My last class of the day, English 251, was cancelled. Of course, I had to take a bus and hike a quarter mile to learn this. Why can’t teachers send out an email if they’re going to do this sort of thing? Especially annoying since I stayed up late last night working on a villanelle that was supposed to be due today.

Anyway, it’s snowing out. Kinda weird, since yesterday it was really sunny, fairly warm, and the sky was completely cloudless. Then when I got up this morning it was cold and foggy. Must be a bad omen for the coming weekend. We’re driving up to Federal Way one last time to pack up a few things, clean the apartment, and do the inspection.

Oh yeah, I got the TiVo working. My USB wifi adapter (Linksys WUSB54GS) wasn’t compatible, but the MA111 adapter my sister had was, so we traded. I was able to enter the WEP code and everything, so now the listings are all accurate. Very cool.

Okay, gotta go. Here’s a photo I took outside just a couple minutes ago:

We finally got cable hooked up to the flatscreen! Has Peter Boyle ever looked this crisp and bright? I submit that he has not.

Now I just have to get a USB wifi adapter that’ll work with the TiVo (and WEP) and we’ll be in business.

I’ve been playing Hearts on Zone.com a lot lately. Really tough game to master… I’ve only been able to win about 10% of the matches. I’d rather be playing Armadillo Run, but I haven’t set up the desktop yet and my save file’s on there. This HP laptop does everything so well I haven’t had much need for the big machine yet.

I came across this great little site the other day: Things My Boyfriend Says. Here’s my favorite transcription:

While E was playing Civilization 4 I decided to go to the store. He asked if I would bring him back something, I said no, and he said:

“And I was just going to name this city I conquered after you. I guess I’ll have to call it Bitchburg.”

When I was in the Tri-Cities a few weeks ago I decided to go see Children of Men. But when I got to the theater, I found they’d replaced the showing with something dumb called TV: The Movie. My only other choices were Casino Royale and Dreamgirls. I reluctantly bought a ticket for the former and was pleasantly surprised — it’s the best Bond movie I’ve seen yet. I was a little disappointed that John Cleese wasn’t back as Q, but I suppose his presence wouldn’t have been appropriate anyway; Casino Royale‘s too serious for him.

I have to finish a 235 page novel by next Tuesday for English 373 and it’s sooo boring. At least the reading in 251 is getting interesting.

I’ll leave you with these awesome Japanimation-y Simpsons/Futurama illustrations I pilfered from Krunk:

I’ve been pretty busy with school and stuff, but it should be easier now that I’m not getting lost and I’ve learned to ride the bus. You know you can ride the Pullman transit for free if you have a WSU student ID card? And the J-route stops right across the street from my house. It’s much easier than I thought it’d be. Less waiting too.

We just finished reading Heart of Darkness in my literature class; now we’re starting Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips. I’m not terribly thrilled with the selection so far, but it could be worse.

Here’s something neat mullingitover mentioned on MetaFilter:

He talks about human civilization as being cancerous/bacteria-like. If you’ve spent time poring over the planet with Google Earth it’s hard not to reach this conclusion. Agricultural areas are partitioned off like cell walls in prokaryotes, and eukaryotic cities feed off their resources. We’re like a petri dish sandwiched between thousands of miles of rock and millions of light years of vacuum.

Not a very original concept, but I liked the way he expressed it.

Here are some pictures of my new place in Pullman. It was built in 1896, but these were taken in the summer of 2004. Right now there’s a ton of snow outside and the wisteria’s all barren, so it’s not as pretty. We’re in the basement apartment, my sister lives upstairs.

It snowed a lot last night. Which makes it really hard to get around Pullman in Brett’s car since he doesn’t have snow tires or anything. I might try taking the bus tomorrow, but I’m anxious because if I catch it at just the wrong time I could end up very late. (More likely, I’ll prepare for the worst and end up being very early which is almost as bad.)

I managed to get into English 251 through a process my sister calls “vulturing.” Looks like I didn’t miss anything important on the first day, but one of the assignments I was given is awfully weird… I have to answer a nonsensical query posed by Pablo Neruda in The Book of Questions. Here’s the one I picked (more or less) at random:

Is a crater an act of vengeance or a punishment of the earth?

To give you an idea of the contents of the book, here are a few others:

Who shouted with glee when the color blue was born?
Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots?
Why don’t they train helicopters to suck honey from the sunlight?
How did the grapes come to know the cluster’s party line?

I watched Howl’s Moving Castle the night before last. Overall I liked it, even though it had that annoying tendency of so many Japanese animations to make everything so “epic.” (With a lot of anime movies it’s like the creators can’t be satisfied with just telling a story on a small scale — every conflict has to have (sometimes literally) earth-shattering consequences, love is always unconditional, protagonists are terribly earnest and sympathetic, etc.) The movie had a lot of Wizard of Oz-ish elements that I didn’t wholly understand the point of (a young girl as the main character, a scruffy little dog companion, an animated scarecrow, a “Witch of the Waste” who dresses in black, a kind wizard who hides behind alternate identities, and so on); but I can’t find anything about the author or director that links them in any way to L. Frank Baum’s work. Surely it’s not just some big coincidence?

Finally got a TV (not the flat-panel) hooked up to cable so we can watch the new Top Chef episode tonight. We won’t get cable in the other rooms till Time Warner sends someone to hook up the basement on the 22nd. Remember when I said Time Warner cable sucked? I didn’t know the half of it — they don’t even carry the FOX network! How pathetic.

Coming up next post: Pictures of the exterior of the new place.

Things have been really hectic with the move, starting school, and so on, but we’ve finally made it to Pullman with enough stuff to live on for a week. The last time we were here it snowed about six inches in just a few hours. Really messed things up — we had to abandon Brett’s Neon at the bottom of the steep South St. hill and walk a quarter mile to get home. (Later, after the roads were plowed, we had to get a tow truck to pull him out of that space.) Snoqualmie pass was really bad that trip too; it was difficult to cross even with the four-wheel drive F-350 my mom lent us.

We don’t have cable at the moment but I’m getting a strong signal from my sister’s wireless router, so internet access isn’t a problem. Knowing my TiVo can’t record things is giving me a sick feeling though. I’m actually using Next-Episode.Net again for the first time in over a year. The cable provider here (Time Warner) is pretty terrible. They don’t even have 24-hour phone support. And you have to go down to their brick-and-mortar office for practically everything. At least that’s close by, like a half-mile down the road from here.

Well, I just had a big spaghetti dinner with Brett and my sister, so I can’t really think anymore. More to come later. English 373 tomorrow at 10:35 AM.

A lot of stuff happened over Christmas, but I’m kind of short on time here, so I’ll just mention the highlights and fill in the rest later: The office Christmas party was nice — had steak, got a snazzy coat and a cookbook; ended up with some amazing swag later on, around the actual holiday (an HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop, deep fryer, DVDs, cash (from my grandpa), fancy leather book bag, GPS navigator, and T-shirts); after Christmas, my (unbelievably generous) dad got me a widescreen LCD television for my new apartment; my family saw Uncle Dirt Nap live at Kimo’s; and I spent a lot of time remedying a wide assortment of technical problems involving Intuit software, network associations, borked timeclock memory, spreadsheets, Windows patches, and a really hinky motherboard. Oh, and I have lots of pictures to post.

Anyway, onto matters at hand: I know I haven’t been updating much lately, but I’ve been awfully busy with travel, work, getting ready to move, and so on. The move probably seems sudden, but that’s mostly just because I didn’t want to discuss it till I knew it was a sure thing — the whole plan was contingent on a few factors that hadn’t completely resolved until recently. But it’s official now: Brett and I are moving to Pullman so I can finish the bachelor’s degree I started at WSU way back when.

I’ve met a lot of terrific people here in Federal Way and Seattle. Leaving them behind is going to be tough. Martin, Torsten, Kristian, Jay, Chris, Keith, Anthony, Pat, Josh, Charlie, Ashlee, Garret, my other gaming buddies, the whole Game-A-Lot crowd — I’ll miss them.

Driving a bunch of boxes and furniture to Pullman tomorrow, so I’ve got to get to bed. For anyone trying to contact me: I’ve been missing a bunch of phone messages lately, so remember that the best way to contact me is by email. (I check it at least three times a day, on both the computer and BlackBerry.)