Birthday Week

Officially it was my birthday yesterday. Yay! Another year old, and another year wiser I say. Since I am a firm believer in the idea that knowledge is power and that being wise is the ability to use information effectively I don’t mind another birthday. The festivities actually started last weekend when I went to the Detroit auto show. That was my dad’s big idea he wanted to do for his birthday so I obliged him.

Yesterday in keeping with the tradition I had begun in high school where to my delight one year, it was a blizzard the night before my birthday. It snowed all though the night and well into the morning dumping many inches of snow. So much snow fell in fact that they cancelled school! How excited I was to be able to say that school was canceled for my birthday. It was one of the best birthdays ever.

Unfortunately, even though the greater Grand Rapids area public schools were closed for my birthday, the university was not. The elementary and high school kids thank me still. Sadly I still had to attend my one class in the snowy nastiness. But despite my frustration of having to go to school on my birthday I made it though class and began celebrating my day. I went to dinner with my friend Holly and later that night went to the bar with another friend of mine, AJ, where we spent the rest of the night chatting with the bar tender until 1am. Good times were had by all and I even got a couple of free drinks out of it. Depressingly, no one wanted to come home with me. I will have to start investing in just for men.

This weekend brings another round of festivities. I will head up to Traverse City as it has been far too long since my last visit. I plan to drink and be merry yet again in celebration of my birthday. There is a new restaurant that my mom wants me to try out and I hear that there will be a few drinks bought in my honor by a few friends who will be around as well. It sounds like a good time to be had.

Sunday I will head back to Grand Rapids to have dinner yet again with another friend whom was sadly indisposed all week and was unable to help celebrate my birthday. He insisted that we have dinner and then perhaps catch a movie. Who am I to argue with dinner and a movie, especially when the movie is Cloverfield? I hear it’s an excellent movie. I cannot wait to see it.

Making out is fun.

Quiet

It was a very quiet day. Waking up late in the morning I looked through my sliding glass door to see several inches of fresh snow had fallen since last night. That coupled with the fact that today is Sunday seemed to create a thick buffer of silence around my apartment. I didn’t hear anyone moving about. I barely spoke a few sentences on the phone all day. Sundays seem to be like that around here. It makes me uneasy. I get a sense of foreboding, like I missed something I was supposed to do. But thankfully I got all of my home work done and my Ancient Literature paper is coming along nicely. It is my birthday this week so I am guaranteed excitement, even if I am another year older. As long as no one notices the gray I will be happy.

Detroit Auto Show

I spent the night at my brother’s place last night in preparation for an early trip to Detroit. We arrived at Cobo Hall around 1130am and entered the auto show. The Detroit Auto show is a chance for all of the major auto manufacturers to show their stuff and to showcase their new concept cars and to vie for the consumer’s favor.

We spent well over three hours there walking around to all the displays and showcases. Some of the more note worthy cars were from Toyota, Saab, Scion, Saturn, and Mitsubishi. Toyota had an impressive array of cars and trucks. The Sequoia looked very impressive. It is exactly what every man’s man would desire in a full size SUV. It is truly enormous. Of course they had a few different kinds of Prius’, one you could plug into a standard 120v outlet to charge the batteries for short trips.

The new Saab 93 was amazing. I got a few pictures of it and sitting in it made me feel like a rich snob. Scion on the other hand had an entire wall of cars. Seriously, they built a rack and had their cars packed into it like match box cars. Most noteworthy was the new xB which is much larger and rounded now. Also I learned that Scion means “descended from, or heir to”, interesting. Saturn is starting to create some nice luxury and full sized cars. They are getting really good at making a nice front end that catches the eye, but keeping their cars reasonably priced. Mitsubishi decided to go retro this time around and make their GTO look like an old 1970s barracuda, or so my dad said.

All in all it was a great little trip. We had dinner at the Parthenon which is right across the street from the Greek Town Casino. We road the people mover over to the casino from Cobo Hall which in and of itself was an experience. You can really tell this is a car town. No one likes it and it is a really short loop.

Now I have to get started on a paper for school, so that I have some direction when I try to finish it tomorrow.

Bar Employees Are Fun

I went to an employee party for a friend of mine who is a bartender for a bar downtown GR yesterday, Tuesday. It wasn’t the best idea to go out on a school night, but with the promise food and drinks, how could I refuse? After class I came home, worked out and got a bite to eat before cleaning up and finding some cloths that I thought were appropriate for a company party. Did I forget to mention that this was for the employees of a bar?

We ended up having a good time. At first it was hard to mingle. No one seemed to be talking about anything I could join in with. It was mostly chatter about who is up to what and where people are and what they are doing. Since I had no idea who they were talking about it was next to impossible to chime in.

One of the employees came around and handed out free drink tickets. My friend got his tickets and immediately ordered a couple of drinks for us, love that boy! As we were chatting the owner came around and my friend introduced us. After that he made some comment on us not drinking enough and handed me two more free drink tickets. Smiling, he told us to have fun as walked off to mingle.

We finished our dinner and we both received a to-go box with more food. The owner had prepared a full turkey dinner for the party and there was plenty left over. I thanked the owner, Rob, for a wonderful dinner and a fun evening and we left.

A Day With out Water

I received a letter yesterday evening after getting home from a very long day of school. It was from the administration of the apartment complex where I live. In it was a simple yet powerful message, “The Water will be turned off”. Apparently something was wrong with the plumbing and it needed to be repaired. So, from 9am this morning till 4pm this afternoon my entire building was without water.

It’s really weird to be without such a basic necessity. I even made the mistake of going to the bathroom, without thinking about how the fact that there was no water would affect the ability of the toilet to function properly. Thankfully I got one free flush. I did however store a gallon or so of fresh water in an old milk jug and a large cup in the bathroom so I could make coffee and brush my teeth.

It felt very odd to me that I was now forced to do with out a convenience that I had taken completely for granted for well over the two years I have lived here. And that it was only unavailable for a few hours over that span of time I was still very cross that I was forced to do without it. Then I began to think about why I was cross, and I realized that it was simply fear, the fear of being without water.

Back Into The Groove

I am getting back into my old routine now that school has started once again. Hopefully this will be my last semester. In fact I know it will be my last semester. For one, I am running out of financial aid. Apparently the federal government thinks it knows more about how to get a degree and the schedule for its completion better than I or the CS department of GVSU do. The other reason I know this will be my last semester is because I already have a job waiting for me. My internship in Key West went better than I could have hoped. They were impressed with my skill set and have offered me a position within the company.

You would think that GVSU would be pleased to see that their curriculum has created an individual who with his first experience outside of school did so well as to elicit full time employment. I would expect the faculty and administration to be overjoyed by such accomplishment and would do their best to hurry me along the program so that I can get out into the workforce and become productive. However this is just not the case.

The university is fighting tooth and nail to keep me in Grand Rapids for as long as they can by claiming I do not meet graduation requirements, General ed requirements, and even major requirements. Sadly, what they don’t understand is that I am paying them for a service. Up until now they have controlled the scope, schedule, and time of this project. Well not anymore. There is a new constraint in place, time. So they will either change the cost or the scope of my degree. Since I highly doubt they will create a new degree just for me that leaves cost. I fully expect this last semester to be the most expensive semester of my college career. Hopefully it will be my last and thankfully the next phase in my life is already waiting for me.