I drove back to school today because I had a meeting, but before I left my dad cooked London Broil on the grill. Add some mashed potatoes and green beans and it was a fantastic lunch! I made it back to school in two hours and forty five minutes because I managed to only catch one red light the entire drive. The way I go, there are a lot of lights, so that was pretty impressive for me. I went through one light that had just turned yellow, but it wasn’t red yet.
When I got to the meeting, I quickly realized it was not going to be what I thought it would be. They didn’t want to see any of the designs I had put together or any of the sketches I had, they just wanted to have a formal meeting to say they had one. That didn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I was asked to be there so I went and answered any questions they asked. I’m convinced it would have been just as effective to have had that meeting over the phone or via email and it didn’t even have to be formal, but I guess they just wanted to have a meeting on the books to show people it had been accomplished. Almost three hours of driving and cutting my weekend a day short for that wasn’t necessarily worth it, but now we can move forward on the mural!
I showed my mom the web cam of six Sheba Inu puppies and she asked why anyone would want to watch them. I really don’t know, but they are kind of a phenomenon going around the Internet right now. That being said, my mom watched them all day today. She kept looking over at the computer screen whenever she was in the living room to check and see what the latest puppy hijinks were. I don’t know, Mom, who WOULD watch six Sheba Inu puppies all day long keeping up with their activities and sleeping patterns?
I left this morning to spend the weekend at home and came home to a house that was 60 degrees. When everyone is at work and school, The heat clicks down so that a lot of energy is conserved at home. I walked I with a coat on and didn’t realize just how flippin’ cold 60 is until I took the jacket off and realized it wasn’t much warmer than it was outside. I quickly turned the thermostat up to 70 to try to gain a little bit of feeling back in my digits.
I found out my sister’s dog hasn’t gotten much smarter. Instead of keeping her in a crate all day while everyone is at school and work, she just gets stuck in the laundry room with a laundry basket in the doorway. She is too scared to move the basket or jump past it, so she is confined to the laundry room simply by her nerves. And when I say laundry basket, I mean laundry basket. It doesn’t even have to have clothes in it and she won’t go past it. My mom wondered if she was just putting on a show and really spends her day running around the house and sleeping on the furniture, but I really don’t think that’s the case.
In the recent economic situation and with constant pressure from government subsidized and well-established delivery services, DHL has decided to halt operations in the domestic US in regards to Express deliveries. They will still make deliveries between the United States and other countries where their services are much more diverse, they just will not be doing domestic deliveries anymore. DHL, you were one of the things that kept FedEx and UPS prices a little bit lower than they used to be and had really great customer service. Your continued domestic service to the USA will be missed.
We played soccer this morning for PT and I found it’s a lot easier to play when you have a team of people who know the rules and understand the general concept of the game. Sure, everyone knew that main objective was to put the ball in the goal, but the concept of hand balls, off sides, penalties, goalie boxes, passing, scoring, zone defense, field positions, ball handling and many of the other finer points of the game escaped a good number of people. It was a lot of fun though and it got us out and running around, so it was a good workout if nothing else! I also learned that there are people out there who are more uncoordinated than myself!
I spent a lot of time today getting my security clearance paperwork done (sorry if I included you as a contact and didn’t tell you. You may get a security investigator at your door in the next few weeks, so just answer the questions he or she asks and know that I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before hand!) and that meant spending a lot of time on the phone to get my online application password corrected. I got transferred nineteen times in two hours and explained my story to six people. I had to listen to a lot of automated menus and I realized how ridiculous it is to have a message telling me the menu option have changed.
The recorded message usually says: “Please listen carefully as our menu has recently changed.” I don’t think you need to tell me that they have changed and just waste my time. I haven’t ever called before and if someone already knew what they were going to hit, they had already hit the number anyway, so that message is a waste of my time. And when more and more people are on a cell phone, that is four to five seconds I could have been reexplaining my story to an actual human! Just put me on the phone with someone!
EAD (this is when you start getting paid): 23 December 2008
RNLT (the absolute last day I can show up at my base): 26 December 2008
For those of you not up on the Gregorian calendar and national holidays, 26 Dec is the day after Christmas.
That’s going to make moving kind of tricky.
And for those who may not know about the whole graduation ceremony, I have to be at my first base just 9 days after I graduate. Other people are getting four to six months (and more in some cases).
I found out today that people do not know how to write legibly with a pen on paper (or pencil on paper depending on your preference) because we’ve all started typing everything. We had to hand write a couple paragraphs and then pass them around for a class last week and I had a hard time reading a lot of people’s papers because their handwriting was atrocious. And this wasn’t just guys, a couple of the girls had terrible writing as well.
I think this comes from a lot of typing. We hardly write anything anymore when it comes to school and I know businesses out there are moving more and more toward email and online documentation. People, we have a lot that needs to still be handwritten to make it effective! Which is better, a thank you email or a handwritten thank you letter? See, we still need a few things to be written out like in the old days!
Don’t take this as a lashing of electronic communication (I’m a huge proponent of electronics and technology). I just think if you are in college, you should be able to write two pages worth of words and I should be able to read 99% of them. If I have to basically have you read me your paper, it’s not worth your time or mine!