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Ok, there’s not much time left. I haven’t been feeling well today, so I took a big dose of Nyquil about 15 minutes ago and I think it’s only a matter of time before I pass out; I’ll make this brief. I’m back in Austin after spending a nice Christmas holiday at my sister’s house in Houston. I arrived several days before the rest of my family so the majority of my time was spent keeping my niece out of her mom’s hair while she prepared everything. I’m not complaining though, little Lauren is a lot of fun. The food was great and nobody was too stressed out, it was a really nice time. I had to come back this Monday though because my office reopened on Tuesday and I had some stuff I needed to take care of before the Rose Bowl. It kind of sucks now that I’m an “adult” and I can’t just sit at home and veg out the entire break.

My eyelids are starting to get really heavy, so I’m going to have to cut this short. I really hope I can get whatever is wrong with me under control by the time we leave for Vegas…

After about a week of not having a working computer (which is an eternity in the computer nerd universe), I’m finally getting around to fixing this thing. Between all the working, sleeping, and drinking I’ve been doing since the semester ended, I just haven’t had a chance to work on it until now. I ended up buying a new hard drive at Frye’s (NOT a Maxtor), installed it, and am now in the middle of getting all the software set up again. The Service Pack 2 install is running now, which takes forever to finish and is why I have time to sit and write this.

While my computer was broken I was able to get my truck taken care of and the situation turned out a lot better than I expected. It wasn’t the tranmission that was the problem but rather the fuel injectors. A general tuneup, fuel injector replacement, and $600 later, I’ve got her back in good working order. I’ve had several people tell me that I got ripped off for something I could have done myself, but this was one of those situations where I feel my money was well spent in getting someone else to take care of it. Besides, I was originally expecting it to cost several thousand dollars, so I’m happy.

I’m heading out tomorrow morning to spend Christmas with my family at my sister’s house in Houston and I wish everyone a Happy Holidays. Drive safe if you’re traveling anywhere!

A lot of good things have happened to me this semester, so much so that I think all the bad luck I’ve been missing is catching up to me. As I was leaving my company Christmas party the other night with Denicia, my truck didn’t seem to be running right. As we were sitting at a stop light it felt like the truck was lurching back and forth instead of just idling. As I accelerated to get onto the highway it felt like the transmission was slipping because the RPMs would go up, but I was going any faster. I nursed the truck all the way home in 2nd gear and the check engine light came on as soon as I pulled in the driveway. I tried driving it around the block yesterday but it was just more of the same. Tomorrow is the first chance I’ll have to take it to a shop, so I’m getting up at 7:30 to get it in before work. I’m crossing my fingers hoping that this isn’t going to be a $3,000+ transmission rebuild

By the way, Thank You Denicia for letting me borrow your car for the past two days!

Busy times, busy times. I just got out of my Compilers final and I think I did alright. I had my Automata Theory final yesterday, which I think I did alright on as well, even though I was completely stressed out while taking it. About an hour before the final started (yesterday morning) my computer died on me. I didn’t have time to jack with it then, so I said f*ck it and left for my final. The whole time I was taking my final I was worrying about what I’d be able to recover, if anything. Luckily, after jacking with it for a little while after I got home, I found that really nothing important got erased, just parts of the OS got corrupted. I was able to get the computer somewhat up-and-running to where I could copy all the important stuff to my second hard drive. The computer works to some degree, as I’m typing on it now, but after finals are over I’m going to put a new hard drive in and reinstall everything. One lesson I’ve learned from this is that Maxtor hard drives suck. This is I think the third one I’ve had screw up on me.

Tonight is my company Christmas party at The Old Pecan Street Café downtown. They said it was going to be a salsa theme with live band and a salsa instructor on hand to teach us how to salsa! I’ve got two finals tomorrow though, so I’m not sure how much salsa-ing I’ll be able to do.

And I REALLY need to start doing some Christmas shopping…

Like I said in my last post, Maggie is back! We lost her about 3 weeks ago when the wind blew the gate open and she got out. Kam had gone to the pound to see if the city had picked her up, but she was nowhere to be found. He put up a lost dog sign and it turns out that a guy that lives literally two blocks from here was taking care of her. The guy saw the sign at the pound and called Kam, and now she’s back home. We’re in kind of a predicament now though because none of us are going to be able to take her home over Christmas break for various reasons, so if you’re looking for a puppy-friend for about 2 weeks around the end of December, let me know!

I also found out this weekend that I got tickets to the Rose Bowl! I went and picked them up early this morning, and it was funny because as soon as I picked them up people were making offers for them outside the ticket office. One guy even offered $2,000 for the pair (I think I could actually get around $3k for them). No amount of money is going to make me part with these tickets though. The tickets to the game were the last piece of the Rose Bowl puzzle, but there’s a problem: We’re one ticket short. There are 3 people in our group, but students were only allowed to reserve a maximum of two tickets and I was the only one that got them. If anyone has ANY friends that 1) Got tickets 2) Have a heart 3) Are willing to sell one of the tickets for a reasonable (READ: Less than $500) price, please let me know!

My parents and sister came down on Sunday for my Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony, it was really nice to have them come. I was even able to talk Denicia into coming along. The ceremony was pretty short thankfully, and we went and had a feast at Texas Land and Cattle afterwards. It’s nice when they come in town or I go back home, I get to eat like a king!

It’s been a pretty eventful past couple days for me and finals are right around the corner, so let the studying begin. Oh crap, I need to buy Christmas presents sometime too…