus. I was stunned. I couldn't think of his name, where I knew him from, other than generally 'the army' (though I could, strangely, tell you his hometown), or if he was married/who he was married to. What's odd is that I thought I saw him in a class a few days ago, and I thought, "man, that guy looks familiar. Who does he remind me of? What was that guy's name?" What's even more odd is that that guy from my class wasn't him.

Anyway, with some facebook/myspace sleuthing, I took a guess at his name and eventually put it all together. Only a few times have my army friends met and hung out with my civilian friends, and even then it was a planned event. This unexpected collision of worlds that were never meant to intersect leaves me feeling woozy. I like to have a general sense of order in the world and in that order certain people do not belong in certain places. It's sort of like a character from a book I've read long ago appearing in a new and completely different story. Weird, weird, weird.

Well, crap

For those of you who were unaware, for the past couple years I'd been planning on taking up a working holiday visa with Ireland (4 months) and the UK (6 months, and repeatable once) when I graduated university. With a little bit of effort I should graduate in December and would therefore be looking at late January or early February for departing on ten months of work abroad. I even had a sort of job offer in the UK. But when I clicked on the programs website a few days ago in order to get the application started, I read, "As a result of changes in UK immigration rules, the present Blue Card program ends on December 31st, 2008. However, the deadline for the issuance of 2008 Blue Cards has now passed and we regret that no further cards can be issued. ...It is hoped that an agreement will be reached in the near future and that the BUNAC Work in Britain program will be available to US participants for 2009."

After then reading up on these changes on the official British government site on immigration and work permits, I have very little hope in that last sentence. It is a masterfully tangled web of bureaucracy they've created over there and it seems to be a work in progress, with only increased levels of convoluted direction in the future.

So now I just don't know what to do. I'm stuck back in the old problem I've avoided since high school: what the fuck am I gonna do with my life? Working abroad was sort of a delay tactic to avoid joining the real world (as was the army, college, etc) and now the real world will be here in January.

I suppose though that I still have a bunch of money saved up from my army days and that I could still go over to Europe and bum around for a few months. Instead of coming home with a small dent in my savings under the work program, I'll come home truly in need of a job. But hell, what am I gonna spend that money on anyway? Food, rent, gas, car insurance? That sounds awful. If my military-bound self heard my whining university self say that she'd be bitterly disappointed. I didn't work that hard and save up so that I could continue the same later. Nah, I wanted a vacation and an adventure! I'm looking for optimism here, as you can see.