Daylight Savings

So for that one magical day in the year, you realise that your day has 25 hours. This is what you've been waiting for. The dream of many, to have more time in a day for no extra cost! (until a few months later anyway, sorta like a no downpayment purchase of furniture)

So what do you do?

Sleep an hour longer.

What else would you do with the time anyway?

Pride before the fall

A blazing red tree outside of Cobb, stark against the remaining green leaves. It's fall again. Somehow i don't take half as many photos as last year though, a more jaded approach to life? Or simply because i don't feel the incessant need to chronicle everything anymore, even though beauty still abounds where i look.

Step back and take time to smell the roses? Certainly. Especially when i still have no permanent house and thus no internet. grr.

more pictures

From jap curry version 1.

House brand:


Plus ingredients equals:


Yay for manually imported food packs!

Ginseng Root Beer

Seen in the Div school coffeeshop:



Only 75 cents! Doesn't taste very much of ginseng though. Think root beer with a little bit of a herbal aftertaste. Supposedly it had 200mg of ginseng in it. 200mg of ginseng water, more like.

In other news due to forseen circumstances our move in date has been delayed, and thus so has my date of proper return to the internet. Somehow i should be more irked by that than i am. I hope i can extend my current lease, else it's gonna be living room dwelling for a week.

New move in date: Oct 26th.

internet!

So i just spent 40 minutes on the phone today talking to this SBC representative trying to sign up for a phone line + ADSL. Had to do this coz the online form refused to acknowledge that my house existed. So phone call.

Whereupon she tried to pimp everything to me in super subversive and cunning methods.

"do you want your phone number to be listed on our directories?"
"no."
"ok. do you want to automatically bar 1900 numbers?"
"wait, go back, is an unlisted phone number free?"
"no it's $2.99 a month."
"i'll take the listed number then."

eventually after some wheedling and mild dispute over the concept of "cheapest plan", i manage to get a super ultra basic plan for $29.95 with a phone and internet. but boy is it exhausting to weave through a minefield of hidden costs for 40 minutes.

And in other news, Jacq came down from Madison to visit, although it was kinda a cop out coz i didn't really have much time since i was away shopping and spending lotsa money. Still, i hope she had fun, and yes, i did spend a lot of money. But a gap long-sleeved Tshirt for $6.50? and a 7 piece knife set for $15? woooo.

Oh so i'll get my net up and running (hopefully) on the 20th of October. They will mail my equipment over, thus saving me the $200 setup charge that a technician will cost.


I need to work as a technician.

random photo

Ikea hangers, they descend from the heavens and multiply in boxes when people aren't looking. no wonder they can sell them for so cheap.

Saying nothing at all

The rain is falling on Chicago now, which means a few things:

1. it has suddenly become @#$*ing bitingly cold
2. our car is being washed for free!

It's truly turning to fall now, the day before yesterday it was like 90 degrees farenheit [(90 - 32) * (5/9) = 30+ degrees celcius] and suddenly it's into the single digits. Without the net at home, there's no weather report other than "how long it takes for my feet to feel cold after getting out of bed and onto the freezing floors", so of course the weather chooses this time to change rapidly.

At any rate, life has been good and this quarter looks to be a nice enjoyable one... part of me feels i should take harder classes than the ones which i'm slacking off on right now, but welllllllllll... nah.

Photos should be uploaded, but i'm on a shared computer in the library away from all my pics and so my captive audience shall just have to remain captive with bated breath.

Tomorrow we're going shopping. In a rented bus. Far away. For the whole day.

Somehow that is actually sounding appealing.

Oh right and so i also got my driver's license last week, and due to some strange metric/imperial conversion problem, i am actually now grossly underweight. They should have counter staff conduct logical checks on people who pull random numbers out of the air. But so now i can drive a bit more legally than before (well a bit more legally a few months from now after my tourist driver's license allowance thing expires) and i finally get my state ID. yay.

Net deprivation

Hullo world!

I'm sitting in Brian's house using his generous free wireless internet (comes with laptop) and smelling the wonderous scents of the steak that he and jiahui are cooking. Everyone's having lots of fun cooking now that we're all moved in to our apartments and places (pictures up when i get my laptop to a place with net)







Doesn't look that good, you say? Baby steps, man, baby steps.

We've also tried our hand at our own cooking, and so far it's 3 pasta dishes and risotto and some breakfast foods. Not too shabby for 1 week.

Also we now have a theme song for moving house: Volare by the Gipsy kings. Whilst i might otherwise share in the joy, i can but provide a link to a page of lyrics:

Vooooooolare!

But that still doesn't quite do it justice. To appreciate the full beauty of the song: the chorus goes like this:

ahem.

VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOlaaaaaare, Ohhhhhhhh oh,
CAnnnnntaaaaaare, oooooh oh oh oh.
Nel blu.... di pinto di blu.
Felice..di stare lassu.

then it goes off into even more random spanish staccato words. Si.