Rambles

I feel like this is becoming the dead mom blog so I'm going to ramble on about some other stuff for a while. I will say, the house is finally empty, but things got much worse before they got better.

I'm still in school. I realize what a glorious luxury it is not to have to work while I'm in school full time. Thanks Ford! I really really hope to continue that trend for the rest of my school career. Mostly my days are filled with homework right now, trying to finish up projects for the end of the term. Today was Java, tomorrow is PHP and CSS. If you followed that last sentence, then you are probably somewhat geeky.

I'm working becoming more geeky but it's slow going. I finally installed Ubuntu Linux as an extra OS on my Mac so I could see what all the fuss is about. I used VMWare Fusion, which I originally got so I could defile my Mac with a Windows installation. It's a necessary evil for school purposes and truth-be-told, it's not Windows I mind, so much as the viruses and crashes that seem to come with it. But it's been fine so far.

I haven't had much time to monkey around with the Linux, but I noticed that the mouse functions weren't what they could be. I needed to install VMWare tools to get more seamless functionality but the graphical installer wasn't working. So I successfully used my root user privileges in the command terminal and installed it that way. Go me. So now I'm posting this from Firefox in Ubuntu.

All my t's and i's are just about crossed and dotted for my transfer to AIP next fall. I'm really looking forward to my last term at PCC. I designed my schedule with an eye for classes that will definitely transfer over to my new (very expensive) school and as a result, my schedule is structured to stretch my brain (and body) in every possible direction:

Drawing: Although I will eventually focus on programming, I have been adamant that I wanted a program where I could learn design principles as well. Hence the art school. Everyone takes drawing and color theory. At this point in my life, I can draw a stick figure and that's about it. I'm both excited and nervous about this class.

Math: My math requirements are sufficient for the two-year plan I started out with, but for a bachelor's, there's a little more math in my future. I had a choice of three different focuses: A) Liberal Arts, B) Business/management/life/social science or C) hardcore science/engineering. I'm not sure how you skew math in those different directions, but I chose B as soon as I saw the name of my old math teacher from last year in front of it. I like his teaching style and he wrote me an awesome recommendation letter for my Ford scholarship. Plus he's totally into bikes, so we were always talking about our steeds after class. He came to a Dirty Martini show at happy hour when class was over and was a witness to my first drunken binge--but that's another story. Math will be hard, but cool.

Since it's my last hurrah, I decided to totally indulge, so my third class is Creative Writing Nonfiction. Can you say, 'Excuse to blog?"

Last but certainly not least, I signed up for a yoga class, three times a week. I've only been talking about taking yoga for the last 15 years, so now I'm taking the plunge. My new massage therapist forbade me to stand on my head and ruin all her hard work on my neck.

See? Mind and body. Since I'm not taking any programming or hard core geekery this term, that means I can take all my classes at the Cascade campus 15 minutes from home. My schedule is 9-2 MWF, and 2-5 TH which means I'll have to get off my butt and ride my bike to school every day. I'm sure that will do wonders for my mental health.

In other news, I have an actual paid writing gig for a new magazine all about the Portland bike scene. I never really thought about it, but it is kind of ridiculous that we are widely considered to be the best cycling city in the U.S. but we don't have our own magazine. My friend Curt aims to fill the gap. I ran into him last fall while working a rest stop on the Bike to the Future ride. I met Curt a few years ago when I was still on a long term mission to get mom a bike. He was working at River City Bikes and he was extremely helpful and nice to us. Mom actually put a down payment on a Specialized Sirrus, but then changed her mind. Stubborn. It was another two years before I forced her into buying a bike, which she took one ride on before things went downhill (and there we go down the forbidden path again...)

Anyway...of course I mentioned that I was a writer so Curt promptly offered me the Women on Bikes monthly column. The first issue will be out in April, check your local bike shops.

Jess and I are having a hard time getting to bed before 2am these days, what with her out of work because of her wrist and me not having any classes before 1pm. She has become quite the social butterfly, and is always off on some date or another with her friends, since all I do is read and mumble unintelligible things about objects and methods. Her old camera died (RIP Casio) and the new one arrived today and she's been obsessing about photo organizing programs, and picture hosting for the last several days. She even started her own blog, which you should add to your feed reader immediately. Her new camera makes movies with sounds and she's busy learning to edit with her Movie Maker program and if I hear myself say, "Hi movie watching people" one more time, I'm going to pull out what's left of my hair, but since I've been the one behind the camera till now, I guess I'll just suck it up.

OK, I'm going to stop typing now and go to bed, despite the fact that I just discovered the built in games in Linux, one of which is Tetris. I *really* did not need to know that.