I forgot to even mention it yesterday (just wasn’t on the brain) but I came up with an idea for a new 80’s show that would work on WRST. Instead of playing all the “best pop hits,” it would be an album-oriented show, where each week a record from the 80’s would be featured, played, talked about, etc. This would be a lot more work that the old 80’s Rewind, but certainly would be fun, and interesting, I think. I want to plan out a few shows and then pitch it to the new station manager, whoever that kid is.

One of the things I’m working on a bit here and there (and a year late) is quieting down my fingers on the ol’ keyboard. I have a long and storied history of pounding too hard which I attribute to my childhood borrowing of Grandma’s typewriter. Them old typewriters, man, you had to pound the crap outta them keys. But anyway, I’m making a conscious effort to tap lighter, and I’m not noticing much of a problem with keying too lightly, y’know? You really don’t have to hit these buttons that hard to make them go. I probably should’ve done this a while back, then Jen and Joe wouldn’t have been pissed at me if I stayed up late a’typin.

So my two big projects that I want to complete before the first of June are revamping the site, and filing all the appropriate materials to get my credits from MSU transferred to Oshkosh. The first promises to be decidedly more simple. I guess I didn’t think about it, but of course it makes sense that the grad school doesn’t transfer the *grades* in, but rather just indicates which courses you completed at another institution. This is a good and bad thing, I suppose. It means that my A’s from MT won’t help my GPA here, but it also means that I won’t have that B+ to hurt it. I did some figuring, and with my current UWO GPA at 3.66667, if I get an A over the summer, BOOM: I’m up to 3.75. If I get that same A, AND if I had the grades included from MSU, I’d be at 3.79. After the fall, if I get two more A’s here, well, then I’ll be at 3.83, and if I had those MSU numbers as well, same thing: 3.83. So what I’ve got to do is never get anything less than an A. I should probably have tried to avoid those B’s altogether, then this discussion would be moo.

OK, maybe more later on, maybe not.

TOP V LIST FOR THE DAY: Top V Titles I Thought About for the New 80’s Show
V. The 80’s Rewind brings you 80’s Records
IV. 80’s A.O.R.
III. A.O.R. 80’s
II. The 80’s Rewind: On the Record
I. The 80’s Rewind: For the Record*

• ultimately chose this one

P.S. – Wow, I’m hungry. And yet I’m so damned fat; it’s amazing how the body works.

It’s been some time since my last report. If you haven’t been privvy to information about me in that time, please allow the following summary:

– I returned from an absolutely splendid spring vacation in San Francisco and Los Angeles on March 22. Wordy and Matt graciously hosted me for the duration of my L.A. stay, and it was much appreciated. The week after I got back, I started looking up all the colleges and universities on the west coast of California to see if there’s someplace I could work (teach) one day.
– The following weekend, I took a trip to LaCrosse? to visit Grandma Bock, at that time just recently returned home from an extended stay in assisted living after her heart surgery last fall. Glad to report that as of now, Grandma’s health continues to improve.
– Went up to Eagle River for Easter and Mom’s 50th birthday.
– Worked hard, toiled through a tough 2nd half of the spring semester.
– Had a visit from Kyle and Knitt the first weekend of May.
– Barely slept during the last week or so of classes. Got all the work done, earned 2 A’s and a B.
– Took a “week off” from May 17 thru May 21; used this time to work 8 hours a day @ the Financial Aid Office and make a large, all-encompassing list of “Things to Accomplish Over the Summer.”
– Just last weekend, visited Kyle & Robin in Milton, along with Dave and the Kiefers.
– This week, began a search in earnest for a new apartment.

Right now, I’m thoughtfully considering the fact that everything I’ve done in 69 days can effectively be summed up in less than 250 words.

The semester was really busy, though, really tough. Forgive me if you’ve heard the story already, but for the benefit of others, I made two critical errors: 1) took 9 credits (three classes), 2) with that course load, also worked 20 hours per week. As the term wore on, it became clear that it was more work than I could handle; I was so busy just trying to keep up all semester, I wasn’t able to do any particularly interesting or unique work. I was disappointed about that, but now I know what the game plan should be for the future. I suppose there’s an extent to which any new school you attend requires a “feeling out” period; I’m glad in this case that I didn’t have to feel out a town as well.

I’ve got a pretty sweet setup with work for the summer. I’m going to work @ the office 40 hours a week while class is not in session, and I hope to continue learning some new things in that time. As you probably know, I’ve worked in Financial Aid before, but I’ve just realized this week that it’s taken me this long to reprogram my brain; now it does certain FinAid? stuff automatically. I’m not sure if that makes a lot of sense.

With regard to the “transitional-ness” of this new-looking site, my ultimate goal is creating something that’s conducive to quick and easy blogging, while still storing all the old stuff that people like (pictures, videos, writings, etc.). I hope that the change will simultaneously keep me in better contact with the site and make it easier for dial-uppers in particular to view it.

More to come soon; thanks for stopping by…

TOP V LIST FOR THE DAY: Top V Items on the Summer To-Do? List Not Likely to Be Finished
V. Do an install of Linux and actually try to use it
IV. Try to see Knuetson and/or Konsmo in Seattle
III. Make time to listen to all the music I got from Bryan and Kyle
II. Get a digital camera
I. Read instead of watch TV

Jen made a comment yesterday as we walked down Hollywood Blvd, something to the effect that people in this town seem to do a lot of loafing; walking slowly, and purposelessly? I’d have to agree, I guess that’s part of the charm.

Yeah, so today we did the Walk of Fame walk, and we saw things like the Kodak Theatre and El Capitan, and we took some more shots of Harry Zimm’s office and the Hollywood sign from a distance.

Later in the evening, Jen and I walked the 30 or 40 blocks (it’s more like 30) from Wordy & Matt’s apartment down to the beach. We sat and watched the water for a bit. As we sat there (since it had been a very long walk, my feet were into sitting) we saw a young couple (M & F) some 50 or so yards down the beach. He was on one knee, holding her hand, and at first, I said to Jen, “I think we’re witnessing a marriage proposal.” This theory stood up just fine until after he rose and there didn’t seem to be much in the way of excitement or jubilation at a new engagement; in fact, their body language seemed to suggest just the opposite.

We talked a little more about it and decided that she probably dumped him and he was begging her not to go: “Please baby, please; I can make it all better again, just don’t leave me, baby.” That idea led us to agreement that she was kind of a bitch for dragging it along like that. Jen said that she probably enjoyed all the attention. I said, “bitch.” Then they seemed to kiss rather passionately, and clearly he wanted something that she wouldn’t give, and then, what the hell, he’s back on his knees again, this time he’s got his armed wrapped around her leg.

By this time, we were entertaining the notion that maybe *he* really screwed up and he was groveling for forgiveness; the leg-clutching seemed to indicate a grovel. I said that he probably had sex with her sister or something and he was telling her it didn’t mean anything and he was very sorry. We went on to agree that he was kind of an asshole, I mean, to get into bed with her sister, he was lucky she’d even talk to him again. And what’s with her sister, too?? Most likely, there was a beach trip planned for her in the near future as well.

It was around this time (and he was still groveling) that we got up and kept walking.

We went back to the 3rd St Promenade to find something for dinner, but first Jen found some things at the Gap. I found some things at the Gap, too, but I don’t really have the money or the belly for them right now. I should get on some kind of a program…

Ultimately, we ate at place called “Yankee Doodle’s.” We settled on that after glancing at a number of menus that I was luke-warm about, but when we got there, I think we were both just tired (again) of walking. Our waitress was abysmal. In a restaurant that had definitely gotten past its “busy time” for the evening, it took no less than eight minutes for her to take a drink order, another seven to bring said drinks back to the table, and we sat (I’m not exaggerating) for over twenty minutes waiting for the food to show up. A meal that easily should’ve taken 35-40 minutes lasted an hour. After a thorough conversation with Wordell the night before, we tipped 15%.

Time to go back home, and Jen, being a mass transit veteran from her college days, said “let’s just get on the bus,” so we did, and that was sooo much better than walking! We only had a five when the bus showed up, so the driver let us on for free.

Holy crap did driving down Hwy 1 take a long time. We were literally in the car for 12 hours. Well, I guess we weren’t in the car the whole time, but that’s how long the drive took, with the frequent stops for photographs and whatnot.

I told Jen several times during the winding up and down the mountains, this drive was kind of like drives you can take in Montana, except that things here are green, and there’s a large damn ocean on your right (when you’re traveling south).

Really, I feel like the whole day is better expressed visually, so go click that link for the pictures. I reorgamanized them to be dial-up friendly.

What else? Oh — when we were driving through Santa Cruz, I saw someone with a bumper sticker that said, “Keep Santa Cruz Weird,” and I thought that was sort of funny. Then later I saw someone else with the same bumper sticker, and it lost some of the magic for me.

Enjoy the photos, though, and will try to talk tomorrow.

Today Jen and I got up at around 7 AM to drive to San Francisco. We were out the door from Wordy and Matt’s at about 8:05. The drive was super-easy, it was a nice day, there was a lot of “fresh air,” and we made it to the city by the bay in roughly 5.5 hours (that’s like, door-to-door, their place to the hotel).

We wasted no time in commencing the vacationery activities. We realized that there were only two short days available to be spent in SF, and we had to get to business in a hurry. Our hotel (Club Quarters) is quite conveniently located just east of Chinatown in the financial district. We parked the car in a structure that’s nearby and walked for the rest of the day. Lunch was at “Jeanty at Jack’s,” and between the two of us, we only spent EIGHTY TWO DOLLARS WITH TIP. We explored Chinatown quite thoroughly, thanks to the help of Fodor’s 04 guide to San Fran, and then took a stroll down to Union Square. Jen tried, but ultimately couldn’t resist a bit o’ shopping, and we returned later to go to Macy’s.

After the investment at lunch, we decided on a cheaper dinner, and found a Vietnamese place that only accepted cash and had extremely reasonable pricing. Jen brought most of her sweet and sour pork home.

After dinner, we popped over to the comedy club that’s just around the corner from our hotel, but the show wasn’t going to start until 11, and we were both waaaaaaay too tired to be up that long. I mean, check it out; 10 to 11 and I’m gonna crash almost immediately.

Tomorrow we go to Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Wharf, and whatever else suits our fancy. Take a look at the pictures; thanks to Joe for the camera, it’s workin out great.

I got to Waukesha and Jen was crying. Or she was within a few minutes. I met up with Joe, Raul, Jen and Christy at Ambassador around 8:40 (but Jen couldn’t have told you that) on the eve of my flight to Los Angeles for the second spring break in a row. So my big sis was most of the way through her first bottle of wine (after a pitcher of Leinie’s) and I was met with the startling revelation that SHE HADN’T PACKED YET. It was an entertaining evening out, anyway, and a fine send off to springtime debauchery.

All things on the flight went well; we watched Friends on the laptop and Jen took a slight nap. The surprising thing was that neither one of us suffered any ill alcohol effects. Or if we did, we were just sitting there and it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Oh, I did notice that it’s more entertaining to travel with a partner than by yourself. I dunno how long you’ve known me, but if you recall, I flew all over the place last year from Bozeman, always solo. The superior thing about the partner is you can make lots of jokes that only the two of you understand or laugh at. So that was good.

We rented a white Cavalier from Alamo, and the guy at the counter was a quiet mumbler. It was horrifically frustrating. For all I know, I agreed to pay $400/day for this ride. Jen got a little freaked out once we got on the freeway and I told her I had to “start driving like I’m in California,” which I’m fairly certain my cousin Adam can totally appreciate.

Went to lunch at Marina Pastries on Wilshire and it was fairly average as sandwich joints go. The bread was good. Jen and I both accidentally ate some meat.

Later on, there was a shopping trip to the promenade off Santa Monica because I totally forgot to bring sunglasses with me and we also needed a travel guide for San Francisco.

Nice to be in town and see the gang. We had the windows down in the car, the sun was shining, there’s no bloody snow at all.

Follow this link (or the one at the top of the page) for pictures.

See you tomorrow…

You want a reason it’s been so long, I’ll tell you: I was deeply engaged in some empirical research in which I discovered that 53% of all blogging is apologetic in nature.

To hell with that.

I’m finding that these Thursday nights waiting for Dave to get to the Union after class are the best time for this (blogging). The reasons for this conclusion are multi-fold:
— It’s the “end of the week” for me, so I actually feel as though the time is “free.” When it’s mid-week, even if I’m not doing homework, if I feel like I should, I will rarely engage in another “project,” as it were.
— I am an exceedingly more social creature in Wisconsin than I was last year in Montana. Quite frankly, I knew fewer people in Bozetown, we never traveled out of the city much (maybe we would have if I’d stayed, who the hell knows), and so during those times that I wasn’t in class, I was prone to get more web work done. What I’m saying is, the way my time is budgeted in Oshkosh is very different. When I’m “at home,” I don’t stay there as much. (I’m considering it further, and realizing that I could and should have gotten out more in Bozeman, but I got into a pattern of reclusiveness very quickly out there, and I just sort of rolled with it. I enjoyed the year. I really did. Even though I was alone a lot. And even though I ranted a lot about how depressed I was, particularly in the fall. But I digress.)
— My writing voice is more academistrated and universified immediately after class. This is a result of assimilating the text that I’ve been most recently in contact with. If you’ve ever read something I’ve blogged after watching TV for four hours, it sucks ass. That’s why I don’t do it very much.

This (blogging with Mozilla instead of in the webspace of MS Publisher) is working out for me so far. It’s easier for me to work with images around the text, and the whole thing seems to line up nicer when viewed as HTML, unlike the Publisher sites. I’ve decided, though, that there are still times when I’d like to do more artsy, constructive things with graphics or text-as-graphics, and Publisher is good for that. I’m going to be working with the sites in a variety of ways. Might be a good idea, might not.

So have you heard about this Passion of the Christ movie, with the Mel Gibson, and all the blood and the death, and the crucifying? What’s the deal with that? It occurs to me I need to read some reviews to find out…
OK, this might be a good way to look at this, a “reader review” collection from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/03/readersopinions/03PASS.html?ex=1078981200&en=119a4673233ab7bf&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

But yeah, I haven’t seen it yet, and I also can’t help having overheard all the people at work talking about it early in the week. One of my co-workers in particular loved it to death (pun not intended). She was also a particular sort of upset that anyone would think otherwise… Er, no, that’s not right. Allow me to reflect back there…. yeah, she was upset that people were mad at Mel Gibson for *making it*, and that is a much more rational thing to be upset about. I certainly don’t give a crap; Mel: make whatever you want. Is it a bad thing that Mr. Gibson is going to make 12 asstons of cash (reference to 12 not intentional) by “exploiting” the story of Christ? Different debate, I think, but this much is clear: if you’re a studio exec who said “we won’t make this movie,” you are a big dumb bastard.

This weekend I’m going to go out for fish, play Sheepshead, and do a lot of writing. I have some stuff to turn in for workshopping in my ficition class next Wednesday, and I’d like to have 8-10 pages down.

Damn, I gotta make a phone call. Catch you later in the weekend?

I was just surfing a bit in between some reading. I happened to visit Wil’s site, and then I decided I would look at Wil’s old site via the Internet Archive. For shits/grins, I tried typing “the80srewind.net” into the IA to see what would pop up. Stuff did!

I was surprised, cuz I think my ego is large enough that I’ve done this before. They have some pages archived back to right after I gradumacated from Osh Vegas the first time. I thought it was funny to look at some of those old pages, because A) I lost some of them in the fire, and B) my site used to suck royal ass.

Now it only sucks Common Ass.

Busy w/ the homework, but I should be able to get a video up this week, I think.

It takes some effort to move the objects around on this page when I add new stuff, (like blog entries, so I’m just going to keep typing random thoughts to fill up the rest of this white space. Oh, I bought another pair of shoes today. That means I can rotate. I bought them from the same woman who sold me the last pair. She seems to reeeeally be in to shoes. I guess that makes her a good sales person.

The Top V things that I had ample time to do last spring that will not be true this spring at all:

I. Television – with no job and two classes, I had all sorts of time to watch 24-30 hours of TV per week. At this point, it seems like I should probably throw out the TV, just swap out the tape in the VCR once a week, and if I really want to know how the seasons of Charmed, 24, Smallville, and Friends all end up this year, it’ll wait ’til June.

II. Video games – last spring, I played all the way through Grand Theft Auto 3 and also made time for SNES games on the emulator. Yesterday, I “put away” my USB game controller in a very inconvenient place, but I do still have this Sims CD staring up at me from the top of the computer case.

III. Obsessive apartment cleaning – there were the weeks that I cleaned the bathroom three times and the days that I did dishes four times. Even though I only had two meals and one shower per day.

IV. General Internet shenanigans – Wordell can attest to the fact that the IM was the best place to find me between the hours of 6am and 10pm MDT.

V. Doing good work on the website – sure, blogging a little is never that hard, but producing a video, writing and Interesting & Factual Tale, etc… I just don’t see good things happening.

Dammit, I gotta read.

While I’m doing that, you could go catch yourself up on last week’s episode of Charmed so you can tell me all about it next time we talk.

So I woke up from a dream at about 5:27 this morning. If I could be so bold, conceited, and condescending as to guide your reading, the phrase “about 5:27” is funny. Featured in the dream was some random bar & restaurant way up north. We were all hanging out and having wings and stuff, and I was too full to eat any more, I remember that, but someone reeeeeeeally wanted to get a fish fry.

Anyway, it was time to leave, and it was snowing outside, and it looked kind of like the “parking lot” at the Sundown Tavern in Phelps, if you know where that is/what that looks like.

Well, once again in perfect random form for the ol’ subconscious, I run into this woman who I knew/had a thing for a while back. Well, we exchange pleasantries, and I ask her out and get shot down in my own dream. I think things are definitely looking bleak when you can’t even get any in a dream anymore.

Happy Birthday to Jen, though, she is 27 today. Pretty soon she’ll “be like this.”

(Man, I’m full of the inside jokes today…)

In other news, maybe I should scan all my books and handouts for class in to PDF format, so while I’m doing homework at work, it still looks like I’m working. But that would be an awful lot of work.