Super Amy

D’you ever get so busy that you forget where you’re supposed to be at any given time?

I don’t even know what day it is. I hope my next final is at 11… and not. *gulp* ten.

But hey! look!

Last day of classes. Woohoo! Chaz took questions, Reiger fast-forwarded his way through The Great Gatsby (great book, terrible movie… it’s what Dark Shadows would have been if it were set in the twenties), and I’m currently ignoring my statistics professor. Per usual.

Strangely, my server would not work on any of my home computers over the weekend. Not just superamy.com, but also spiralwarp and haisoft.net (the hosting company I use). I was completely freaking out, because this happened before, and I’m a little paranoid these days.

But, lo and behold, everything is safe and sound, and I think it has something to do with my cable internet.

I might switch over to my gmail account as a primary account, and start backing up files regularly. Who knows?

I want finals to be over. More importantly, I want next semester’s financial aid to come in.

Don’t buy me Christmas gifts this year. Seriously. I am going to be so angry if you do, because you’re not getting anything. It’s like its own holiday or something.

song of the moment: stats class. but this has been a recent download..

Oi.

Classes are over Monday, and for Hopewood, the seventeenth (I think). Finals? I don’t know.

Christmas is such an odd event for me. Every year, I react differently. Last Christmas was really upsetting, because pretty much everything got me down, and I ended up being grinchy all the way through new year’s. While I don’t want that to happen again this year, I don’t really know how to stop it, because the only way I can really get excited about Christmas is by decorating and buying a tree and whatnot. We have some really cool vintage decorations in our attic, and a lot of stuff that reminds me of my childhood, because honestly our decorations are always exactly the same. There’s the little strand of styrofoam santas and cloth-wrapped presents that we hang over the fireplace (or over our little cutaway when we lived on Faulkner), and the same stocking I’ve had all my life, plus snowbabies our Grandmother bought us every year. Hallmark ornaments, dad’s collectable budweiser steins. It never changes.

But I don’t want to pull them down. It would involve cleaning the whole house, finding a space for a tree, buying a tree, pulling boxes from the attic, and putting stuff up, knowing I’ll have to take it back down in January.

February. We all know it would be at least february. I mean, as sad as it is to admit, my halloween hello kitty pumpkin is still sitting beneath the stairs, on the sidewalk in front of my house. Yes, kitty’s face has crumbled in quite a bit, and the inside of the pumpkin is growing all sorts of wonderous things. Yes, I probably should have disposed of kitty. Last month.

I’m terrible, aren’t I?

Anyway, all this brings to mind right now is the stress involved. I can’t start cleaning and finish cleaning in a logical fashion.

But classes are almost over, and it isn’t a bad thing. Honest, it isn’t. Next semester, I’m taking another programming class, networking, google class beta (hah), stats 2, and an electronics lab.

boo.

I want to drop stats and take photography, but sadly, I have no money for a camera. Over thanksgiving break, my checking account was shown in red, with little “-” signs in front of all the numbers. It was a sad day, indeed. *sniff*

But, alas. programming class is over, so I should probably go. This blogging thing is going to become a new habit. Really.

$40 a year becomes too much to pay for a website i don’t love enough.

I leave you with this.

song of the moment: programming class. but hey, look! I’m a scrobbler!!

Tonight, in Greenville: Ben Folds. In Athens, GA: Feist and Bright Eyes.
Tomorrow, in Greenville: David Bromburg.
Saturday, in Atlanta: Slaid Cleaves.

Not that I’ll be going to any of those places. :-/

After this week is over, I will have a Monday and a Tuesday, and then three luxurious days of Thanksgiving break. After that, one week and one Monday and lotsa finals.

Oi. street level.

Sometimes it feels like Statistics class is the only time I ever get on the internet anymore. This demonstrates two things:
a) I should consider reconsidering my major.
b) I should pay more attention in statistics.

This semester has been frantically meandering along (go with it), so I’m sorry if I’ve neglected any of you the way I have this blog. I’m going to pretend that my Christmas break is wide open, and I want to do all sorts of things, mostly things which don’t involve spending any money, because I don’t have any.

My gas tank is getting smaller as the prices go down, I believe. Or perhaps the smaller my bank account gets. Either way, a tank of gas that could last a whole week a couple of months ago will now only last 4-5 days.

I thought this would be my last semester of computer programming, but I was drastically mistaken. I have to take 330 with Crabtree, whatever that is.

Oh goody.

I’m not listening to anything right now, obviously (excepting statistics, which I am skillfully tuning out), but if I were, it would probably be the new Devendra Banhart album, Cripple Crow. It’s beautiful.

Guess who got the last four tickets to see Wilco playing in Asheville last night?

.
.
.
.

If you said me, you’d be wrong. After all, I needed merely one ticket to hear Jeff Tweedy in all his wonderousness. But myself, Amandy, Sarah, and Hannah – there’s your four.

We got stuck on the interstate. I mean the kind of stuck where before you’ve moved an inch, you’ve discovered new patterns in the interstate gravel. The Fellowship of the Ring (extended edition) had played in its entirety before we got off of that dreaded interstate, and we were convinced we’d never get tickets. Keep in mind, this is the same show that sold out a month ago.

Lo and behold, we got the last four. The last four. The last four. The last four.

The last four.

It was absolutely wonderful, and 10x better than I’d ever expected. They played 5 (5!) songs off of Being There! It was truly beautiful. I only regret that I didn’t have $800+ to see them open for the Rolling Stones tonight.

There were some pretty good photos, too, but Mandy took most of them, and won’t let me use them. Maybe she’ll get around to posting them eventually, so keep an eye out for them.

Quite frankly, I miss my little Tweedy, and I want him back.

song of them moment: Yeah. It is Wilco. *hangs head ashamedly* I Got You (At the End of the Century)

HAHAHAHAHAhahaha.

2.5) Compute the total memory traffic in bytes for both instruction fetch and instruction execution for the code that implements the expression evaluation (A=(B-C)*D) for 3-, 2-, 1-, 0-, and general-register machines. -homework question from Dr. Chaz.

What a glorious semester I’m in for…

The other classes are going just as well, I might add.

*brain explodes*

song of the moment: andy griffith theme playing from the laptop of a lab student

He finally gets it.

For five years, I’ve been doing this, and he finally gets it.

After introducing dad to myspace.com, he really took a liking to it. He’s really into doing his own songs and recording them and fiddling around with them, and hadn’t realized that there were millions of other people doing the same thing that he could easily network with. The details and features of having an account, however, are still a little new, and he’s having to play around with everything to figure out the differences between posts and comments and messages and invites and bulletins and whatnot.

“I guess I’m going to go post a… blog,” he told me finally, tonight. His account had just the one blog entry he’d posted right after he joined. “I don’t guess anybody cares, though, since I’m the only one posting.” So dejected. I explained to him the difference between blogs and comments and messages, and the fact that only he is allowed to post to his blog. He’d been confused by the “subscribe to blog” link. Slowly, the realization dawned on him.

“Wait… so I get to say whatever I want?” I confirmed this. “I can make enemies en masse, instead of just one at a time! I can be all kinds of politically incorrect! I can spout out anything I want to, and nobody can stop me! Wow! This blogging thing is pretty cool!”

So kids, if you ever sometimes wonder if your parents pay any attention at all to what you do on the internet, the answer is no.

song of the moment: Chin Up Chin Up – Virginia Don’t Drown
The title of this album is “We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers.” Forgive me for picking on such a great album name, but you english people – isn’t that a split infinitive?

You’re what happens when two substances collide, and by all accounts you really should have died.

Update time! Can we just pretend I apologized and whatnot, and move on? I think I would like that.

The past month has been pleasantly busy with work. Once I managed to finish up the June onslaught of trips and missions work and general stress, summer turned out to be faithfully steady and mostly predictable. “Work”, on the other hand, was very enjoyably random. I got to paint buildings and numbers and calculators and stars and all sorts of things on walls and cabinets, hot-glue rope to ceilings, sort books meticulously, hang lots of wallpaper, tile tabletops, and play video games with the coolest kids ever.*

The fall semester is coming up so quickly, and it’s a little scary. I’m slotted to take CIS 235 (not really sure what that is…), ENGL 214 (”Literature and Madness”), MATH 211 (Statistics), and CIS 231 (C++, pt. 2) all in a row on M-W-F mornings, and ART 105 (with Sarah, Mandy, and Tota) on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Simple enough. The afternoons will be spent at Hopewood, teaching Spanish to the high schoolers. Wow.

I’m really, really excited, and really, really nervous… I mean, it’s very typical for me to get bogged down in classwork in general, but I really want to put the time and effort into lesson plans for Spanish. I’m pretty confident that everything will work out, though, since I won’t have any spare time at Lander to be pulled in different directions. All of Hopewood could use your prayers, though, as we start a new year in a new building.

The quote at the top of this post is from “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left,” one brilliant song by one brilliant Andrew Bird. Don’t think, buy it now, and remember to thank Sarah. I’ve also recently purchased the new Coldplay cd, the new Sufjan Stevens cd, and the not-so-new but nonetheless incredible “Carney” by Leon Russell. I don’t know how I’m supposed to pay my traffic ticket** now, but then I suppose the responsible thing to have done would have been to think about that before cd-shopping.

I’m going to get things organized before classes start, and I’m going to stop eating so much junk food, spending so much money, sleeping so late, and getting distracted by trivial things. Is it weird that I’m almost always about eight months late (four months early?) with my new year’s resolutions?

song of the moment: Leon Russell and Joe Cocker – Girl From the North Country

* If you’re a Gravley, I promise I was working the whole time and not at all playing video games with your children/grandchildren.
** “Careless driving.” It’s a pretty amusing story, really, but will likely only continue to be until the woman sues me.

I got my driver’s license yesterday. I was a little nervous about it, but after so many reassurances that it wouldn’t be so bad, I wasn’t too terribly worried. I passed – not necessarily with flying colors, but I passed. This is the point where it hits me – the state of South Carolina saw it fit to put me on any highway in America, just like that. How can they do that? I’m a terrible driver! I don’t pay attention, and I wait too long at intersections. I have no sense of direction, Roads don’t make sense to me, and I’m probably a bigger insurance liability than Geico will ever know. No wonder driving through Greenwood is so scary. They let people like me pass the test.

For almost a year now, there has been a small bird that likes to build nests in our garage. We have a few small shelves on the wall up against the house, and I guess she liked the warmth during the winter, and shelter from the rain. It was really nice to get to hear the baby birds chirping after they hatched. Dad told me tonight while we were standing outside that he’d heard baby birds this morning, and that he thought her eggs had hatched. I excitedly started climbing things to see the little babies, but they weren’t there… just this ugly brown snake. I hate him. I think he ate the mommy bird, too, and now we don’t have any birds in our garage… just Ugly Brown Snake. Last night, we saw the snake sitting in the corner of the garage that the mommy bird slipped under when the door was closed, and we tried to catch him for a while, but eventually gave up. And now all of our birds are gone.

I don’t like snakes anymore.

My trips went well. Summer, so far, has gone well – mostly working and whatnot. It always feels a little weak to talk about two or three months’ worth of activities after they seem of such little importance now, so I won’t.

Next semester, I’m taking CIS 135 (formerly with Chaz, but now with Shaffer… I’m so upset), CIS 231 (C++ 2), ART 105 (yay!!), ENGL 214 (Literature and Madness with Rieger… yay!! again!), and Math something (211 maybe? statistics – meh). I’m also going to be teaching two high school Spanish classes at Hopewood, and apparently monitoring some PE classes and homework sessions. As usual, I’m way more excited about Hopewood than I am about Lander – the new building is really, really exciting.

Oh, yeah. Speaking of Lander, they’ve decided to increase tuition 12-13%. Apparently, this puts them more on par with such colleges as Clemson. I’m not sure how making us pay more money is supposed to make us feel like we’re getting a better education, though – Lander will never be able to offer the resources and opportunities Clemson can. So if you feel like donating to the Amy-college-fund… you know. Let’s talk.

Also, the new Coldplay cd is really, really good.

song of the moment: Wilco and Billy Bragg – Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key

1. Spring 05
Finishing classes was supposed to be exhilarating – a rush of relief to follow the stress of scholarship applications and final exams and the anticipation of grade postings. Don’t get me wrong – in a way, it has definitely been a pleasant escape – but it hasn’t been all I’d imagined the first post-semester week would be. First, there were the three or four days I spent sleeping in and playing ridiculous amounts of video games. These days were saturated with feelings of guilt: “Isn’t there something I should be doing? Shouldn’t I be feeling stressed or worried? Am I sleeping too much?” Once I finally came to terms with the peaceful, resounding “No”s induced by the mass amounts of serotonin my well-rested synapses were able to put forth, reality hit. Of course there were things I needed to be doing, and tons of them. I should be stressed and worried, and I am most definitely sleeping too much.

2. Super Mario Brothers
It gets to the point where I can just sit and play and not think. Everything becomes mechanical – jump, dart, hit, run. I’ve been getting almost giddy about it lately; I gather pillows and bean bag chairs, a diet coke and chocolate. When I get tired of staring at the tv screen, I move on to the classic Minesweepers, in addition to WHATword and Collapse, and BounceOut. This has gotten serious, and admittedly, a little embarrassing.

3. Wallet Abuse
Bruce Springsteen – Greatest Hits; The Cars – Complete Greatest Hits; Jack Johnson – In Between Dreams; Ben Folds – Songs for Silverman; Tom Waits – Bone Machine; Harry Nilsson – Nilsson Schmilsson; Whiskeytown – Pneumonia; The Counting Crows – August and Everything After; Bruce Springsteen – Devils and Dust. And I really needed that book buyback money, too. Weezer’s new cd comes out Tuesday, and I just don’t know what I’m going to do.

4. Graduation
Congratulations to all of you lucky ducks who are finished with such years of madness. Liz has set a ridiculous standard of what we’re supposed to do with our lives post-graduation, and Markley… well, I guess he isn’t through schooling yet, which means the rest of us will feel like slackers for just sticking with the four-year degree. And for not being ridiculously talented comic artists. Actually, I’m never going to amount to anything.

5. Sufjan Stevens
This is for you, Mario (And the whole state of Illinois, too, I suppose). Please don’t die.
A few years ago, there was that Sufjan Stevens album, “Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State.” It was good, I thought. Then Sufjan announced his intentions of releasing a concept album for every state in the great USA. All the indie kids laughed and called him overzealous and idealistic. Well, “Chicago,” the first single off his forthcoming “Illinois” album stopped approximately 12,419,293 people from laughing. If you want it, “Nxd Amy” on AIM will gladly send it to you. That’s me, if you haven’t gathered as much.

song of the moment: The Veils – Valleys of New Orleans