Originally, I had planned to write this post when I got back from Oregon. Then, I was going to write it on Labor Day, and then I was going to write it after my first day of classes. Oh well. At this point, I’m proud of myself for writing it at all. (And really, if you wanted to go back even further, I was going to write a post with this same title last fall.) I suppose what I will do is go back and recount the past couple weeks.

Oregon

As they tend to be, my trip to Oregon was great. The weather was much warmer than I would have liked, and the eighteen days I was out there for seemed like three, but I still had a great time with Michelle. I long for the day when there are no more goodbye scenes in airports.

Back to Long Island

After I got back, I had about a week and a half of freedom before classes started. I spent my first week back shrink-wrapping newspapers and earning ten dollars an hour for doing so. I also tried to relax as much as possible, knowing full well that in another week free time would be at a premium.

Classes started this past Wednesday. I have never liked fall semesters, but so far this one hasn’t been so bad. Hopefully that isn’t just the fact that I’ve only had two days of classes. I’m going to be optimistic, though, and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised come December.

Miscellany

As I alluded to in my last post, I upgraded from XP to Vista back in June. Most of the things I’ve heard about Vista have been negative, but I just don’t see it. Is it still Windows? Sure. Is it OS X? Definitely not. Regardless, I’ve been running it for the past couple months and I haven’t had any problems, which is something I’ve never been able to say about a Microsoft operating system. I still plan to make the switch at some point (and those new iMacs are so nice), but Vista has made me feel better about the fact that I can’t do so any time soon. Office 2007 is pretty nice, too; I’m actually writing this post in Word.

In my last post, I asked the Mets to bury the rest of their division as though they read my blog. They were promptly swept in four games by the Phillies the first week I was back, but they’ve regained all the games they’d lost since then. I’ll take it. Speaking of sports, I had forgotten how much I missed football. Today is a good day.

I had envisioned this post being longer than it is. Oh well.

Posted on 9 September 2007 | Comment

Tomorrow morning, I’m flying out to Oregon to see Michelle. I will be there until the 25th, when I return to New York. After I get back, be on the lookout for entries on my upgrade to Windows Vista (two thumbs up), my new job (selling alcoholic beverages), and a host of other topics. If I ever get around to writing them, that is.

Goodnight kids.

PS:

Dear New York Mets,

Please bury the rest of the NL East while I’m gone.

Love,
Andrew

Posted on 6 August 2007 | Comment

I have a few moments to catch my breath before I head to sleep, so I figured I’d stop neglecting my blog and do a quick update.

It’s been over a month since my last update, and even longer since my last update that wasn’t just me making excuses for not updating. In that time, school weighed very heavily on me; a paper or two would be due one week, I’d have a test next week, and so the cycle would go. It wasn’t fun, and unfortunately, I let my pledge to update slip.

Since my last post, I turned 22. Not much different than 21, really.

In just a few hours, I leave for Oregon to see Michelle for the first time since January. I’m already up later than I should be, and so this update won’t be nearly as lengthy as I’d like it to be. Perhaps I’ll do a recap when I get back.

Sorry for not updating, guys. I’m as disappointed with myself as you are, and I shall strive to do better. Be back in a week.

Posted on 29 March 2007 | Comment [4]

Here, at last, is the long-awaited (yeah, right) conclusion to yesterday’s post. I kind of lost steam towards the end, but this post ended up being longer than yesterday’s. Go figure.

November

Finally, things started to look up. Target had me start doing “comp shop,” which consisted of me getting a PDA with a list of products each week, taking said PDA to Walmart, and getting the prices for those items. This coincided almost exactly with me putting in my two weeks’ notice at Target, as I’d had more than enough of working in retail to last my entire life. For the first few days, I was good; I stayed in Walmart for most of the day. Three days later, I was guessing prices and walking around the mall for eight hours a day on Target’s dime. Fantastic. I did comp shop for the rest of my time at Target, with the exception of my last day there.

Before I started doing comp shop, I got offered a job working for a mortgage company. I took the job, because it gave me a way out of Target, but I’m kind of regretting it now. The work is horrendously tedious, and my boss is possibly the most incompetent person I’ve ever met. Oh well, live and learn.

November also saw the long-awaited release of the Wii. I played Excite Truck in a Gamestop about two weeks before launch (while I was being paid to do comp shop, no less), and I knew right away that it was going to be amazing. When it came out two weeks later, I brought it home and played for basically the entire day. Zelda was and still is everything I hoped it would be, even though it isn’t perfect. I am very, very pleased with the Wii.

Thanksgiving was nice. My aunt, uncle, and cousins all came to our house for the first time since Easter of 2002. The “kids” played Wii Sports and Excite Truck for basically the entire time, and if that didn’t prove how much fun the system is, then I don’t know what will. They all left wanting one.

Thanksgiving break also saw the much-anticipated Shrimpfest. On the Saturday night after Thanksgiving, I met up with Scot, Ryan, Matt, Tom, Dan, Vogel, and PhilCollins at the Roosevelt Raceway theater, where we saw For Your Consideration, which brought the lols home. After the movie was over, we made our way to Red Lobster, where much shrimp was consumed and much good times were had. Endless Shrimp had ended earlier in the week, which elicted a collective groan from the eight seated around the table. Oh well. Coconut shrimp are delicious.

Towards the end of November, my brand new Wii decided its system memory should be corrupt, and it thusly stopped working. I was pretty distraught about it, but Nintendo handled it very well, and it was replaced within three weeks. Go Nintendo.

December/January

December was probably the overall best month of the semester. With weekends now free, my sleep schedule became much more normal once again, and as a result, I regained my sanity. Classes ended on the 13th, and my last final was on the 21st. With my two finals (my other three classes had final essays, which was a nice change of pace) completed, I bid Queens College farewell once and for all.

My cousin Danny managed to score three tickets to the Giants’ last home game (on Christmas Eve against the Saints) and offered me the third ticket, which I quickly accepted. I drove up on Saturday night and nearly died when I had to swerve out of the way of an SUV that had stopped to let a deer cross and my car decided to keep going. I ended up on the median, quite a few feet away from where I lost control of my car, but I didn’t hit anything, which was definitely a good thing. Scared the hell out of me, though.

The game itself would have been much better if I was a Saints fan, as the Giants were murdered. The final was 30-7 Saints, but the Giants didn’t run a single play on offense in Saints territory all day, so the score doesn’t really express how poorly they played. The seats were fantastic, though. We sat in the eighth row on the 20 yard line. I’ve never had such good seats for a professional sporting event before, and it was nice to be that close to the field.

Christmas was nice. Michelle flew back in on Christmas day and spent another two weeks here. Just as with our previous three visits, it was wonderful, but never long enough. I’m sure that’ll always be the case. Wiifest was fun, and New Year’s Eve was spent at my aunt and uncle’s house. The rest of our time together was mostly spent just hanging out around my house and actually getting to spend time with each other, something that I really don’t appreciate enough. I’ll see her again over spring break, and that can’t get here quickly enough.

Since she left on the 6th, most of my time has been spent working or playing video games. Classes start at Post this Monday, and I guess I’m looking forward to it. For some reason, I’ve always preferred spring semesters to fall semesters, and I’m hoping this one will be more of the same. It’ll be nice to only have to drive fifteen minutes each way to get to and from class again, as well as actually being able to park on campus, two things that Queens was sorely lacking in.

I think that about does it for the recap. I really hope this is the last one I’ll ever have to do on here, and that updates will be both more timely and more numerous. I’ve said that already, but it bears repeating, so there it is again.

Posted on 17 January 2007 | Comment [1]

I’ve been working on the site pretty much all day. The individual article page should be finished now, and I cleaned up a lot of the stuff on the back end. I’m still not done by a long shot, but I feel pretty good about how things are going. With any luck, I’ll be able to continue this trend and finish things up before classes start next week. I really need to rewrite the “about” page, as it’s outdated and poorly written, and I’m going to do a style guide as well. I’m sure I’ll think of other things that need to be done, too, and I’ll deal with those as they come up.

I thought what I’d do tonight is do a month-by-month recap of what’s happened between my last real post and now. There were definitely things I wanted to post about during that span, but I somehow convinced myself that I didn’t have time to do it, so I’m going to try to remember it all now. Hopefully, this will be a one-time thing, and all future events will be recorded in a timely fashion.

Originally, the plan was to post the full recap in one fell swoop, but it ended up being three pages in Word, so I decided to post everything up to October tonight and save the rest for tomorrow. I’m hoping this will help me start some kind of routine here. We’ll see how that works out.

August

On July 20th, I made the following statement:

Michelle comes out here in less than a month. My pledge to update [semi-]regularly may have to be put on hold for the two weeks she’s here.

Well, as you can see, that proved very true. We had a wonderful two weeks together, after which I lived through probably the most stressful two months or so of my entire life.

September

The day after Michelle’s flight back, I started work back at Target, and the day after that, I started classes at Queens College. My schedule for the semester consisted of 7 hours of classes on Monday and Wednesday wrapped in an hour’s car ride and a three-hour class on Friday. My work schedule was 9-5 at work the other four days of the week. Needless to say, this very quickly took a toll on me, and I forgot what it meant to get a good night’s sleep—or anything more than a few hours a night, really.

The month wasn’t all terrible, though. I saw Staind and Three Days Grace in Philadelphia, and although the ride there and back was horrible (to the point where I swore I wouldn’t drive outside of New York for at least a year), the show was pretty awesome. I’m sure a lot of you don’t like either of those bands very much, but it was the second time I’ve seen Three Days Grace live, and they put on one hell of a show. Staind then topped them by putting on what I can only assume was one of the most amazing live shows ever.

My cousin Heather got married on the 23rd; the ceremony was very nice (and also very short), the reception was fairly insane (my family knows how to have a good time, especially when there’s an open bar involved), and it was great to see my cousin get married to such a good guy. Jeff, you may not be blood, but you’re family forever.

October

October was, in a word, hell. All my classes started piling work on at the time same, work continued to be terrible, I continued to get very little sleep, and the emotional drain soon overtook the physical drain I was going through. I began counting the days until the semester was over, but doing so didn’t help any; it only served to reinforce how long the semester was. I did get accepted to Post as a transfer student, though, which was one small glimmer of hope. Oh yeah, and the Cardinals knocked the Mets out of the playoffs. Boo. I was pretty disappointed about it, but most of the team should be back next year, and I’m pretty confident that they’ll be in the hunt again come the 2007 playoffs. Enough of October, nothing noteworthy happened.

Tune in tomorrow for the stunning conclusion to my year.

Posted on 16 January 2007 | Comment [1]

I’ve been playing around with some plugins lately and haven’t posted anything of real substance, so I decided it was time to do so.

Firstly, you may (or may not) notice that the “Categories” on the right there are now “Tags.” Don’t worry, I’m not selling out to the hype of Web 2.0 and social blah blah blah…I switched to a new plugin because it gives me more freedom than using two predefined categories for a single post. The downside is that it means I’ll have to be updating and stuff more often, or something, but I’ll see what I can do about that.

Moving on…

Things have been going well of late. The interview at Target I mentioned a few weeks ago was a success; I’m now employed as a cashier in the same store as one the scot which makes us, as Bob put it, “the most horrendously funny retail store on Long Island.” Accept no substitutes.

Michelle comes out here in less than a month. My pledge to update [semi-]regularly may have to be put on hold for the two weeks she’s here.

I finally got notice from Queens College…I’m in as a transfer student, and by the look of things, the classes I took at Nassau knocked out most of their liberal arts core requirements, which is good. I’ll have to take a few classes to account for what they want that Nassau didn’t, but that’s no big deal. I’m hoping that there are still some classes left to sign up for, however; I should look into that. Damn it.

I think that about covers everything that’s been going on.

Posted on 17 July 2006 | Comment [3]

/me sighs

So here we are almost 3 weeks into the new year, and I still don’t have an update with “2006” in the date. I am sorry, my dear readers (reader?), I really am. As I was just explaining to The Scot, I’m not much for doing small updates, as I prefer longer updates with more substance. However, by the time I actually get to where I want to update, I can’t remember half the stuff I wanted to write about in the first place. I guess the best way to remedy that is going to be this: when interesting stuff happens, I’ll write about it, hopefully in a timely fashion. However, my life is not always terribly interesting, so I can’t promise there will be much [interesting] content. I hope you can deal with that. =o)

So yes, as promised, here is an update about my trip to Oregon.

After getting approximately 4 hours of sleep, I woke up at around 4:30 AM on December 29th, showered & dressed, made sure I had packed everything I needed to bring, and my dad and I left for JFK International Airport at around 5:30. Neither flight was terribly interesting…a little turbulent, but nothing major. (Aside: The innovative touch screen control of the Nintendo DS is not particularly well suited to turbulent airplanes.) Landed in San Francisco, dashed down to the departure gate for my connecting flight to Portland, had my carry-on randomly checked because of the Playstation 2 in my bag (Michelle’s Christmas present), boarded the plane to Portland, and touched down a couple hours later.

I was a little anxious getting off the plane…I mean, I knew for sure that I was in love with Michelle, and all that good stuff, but there was always the chance that maybe I wouldn’t like her, or that she wouldn’t like me. I didn’t see that as being the case though, so I dashed off the plane and walked around looking for her, since I wasn’t exactly sure where I’d be meeting her.

After about a minute or two of that, I noticed this really cute girl leaning against one of the poles looking at something off to her right. A second later, it registered that I’d found her. There was that moment where our eyes locked for the first time, and the next thing I knew I was finally hugging the girl of my dreams, the woman I was going to marry one day.

A good five minutes later, we walked down to baggage claim and got my suitcase, then went out to the car and headed the two-ish hours back to her house.

I can’t say there’s very much to write about concerning my time there. Most of our time was spent snuggling at her house. But you know what? The trip couldn’t have been any more perfect than it was. I mean, other than if it were longer, but that doesn’t count. I’ve never been as happy as I was for those 5 days Michelle and I spent together. Getting back home and being apart wasn’t easy for the first week, and it seems like it’s been longer than two weeks since I got back home, but I now have those 5 days to look back on, and the promise of more good times to come in the future. The future is looking very, very bright.

One side note: coming home, American decided to ‘delay’ my bag, which means I got home on Wednesday and my bag got home on Friday, and when I got it back, the retractable handle thing was busted beyond all repair. I’ve tried getting in touch with their damaged baggage office or whatever it is, but I haven’t had any luck yet, so I’m not really sure what to do. If anyone has had any experience with this sort of thing, and can offer insights, that would be a tremendous help.

Moving on.

My winter break is about over, as classes start the 23rd. With any luck, this is going to be my last full semester at Nassau; I then plan on taking 3 credits during the summer session in June, and then I’ll be done there. That raises the question of where I’m going afterwards, but I’ll figure that out. I think so, anyway.

I guess that about does it for this update. I really will try to be better about it from here on out. I’ve said that before, to no avail, so we’ll see how it goes. So yes. Stay tuned…

Posted on 19 January 2006 | Comment [3]