Thoughts on the Journey

I just got off the phone and finally have my wireless connection set up, which is a relief. I had to call Linksys since apparently I have to do clone thing for my Mac and had to pay them some money, but its set. Also it was that weird feeling of I've set up a lot of wifis and fixed my parents so I know a lot of the basic steps and I think the tech lady appreciated that she didn't have to explain a lot. I wouldn't have known to do that but I think my mother mentioned having to do the same when she got her new laptop as well. Honestly calling Apple probably would have been simpler as I have AppleCare but I'm not used to thinking about the fact that I have a computer company that will help. Either way, my apartment is now wifi ready again.

Oh and I found out that one of my debit cards' numbers has been stolen again. It sounds like from the fraud guy that there has been an uptick in this happening in general as thieves are stealing from merchants which is hard to protect against. Its annoying but the banks I work with have been very good at getting me reimbursed and a new card, which is good as I had a scare of thinking I'd overdrafted today.

Today I also started reading a book that so many other people on my flist will love-historical cross dressing, world exploration, botany, science, gender roles and tall ships. Its called The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe and the writing is fantastic which is a nice bonus as the history itself is fascinating. bookelfe, this is right around your sweet spot and one reason I have it is because I'm trying to read more nonfiction as inspired by you. So at the Borders' going out of business' sale I got myself a pile of interesting nonfiction, this is one of them.

Since this is all rather serious and I'm feeling a little jittery, I think I'm going to finish this post with some beautiful pictures that I've taken lately.



This was the beautiful place where the reception of my brother's wedding was held.

( Grapes and Butterflies )

I'm two days out from my last assignment and I already feel so much lighter and tired. This is the feeling I'm used to at breaks as my body goes, no more classes and then I fall over. I don't think the realization that I'm fully done will feel real for a while yet. My plans for doing things are slowly progressing.

I have ideas of yummy dishes to make from the neglected vegetables in my fridge and plans for tidying my flat and getting some new clothes. Does anyone know good pea dishes? I know what I want to do with the cabbage and sweet potatoes but I'm stuck on the peas.

On my way to work today I stopped into a local martial arts place to pick up a sheet about Tai Chi classes. This is part of idea to finally take a dance or something class to get moving again as there's such choice in Ann Arbor. It should be much more possible as I won't have classes just work and job searching and I know I'll enjoy it.

Also in terms of fun things I get to play with, I have a hundred dollars to play with at the app store and on iTunes from my new computer. So far I've bought one rather silly game but I'm not sure what else, there are so many things. Oh and with the caveat that I don't have a smartphone of any sort just my MacBook. For those of you with Macs, what are you favorite apps and why?

Also my mother sent me a generous gift card to Lush, which I'm having lots of fun playing with. I'm thinking that I'm also going to send some books back to amazon for some spending money on there and maybe finally get around to selling the bags of books in my hallway. If I get really productive, I might even clean out my closet too.

One of my other plots for this week is to pick the next round of jobs to apply for and send some more hopes out there.

After I wrote my last journal entry on Monday night, things started to slowly get better. Since dynastessa and I have been playing Tom and Jane from Becoming Jane, we've been plotting how to give them a happy ending. I started to write a possible what happens next fic and its at 1299 words and I had more ideas when I was walking to campus. One thing that's helped with getting this going is reading Georgette Heyer's The Corinthian and I'm going to be happily reading her books for years. The characters are charming, the details are perfect and the plots make me giggle. I think I might for fun toss Penelope Creed into Mixed Muses at some point if I can find the right PB as she's an utter pleasure. I quite understand why Richard Wyndham fell in love with her.

Yesterday was quiet, I went grocery shopping but chose to walk to the local health food place instead of driving and so I have fresh peas and more chickpeas with which to make glorious summer dishes. The best part of yesterday was the Milliways' love meme and I feel truly, incredibly blessed by Milliways, because it introduced me to so many of you amazing people that are my friends. Thank you and I'm lucky to have you in my life, which I can never say enough.

Today started a little rough as I introduced my ipod to my new computer, I'm going to email Apple about it since they helped before. Its rather silly, when my brother years ago gave me a big gift certificate to iTunes, I used my aim screenname for it but when I purchased an iPod, I created an Apple id. My music is divided between the two and my ipod and computer are confused as the iPod used to belong to a PC and so while some of my music is on my computer, most of it isn't and my playlists aren't there. I'll be able to make it work out, but it made me grumpy. Once I've got it set then I'll do the awesome music meme. I need access to my A Bit of Everything playlist for it.

Oh and I haven't heard anything from the guy at North Quad, which is making me antsy. I sent it him a completely casual email about wanting to talk again and maybe have coffee on Monday, nothing as yet. Its bothersome and is starting to make me get all doubtful and nervous.

Good news is that I just received an email from the University of Victoria that says: Your BAHONS degree was granted at the 27 June University Council meeting and the degree certificate were sent out to you by courier yesterday.

Now to start the next step of job hunting and working on my grant writing as I have the next week fairly open thanks to the semester break and holiday.

Today has been a hopeful day for me in a lot of ways. I began by doing all my normal computer stuff on my new laptop, which was wonderful. At the moment I'm using Google Chrome and really liking it as it seems to do all the things I want. I do miss colored tabs a lot and so might go back to Firefox later or go between them, it all depends.

Now the first big thing I had today was a meeting with a woman in the SI Career office and I got there early and since I'd brought Lark, my new laptop, got online. I love that I can actually just carry my laptop so easily, it makes me feel rather professional and good. The meeting I had was fantastic, she basically told me, you're doing everything right and now its time to start writing cover letters and applying. I think I impressed her with all the things I'd done so far.

After that I headed over to the main library as I needed to turn in my timesheet and discovered that I'm going to have a lovely boost to paycheck from helping with the Ann Arbor Book Festival, which might go towards a new office chair and a pad for under it. My current one's wheels have been breaking since I bought it and at some point it was shifted and now sits oddly with my desk and doesn't work. The rest of my afternoon has been spent transferring files to Dropbox and thus to my new laptop and its going so quickly, I love it.

Tomorrow I get to see X-Men First Class again, yay for more James' being Charles Xavier and that's all. Saturday will be terribly busy with the book fair but there's the break between the semesters coming up so I'm going to have some more time. I have a whole bunch of answers to the five question meme to post but I think I'll do that separately so its neater.

Now I just need to figure out what moment in time to post Jane in from in the Mixed Muses' post, I think in Plymouth.

I have a new laptop and I'm enjoying switching over from one laptop to another without being in the midst of a crisis. Its rather relaxing. My new laptop is a MacBook Pro that's silver and has a 13 inch screen and is named Lark since she's light and quick. When I bought her, I got iWork and Microsoft Office for Mac while she has iLife and the normal Mac OS already installed. So far I've downloaded AIM, Firefox, Chrome and Dropbox, which I'll be upgrading as its a better way to transfer files than my external hard drive as that can't go from PC to Mac. I also need to figure out why my wireless router and my laptop don't seem to talk to each other, its probably something simple. Once I fill out a rebate form I'll get 100 dollars to spend at the app store and I need to introduce my iPod to the laptop. What's a pain is I actually have two accounts for iTunes and will be creating an Apple account, I really hope they figure out a way to merge them at some point.

So Mac users and lovers of my flist, what are your favorite programs and add ons that I should go find?

In other news, I had a fantastic visit with my parents and they left me with lots of great bottles of wine and a bottle of gin, as it gets hotter, I'll be having some gin and tonics. I drove them to the airport this morning and I'm currently finishing up some slide shows for Manga Mania, which is coming along really well. I love having a chance to go find images of heroes to share with kids.

I recently finished rereading The Wizard of London from Mercedes Lackey and it reminded me why I enjoy her Elemental Masters' series so much. The plots tend to be vaguely related to fairy tales, on this reread I noticed that this book has some of the Snow Queen story inside it. The first book of this series that I read was Phoenix and Ashes and it kept me awake since I just was so deeply into it. The idea of being able to connect to nature and the creatures and worlds in there clicks with how I see the world. I admit that not all of these books are as good, but Lackey's world building for the Elemental Masters makes sense for me. When I'm walking and feeling really angry, one of the things I say aloud is; Fear, Fire, Wind and Water and it helps to center me. I think this is an area I need to explore more.

I've also been reading A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones and I'm enjoying it. As always its her characters that I love more than the plot and this is a rather classic quest plot though the ideas and settings are wonderful. I enjoy that I can see variations on these characters in other books and its making me want to go read more Connie Willis since time travel is a tricky thing to write.

Since I've collected some more questions, I'll soon be posting another round of the five questions meme and might go find some more. My flisters, you always ask questions that make me smile and think. Also today I plan on doing some writing as I'd love to actually post a Sameth OOM this week.

I hate this week a lot. Last night I was working on the assignment for my Online Search course and I thought I did it okay. This class has handouts and powerpoints aplenty so I was referring to them all over the place. In class I mentioned mine since I didn't get a result so I figured I did something wrong.

Now one reason I don't like this class is the professor does this thing of being incredibly sarcastic and kind of mean, but its hard to tell if she really thinks we're that stupid or if its just her way. It doesn't make me feel comfortable or like I actually want to listen to her, because I have to sort through all this stuff to find out what's she's teaching. Yet as she kept repeating in class today, she's been teaching this same way of searching since 1987. It got really annoying, we're using an old system to search databases since supposedly it will teach us how to truly do searching. I find it tough and feel like I'm having to learn programming again. All the things that are useful end up buried under a flurry of handouts and sarcastic comments and she does know stuff somehow.

Now the thing that's made me all tense and annoyed. Class was in the morning, after class I went to get my laptop checked out and now have my laptop in the queue of a good repair place. So I get home I think around 1 and I don't think I checked my school email. I started my assignment that's due tomorrow and now have a nice draft. Some time around 4 or so, I see there's an email from this prof. Basically she goes, there are tons of things wrong with your assignment and I want to speak to you, I'm around at these times. Well, the time she mentioned was this afternoon and I'm home and its too late. The time she recommends for tomorrow is when I'm working and this is all in this I need to see you and this is when you'll see me tone.

I wrote her an email apologizing for just getting the email, saying what wouldn't work tomorrow and would next week work. I've yet to hear from her which is freaking me out. I've talked about this in chat and on Twitter too, but I need to write it out so its not stuck in my head. I really hate this class, but its too late to drop and start another one. I'll get through this, but gah, I hate this. the_croupier, whenever you're online, ping me, you've taken this class, hopefully its not as bad as it feels.

Please distract me with something, I'll take prompts, I'll take silly things just help.

ETA I got an email back that reads like an order, you will be at my office at noon. So that's what I'll be doing after my morning shift. I hate this.

Apparently after two hours of trying things, HP told me that I need to hook my laptop to an external monitor to find out what's about to fail.

Hopefully its something cheap like the graphics card and not anything involving the motherboard. HP was really helpful, I think I made the HP customer service guy happy, because I understood so much of what he was talking about and we were able to just talk as things processed.

Now I'm backing the few things that aren't backed up so that things are alright. Hopefully the monitor won't act up too much during my shift tonight, I'd feel horrible if that happened while I was helping someone.

I've had this laptop for about a year and a half, that's too soon for it to break. Though I wouldn't mind getting a Mac at some point. My whining about how heavy my laptop is, is not an excuse to break. I like my solid laptop with its big screen.

My laptop is hooked up to the big tv and ever so slowly moving my stuff over to the external HD, this is going to take a while but it will be done. Today is just lovely and I'm feeling hopefully though wow, I really wish I'd known how to do this weeks ago, life would have been so much simpler but now I know.

The crowd has left and I slept really well and actually have energy today, I'll probably be tagging here and there between backing things up.

Let's see if there's any other news, I just finished a really interesting book on Cleopatra called Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt. The author did a really good job at bringing together all the various aspects of Ptolemiac Egypt and Rome, so if you're interested in that era, I recommend it.

ETA: Old laptop has suddenly decided to not see the external HD, gah!

ETA2: Unplugging and plugging back in the HD seemed to fix it.

ETA3: And all the stuff is on the HD and a lot of it is being moved to my new laptop!

I can use my mother's monitor as an external monitor for my old laptop and get all my stuff off. Yes!!

This will be my project for a point this afternoon and the staples guy said yeah for that amount of stuff, its not worth it for you to pay us when you can manage it yourself.

I'm so glad that I can actually get my stuff soon. Small edit for the fact that we have some cable wrangling to do but its possible and won't cost more money which makes me happy.

Yes, I'm doing another round since honestly its about what I'm up for today. I just came back from Starbucks and wandering around a bookstore without being able to decide what I wanted.

Then I got two books at the library, Castle in the Air and the first of the Lamplighter books by D. M. Cornish. I didn't pick up anything else since I'm still working through Whiskey and Water which I'm really enjoying, and just started a wonderful biography of Cleopatra and have a rather silly YA book about pirates to read.

I'm having one of those weird times where I actually have money to go and get stuff that I normally couldn't afford since I've been managing my money decently but I can't decide what to get.

Also my throat hurts and I really don't want to get sick again and I'm still putting off phoning the HD company to figure out how in the world to get my files off the drive and onto my new laptop. I really, really miss all my music and icons.

Now memething, this time the prompts are from fightingthecage and wordsthatfail.

Comment to this post and I will give you five subjects/things I associate with you. Then post this to your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

( Dialect, tea, fantails, the Punch Brothers, chocolate. )

( Demeter, Peace, Milliways, Books, Characterization )