Groceries:

So this afternoon and evening was pretty much completely spent doing grocery shopping. First I went to Costco with Jeff and then after that I went to Shoppers with Andy. I think the time span went from 3 to 10. The sad thing is that I didn't even really buy much food. It's sort of depressing, thinking that I wasted a whole bunch of my day. I suppose it wasn't bad, but just in that specific perspective.

Anyway, I ran into (relatively) a bunch of people that I know today, given the fact that I spent a good amount of time just sitting in one corner of the union and some more time up in North Campus where I know few people. There are a few people that I would have really, really liked to have run into today, just because I haven't had much time to do that whole catching up thing with them yet.

I really love how much being in this house makes me feel like I'm in a crazy family. And I love how there are just a constant flow of people coming and going.

Tomorrow is a long and hard day. But I think we're making home made BBQ chicken pizza and smoothies tomorrow. Yum.

What?:

I found it absolutely hilarious... walking out of commons and running into AZ and Brita. Andy goes "Who's this?" standing right across from Brita and pointing at her. Maybe it's just me.

Family:

Today went from blah to totally cool. After getting back here from church, Mr. Wahba came by to see the place. It has been too long, so it was good to update. Then we went out and took down a tree. That was insanely scary and hilarious at the same time. I then proceeded to cook my first dinner at the house. It was pretty delicious. Lime chicken seared with honey over rice with a side of green peas. Some of us guys went out to the driving range. I think I did pretty terribly for my first time. I doubt I will ever get into golf. It's such a rich-person game, I don't think the whole environment could really fit me. Oh, plus I whiff a lot. We proceeded to cook a massive amount of rice krispies treats while broiling a full rack of spare ribs. It was an impulse buy from Giant... Andy and I couldn't help it. An absolutely delicious impulse buy at that.

There are times in the house where traffic gets pretty busy. People just show up for a bit and leave whenever. It really feels like a big family living here. It's fun. It's also ridiculously late.

Yearn:

What do you yearn for?

Stalk:

So I am back and feeling more complete now. Sad, no? The techy part of Marlbrough is starting to come together. As it is with everything else in the house, the networking setup is overkill. It's a 6 bedroom house. With two wireless router access points.....

Also, if you want to watch a movie, then this is the place to do it. The sound system is pretty sweet. Seriously, check it out. Come on by.

Recently I have been doing a lot of analyzing of room setups and designs. Practicallity, center pieces, seating, colors, patterns, and other room dynamics have been consuming a lot of my discussion topics. I have a pretty big thing with angles. Right angles are fine and efficient, but if you can pull off an offsetted angle then the room has the potential to be really attractive. I don't know. Enough of that.

The Leadership Retreat was good. It pretty much forced me to work on some things that I otherwise would not have thought much about. I suppose that's sort of its purpose. I had a little trouble concentrating, but there could have been factors which would have made it worse. Whatever, got to stay thinking positive.

Tomorrow I get my rice cooker. This thing is really sweet. It's rather ghetto because one of the legs is missing and a little piece of balsa wood has to be used to balance it out, but it makes some awesome rice. I am excited for my rice. I am going to try something new tomorrow evening with the rice. I will try to see what is the best way to get the rice steamed with green onions. There's got to be a certain time and certain way of cutting the onions so that it's attractive and the flavor doesn't get bitter. My mind now wanders to some deeper things than cooking, so now it is time for me to stop.

Dropout:

As school approaches and things begin to get more busy, one can usually observe a significant drop in biog activity. With everybody once again in close quarters, internet updates become less necessary. Typically, I try my best to remain faithful, mostly just out of principle.

Sunday turned out to be awesome. Jeff and Kristal showed up. Then Andy and his dad. Then Ryan. It became an insane moving party really quickly. My arms and back ache like crazy, though. Kristal says we are in the honeymoon stage with our house, and that we are stuck in this mindset that we will have a bunch of people over everyday. I really hope that it will happen. I am also really excited about giving tours.

Not too much going on today except Chick fila in the evening. I may be back to double post.

Beginnings:

Unless you have been to the house within the past few hours, then you have no idea what the interior looks like. A whole lot of work has been done to start getting things in place. I think my back is beginning to ache a little. There is a whole lot that still needs to be done, and I'm beginning to worry about group grocery shopping. That will end up being a lot of work also.

But before I drop off the face of the internet world again, let me update with some scheduling. Tomorrow I go back to the house until sometime Monday evening. Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning I will be going to a Chick Fila opening so I won't be around. Hopefully Thursday and Friday I should be able to get to campus and hang around/ help people move stuff. And then there's leadership stuff. Also by Thursday we should have our internet installed so I should be back to my regularly scheduled programming.

Oh yeah, I put the first coat of paint on today. It's different than what I first thought, but exactly what I wanted.
My furniture is not that nice at all. I don't really have any furniture actually.

Limestone:

This is me standing outside of Limestone. I figured I could walk over and steal their internet for a sec.

Efficiency:

Today I switched browses. Big deal, right? Well, it took me a good while to customize it to the way I like. I left Firefox because of it's problems with handling the TIP. Long story short, it had compatibility issues with some tablet features. Enough boring stuff, onto the coolness. With just two clicksI can open up all of the pages that I regularly read or use.

That's like 8 different blogs all at once! Plus the 40 some people who I am connected to via xanga. Now that's some pretty quality stalking efficiency. Now about this buddy list info stalking...

Due:

Up way too late as usual.

Linked:

Click to read

Banquet:

Tonight's wedding banquet brings to mind two thoughts.

One, ESP seems to be in abundance these days. I get on my friend's case about him not putting his napkin on his lap. He says 'fine' and puts the napkin on his lap. Later in the dinner, he drops some fish on his lap. Major save for those pants, and I do the whole 'I told you so' thing.

Two, it's strange seeing church people go to an event and drink. Not heavily, but enough to noticably loosen them up. You can begin to tell which statements they are only voicing because they have a little liquid encouragement in their systems. It's just... a weird experience. Enough babbling.

Ohh, tomorrow marks the first official day of moving into the Marlbrough Mansion.

Arts:

Expression of thoughts or feelings.

There's something very strange about this sketch. But it describes my state of mind very well. I can't really explain it, so let's just let it be.

Wednesday:

So today is Wednesday again so you can probably guess what at least one of the topics I'll discuss is going to be. Episode three proved to be pretty interesting with a lot of development on the overall plot, but revealed very little about the characters themselves. It's certainly a quality plot/mystery, though.

Note to self: never meet up with someone at a McDonalds. Today I set up lunch with Kristi the staff worker. I went to the McDonald's on 124 near Airpark Dr near Flower Hill. Turns out she went to the one on 124 near Airpark Dr about .8 miles north. We still had lunch, but had to work through that crazy fiasco. Lesson learned.

This post is scattered and poorly written. I can't multitask at all. TV is distracting me.

Visits:

Yes, I was in that 295 traffic that everyone was talking about today.

I got to make some awesome visits today. I like Chipotle. Dana (and Anne's) house is beautiful! I really like the colors they have. They're so solid and classy. I definitely love the fact that it doesn't have that "cookie-cutter" feel that most places have. I think it has a lot to do with the angles. I like a house with non-90 degree angles. Maybe I should look for a house with an octagon room.

So I am doing a pretty good job of doing visits thus far. My week is grabbing a few more events, but I am still open to do a lot of visiting. Just let me know.

I am trying to find something exciting to go do.

Oh yeah, I skipped my nap today again. Exhausted.

Tabletting:

You know I could go on and on about it (and I guess I already have), but I will do my best to spare you and only say a little.

Here is a picture of it sitting in a position that shows off the hinge flexibility. Yes, the screen is sitting flat on top of the keyboard. Completely impractical, but completely cool. Okay, I am done.

Lately, I have been staying up relatively late even though I have to get up quite early. I tell myself that since I am getting up at 6 and doing all my chores in the morning, I can then take a nice nap to make up for the lack of sleep. For some reason, the ability to nap has been sporatic regardless of how exhausted I am.

Changing subjects completely, as I often do... I wish I were a better artist. I was thinking about creative thinking (that sounds stupid) and classified my artistic abilities as being rather inside-of-the-box. So I don't think it is really that creative if I just sit inside of the rules. Anyway, this is what made me wish I could draw better/ be a better artist:

There are a lot of neat art programs, I just can't think of how to use them.

Nap? :

I am so tired right now. Why an I not napping? More on this later.

Construction:

First a news break. I just learned that Peter Jennings passed away. The news was published not 20 minutes ago. May peace be with him and his family.

Coming off the retreat, I am not sure what to think of it. I guess a lot of parts were really good, while some of it was dull. It was really encouraging to see some of the seeds planted long ago in some of the younger group start to bloom.

Moving along with this senseless babble, I've learned that I am really good at building walls. Whether it be mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual- there are things that I can just block out. Of course, it's unhealthy... but it makes it easy for me to keep life moving along. But, at the same time, I find it really frustrating when I can't ignore some issue when I really want to. Some defense mechanism that is.

This week I'll have a lot of free time to do rounds, so tell me when I should do my visiting. Here are some things on my mind at the moment:
-getting psyched about seeing friends
-wanting to plant a few more seeds
-I am not at all fit, I won't be able to climb
-tablet PCs are ultimate nerd-dom
-Happy birthday, Julie... much love :)

Peace Out:

Almost gone, but bringing my lappy... and a copy of NapDyno with me. Have a good weekend. Peace out kids.

Retreat:

So this evening was rather nice and pleasant. Though that billing fiasco was a bit troublesome. I guess it's really hard when people can't catch the drift of, you know... what they're supposed to do. Oh well.

I spent $40 this week, which isn't very impressive in and of itself, but given that about 62% of that was spent on dinner tonight means I did very well. I have to be more conscious about my budget when I'm in the house.

This weekend, starting tomorrow afternoon, is my church's retreat. We're heading out to Messiah College, as usual. It'll be a good time. It would be even better if they have wireless up there, but I think I can live without it. This will be my first full-lecture note taking experience with the tablet so I hope it goes well.

The church retreat holds a lot of good memories for me. Let's see. Last year, we saw a couple of youth come to Christ. Years ago, it was the staging area for a lot of bonding in the old youth group. Many years ago, maybe it was 6 or 7 years ago, I talked to my new brother-in-law about him getting into a relationship. Goals for this year: get in some alone time and spend some time with the Chinatown kids.

Abrupt end of post. Stream of consciousness failing.

Oh Veronica:

So given the recent set of posts, one could infer that all I do all day is watch TV. This is not true. I only flip it on for a little in the evening when there's not much else to do. Anyway, I stumbled across VM again (I really didn't know it would be on) and found my second episode to be less exciting, but still a good overall experience. I dislike that she was less independent in this one, but got to see the bigger picture of the story a bit more. It is intriguing, mainly because I don't have it all figured out yet of course.

In other news, I spent a good amount of time fiddling around with this machine. There are really some small tweaks that I wanted to make that took a lot of research and experiemting in order for them to come to realization. Also, I've been enjoying it's portability (it's 3.5 pounds and has rubber grips for confident handling) as I carry it around the house a lot. Oh geez louise, it's late. More updates tomorrow around brunch time.

Crap-a-roo:

Well that was completely unsuccessful. At about 8 pm I wanted to take a tiny nap (maybe 2 hours at most) so I could catch online rush hour (10 to 12) but be rested for a 6:30 am wake up. Now it's almost 1:30 and there goes my sleep schedule. Completely.

Today was quite a busy day with all the computer stuff going on. I spent many hours of the day configuring my new computer and reconfiguring my old one. The whole process seemed to take from 9 to about 3.

In other news, this thing is ridiculously fun. More on that to come, for sure.

Let's see. Today is now Wednesday and tomorrow is Thursday. Maybe getting out Thursday night will be a really good thing for me. Just a change in pace for this week. I'm going to have to work really hard to get the car if I want to go. Otherwise I don't think I can get out there.

Just more random babbling- I wanted to give the UPS guy a hug, but he didn't seem to be very receptive of my excitement and joy so I restrained myself. It's almost 2:30 now and I will be paying dearly for this screw up.

Nerd:

This epitomizes how nerd I am:

(in reference to a car stereo project)

sirrym0 (9:58:36 PM): time to attempt a removal with a couple of coat hangers
Bertronium (9:59:47 PM): go for it, let the engineer spirit in you soar

Earlier today, I was listening to these two guys who put on a podcast show. Basically, it's a radio studio type discussion, but it's done over the internet. The one I listened is considered the primary source amongst the tablet PC online community. Yikes, how geeky is that?

A lot of talk today about the house amongst some of the Marlbrough men today. I'm getting pretty excited. It's a little daunting looking at all the capital costs that will have to go into setting up the house, but the excitement factor seems to outweight the worrying. On a mysterious note, there are a bunch of secret projects that we're working on so you should be excited, too. I kind of ran into a mental dilemma. We're linked to the Crazy house via Jeff/Kristal and Jason/Jenn, but also linked to 2301 (yet unnamed) through Ryan/Julie and Andy/Farrell. So it's 2 vs. 2 and I can't figure out which is supposed to be the "sister" house. I don't know why I think of these things. Maybe because I like to waste time.

In other news, I really need to go climbing. I feel so weak and out of practice. I'm not going to be doing so hot on the walls when I'm this far out of shape. I wish I was more hardcore.