2 Weeks

Truthfully, I have mixed feelings about the summer ending. I have approximately two weeks before classes start on the 13th. I realized last night that I'll finally be going to school "for real." I'll actually have to concentrate on learning the material to apply in life and not just for periodic tests. Basically everything is falling into place for next semester except for housing. There were a few delays and I received an email from my roommate today that said the apartment complex would have a place available for us by mid-August. I'm hoping it's a generous estimate because we have to move in earlier than that otherwise we'll be camping for the first week of medical school.

I've successfully avoided having a job this summer which gave me the time to go with my church's youth group on a bike trip to Knoxville, TN. I drove the support vehicle for the week long trip, meaning I drove 60 miles a day at 10-15 mph. Everything went pretty well and the trip was fun. The only complication arose on the way back when the truck I was driving broke down about an hour north of Knoxville, forcing me to stay in TN until I could find people from church to drive down and haul me and the truck back to Indy. Luckily, the youth group was spending the week at a conference so I was able to camp out with them. The whole thing set me back 3 days and I had to rush around once I got back to get med school paperwork in. I'm caught up now but it was hectic.

Adding to the craziness was juggling getting the paperwork done and hanging out with Peter and Josh. Actually Peter called me within five minutes of returning from TN last Thursday because he had just gotten into town as well. Josh came down on Saturday and the three of us got to chill for about four days. We fished, bowled, shot pool, gambling at the local Catholic fair, and hit up BW's more than once. (There may have been some alcohol use involved as well :) ) Josh and I also accompanied Peter on gun buying binge because he couldn't go more than a few days without having one. Peter's still in town until the 7th so if anyone's coming through Indy soon, he'd love to see you.

I'm hoping to enjoy the next two weeks before this Med School nonsense starts. Slink, I'm looking forward to the wedding because it's conveniently the weekend after our first major test and I assume I'll need the break.

Updizzle

The summer is drawing to a close, hallelujah. My job hasn't killed me yet, but there's still a week left so I won't speak too soon. Last week a guy running the machine I run lost the end of his finger doing something stupid, but it's the same stupid thing all of us operators do to get stubborn parts into the machine. But fortunately I don't work in that area anymore, cus I passed my welding test and I'm officially a welder now. The started me out doing tig welding, which is easier than mig welding. My boss is a big black guy with corn rows and every now and then he refers to me as "my tigger", which makes me happy, especially cus he doesn't get why it's funny. Basically I babysit a giant robotic arm the size of a small house and clean up its welds when it's done. I also change its tips when they get dirty and clean the spatter off its dies. They've got me on third shift, but since that's only 8 hours (before I was working 10-12 hour shifts) I've been staying over for a couple hours in the morning and helping at my old job, which involves lifting 40-50 lb parts onto a air check table and then off again into a rack. This is by far the hardest I've ever worked in my life, and the longest hours. I have very little trouble getting to sleep at night.

Purdue plans are going smoothly. I've signed my lease with my new roommate (although danny will always be number one in my heart), and I'm putting together first semester classes. I'm going through my old control systems textbook and actually learning all the things that got replaced by a crap semester project by one V. Diddy, because that's just the kind of classes I will be taking.

The funding I got is a teaching assistantship, so I will be working for a professor apprx. 20 hours a week and they give me a complete tuition waiver and a stipend to live off of. I'll have to budget pretty carefully, but it's not too bad. Especially if I can get a sweet summer job next summer. My car doesn't need replacing quite yet, but I think it's getting there. I was hoping I'd have enough from this job to buy something better, but it doesn't look like I'll quite get there. I could buy something, but it wouldn't be much and there's such a huge risk when you start scraping the bottom of the used car barrel.

In other news, I got a cell phone! It's a motorolla KRZR, so you're welcome for the business slinky, and if I have problems I'm complaining to you and holding you accountable to know everything about my phone. I haven't really played with it yet, haven't had time. I'm on AT&T/cingular, and I have free nights and weekends and free long distance. See facebook for number.

Keeping it going

Well if no one else wants to post up things then I guess it's up to me to try to keep this thing alive. So now I'm going to request information from the other two people using this thing. So people tell me about your summer what your currently doing and how it's going for you.

My summer has been going alright. First month or so at Motorola proved exciting and challenging. I was labeled as the expert of a IT environment because I worked with it last year and the old expert moved to a different division. So my first job was setting that environment up and shipping it over to Russia so they can run it there. Apparently lots of things got outsourced since I left. After that project I started working on some Nextel specific issues and whatnot. It's been slow but it's slowly picking up so it's good. Not the work I want to be doing but right now I can't complain.

As for not work things. I moved into an apartment July 7, 2007. It's a two bedroom apartment with a large kitchen and a fireplace. The location is halfway between my house and my work so my commute has shortened from an hour home to more like 20-30 minutes, much more manageable. Last weekend Mindy and I got some couches for the apartment and some barstools for the breakfest bar. It's been quite a ride with all the wedding things and it's only going to get crazier.

Alright guys let me know what you've been up to!