March 30, 2006
It's a Barnum and Bailey World
So, the 23rd was technically my first day of Spring Break since my finals were over on Wed, but things never quite work out that way for me. The DARPA Grand Challenge team I'm on spent time getting some crap together on Friday for a display they had to give the next day. This involved a whole lot soldering, wiring, programming, et cetera et cetera, and basically went until 4m Sat. I don't mind too much however, as we did get a reasonable amount of crap done.
I then woke up early-ish on Sat to go tutoring, and of course the student that was scheduled didn't even show. Grah. An aunt of mine I hadn't seen in six years was visiting my grandparents at the time, so my family went over and saw her for the first time in a long while. She showed us some pics of my 22 year old cousin's wedding in Taiwan, which was just a bit weird. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be married at this point in my life; it seems like giving up a whole lot of freedom during the moments of your life at which you are most free.
I also chatted with her about her sons, my cousins, and what they were up to. Sounds like the eldest, the abovementioned and about a year older than me, is doing some work with a professor on voice recognition technology. From what she knew and what she explained to me, it sounds like he's doing a lot of work on making current systems hardware rather than software based and increasing portability and versatility. What exactly he is doing, I really don't know and my aunt wasn't really familiar enough to help me out with that. Or maybe I was just poor at understanding.
I guess my other cousin, maybe a year younger than me, had switched to mechanical engineering. My aunt hypothesized this had no small part to do with my older cousin's wife's influence, as she is also a mechanical engineer. He's young yet though and is only just finishing his sophomore year, so there wasn't all that much to say about him.
After dinner with the family and extended family, my mom decided to pay a visit to my cousin and his new daughter, since they were in the same area. Her name is Kayli, and she's really adorable. I actually got to see her the day after she was born, and it was just ridiculous.
When I first saw her, she was sleepy, small, and red. When we saw her that day, she was still sleepy, still small, but noticeably less red. Her brother, Darin, seemed to like her quite a bit, though I think he was beginning to realize that mom and dad were gonna be paying a lot of attention to her and not to him. At some point he was playing with cars by himself in the kitchen looking very sad, and I went and asked him what was wrong. His reply was that nothing was wrong, but it kinda obvious he was not happy. It's kinda funny, I wonder how my reaction was when my own little brother was born.
We stuck around for a bit and my mom held the baby for a bit until she finally woke up and wanted food. My mom mentioned that like Kayli, I was born with a head full of hair. For me however, all the hair fell out pretty quickly after I was born and I was bald for a good chunk of my young years apparently.
As an aside, I think the next cousin who is going to have kids is going to be my oldest male cousin in Japan. He got married when I went to Japan two years ago, and since him only my father's brother's oldest kid (the abovementioned) has gotten married. Which makes me wonder what the order of marriage is going to be for the next round of kids, since there are about eight of us, probably more, who are unmarried and in the range of sixteen to twenty-six. Scary thoughts.
After getting home from my cousin's, I went and played around with Sean and Ave and Sean's new copy of Tetris DS. It's fun I suppose, but it's really just Tetris. Might be more fun with more people.
The next day saw me getting up at 0400 again for snowboarding and prep and stuff. It was Diana driving me, Ave, and my brother, and Corey, Katie and a friend of Corey's left a bit before us. I bought a pair of snow pants, we got to the mountain about 0930 or so, snowboarded for hella hours, and then went home after the place closed. It was fun and all, but I think that it would have been way more fun if I wasn't so lacking on sleep. The lack of sleep was giving me problems with slower reflexes, less enthusiasm and ability to work past the exhaustion I was feeling, and all in all I just ended up falling a lot. Still, I had fun, though I didn't make runs all the way up until closing; at some point I hurt a thigh muscle something harsh, and so I ended the day a half hour early or so and waited for others to slowly finish up. We made the long drive home, I fell asleep in the car, and went home and crashed out.
On Monday, Misheru was back in town but incapacitated, so Sean, Joanna and I went over and paid her some company. We bought some grub, Sean bought some sort of Starbucks alcohol mixer thinger to experiment with, we rented The Aristocrats and had ourselves a grand old time. The new family dog, Cutter, made a total nuisance of himself. The dog is like two years old or so, eighty pounds, and still thinks he's a puppy. While we were watching the movie, he kept coming over and trying to get us to play with him, so we eventualy resorted to hiding his toys in a filing cabinet so he would leave us alone and instead sit petulantly in front of the filing cabinet waiting for the toys to come out. The movie itself was about what I expected in terms of entertainment value; there was more in the way of history, explanation and theory than I was expecting, and less of the actual telling of the joke, but the directors did a good job of it and it was thoroughly enjoyable.
Tuesday evening, Sean, Joanna and I went out to SF to see Japan Nite 2006. I went not expecting too much, but actually enjoyed myself a whole lot.
There's more to say on this, but long story short, it was an awesome concert, we got back home around three-ish, and I woke up the next morning with my left ear still mildly deaf.
Sean's got some pictures up here, though he only got pics of the first three bands. This is especially sad 'cause the last two bands were really, really good.
Wednesday was the first day of classes for the Spring quarter and because of the lack of sleep of the nights prior, I managed to miss my first class of the last first day of class of my undergraduate career.
Read it a couple times, it'll make sense eventually.
I went into my second class about forty-five minutes late (two hour class) and immediately wished I hadn't gone at all. It's a junior level course and so I'm largely familiar with all the material we're going to be going over. I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time playing my DS in that class.
Went to the bars that night and had a grand ol' time with friends. It was, not too surprisingly, really crowded out. Drivers were designated, drinks were had, random people were met, drunk munchies were sated, and eventually we all went home.
Now, this morning, when I woke up, my eye was all sorts of irritated. I half woke up, popped out my contacts and tossed them, and went back to sleep. When I woke up again later, my eye was really, really irritated. It was red, and tearing and blah blah blah. Through the day it got better, but it kinda fluctuated and now I can still feel that's not very happy. I'm mostly worried because I remember a teacher of mine in HS once ripped a piece out of his cornea or some crap when he had had contacts in for too long or something. I'm hoping this will be better by tomorrow.
Oh, and I also went to some classes : archery, bowling, robotics. Being a senior is awesome.
I'm not entirely sure what the next few days will hold, but it sounds like it should be fun. People are back for break, and we're hopefully getting together and catching up and such. What's also nice is that tomorrow is a holiday so there's no school. What's irritating about that is that if there was only gonna be two days of school this week, why did they even bother bringing us back? They should have just given us the two days off, given us a week long break, and extended the quarter two days later down the road. Oh well.
I then woke up early-ish on Sat to go tutoring, and of course the student that was scheduled didn't even show. Grah. An aunt of mine I hadn't seen in six years was visiting my grandparents at the time, so my family went over and saw her for the first time in a long while. She showed us some pics of my 22 year old cousin's wedding in Taiwan, which was just a bit weird. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be married at this point in my life; it seems like giving up a whole lot of freedom during the moments of your life at which you are most free.
I also chatted with her about her sons, my cousins, and what they were up to. Sounds like the eldest, the abovementioned and about a year older than me, is doing some work with a professor on voice recognition technology. From what she knew and what she explained to me, it sounds like he's doing a lot of work on making current systems hardware rather than software based and increasing portability and versatility. What exactly he is doing, I really don't know and my aunt wasn't really familiar enough to help me out with that. Or maybe I was just poor at understanding.
I guess my other cousin, maybe a year younger than me, had switched to mechanical engineering. My aunt hypothesized this had no small part to do with my older cousin's wife's influence, as she is also a mechanical engineer. He's young yet though and is only just finishing his sophomore year, so there wasn't all that much to say about him.
After dinner with the family and extended family, my mom decided to pay a visit to my cousin and his new daughter, since they were in the same area. Her name is Kayli, and she's really adorable. I actually got to see her the day after she was born, and it was just ridiculous.
When I first saw her, she was sleepy, small, and red. When we saw her that day, she was still sleepy, still small, but noticeably less red. Her brother, Darin, seemed to like her quite a bit, though I think he was beginning to realize that mom and dad were gonna be paying a lot of attention to her and not to him. At some point he was playing with cars by himself in the kitchen looking very sad, and I went and asked him what was wrong. His reply was that nothing was wrong, but it kinda obvious he was not happy. It's kinda funny, I wonder how my reaction was when my own little brother was born.
We stuck around for a bit and my mom held the baby for a bit until she finally woke up and wanted food. My mom mentioned that like Kayli, I was born with a head full of hair. For me however, all the hair fell out pretty quickly after I was born and I was bald for a good chunk of my young years apparently.
As an aside, I think the next cousin who is going to have kids is going to be my oldest male cousin in Japan. He got married when I went to Japan two years ago, and since him only my father's brother's oldest kid (the abovementioned) has gotten married. Which makes me wonder what the order of marriage is going to be for the next round of kids, since there are about eight of us, probably more, who are unmarried and in the range of sixteen to twenty-six. Scary thoughts.
After getting home from my cousin's, I went and played around with Sean and Ave and Sean's new copy of Tetris DS. It's fun I suppose, but it's really just Tetris. Might be more fun with more people.
The next day saw me getting up at 0400 again for snowboarding and prep and stuff. It was Diana driving me, Ave, and my brother, and Corey, Katie and a friend of Corey's left a bit before us. I bought a pair of snow pants, we got to the mountain about 0930 or so, snowboarded for hella hours, and then went home after the place closed. It was fun and all, but I think that it would have been way more fun if I wasn't so lacking on sleep. The lack of sleep was giving me problems with slower reflexes, less enthusiasm and ability to work past the exhaustion I was feeling, and all in all I just ended up falling a lot. Still, I had fun, though I didn't make runs all the way up until closing; at some point I hurt a thigh muscle something harsh, and so I ended the day a half hour early or so and waited for others to slowly finish up. We made the long drive home, I fell asleep in the car, and went home and crashed out.
On Monday, Misheru was back in town but incapacitated, so Sean, Joanna and I went over and paid her some company. We bought some grub, Sean bought some sort of Starbucks alcohol mixer thinger to experiment with, we rented The Aristocrats and had ourselves a grand old time. The new family dog, Cutter, made a total nuisance of himself. The dog is like two years old or so, eighty pounds, and still thinks he's a puppy. While we were watching the movie, he kept coming over and trying to get us to play with him, so we eventualy resorted to hiding his toys in a filing cabinet so he would leave us alone and instead sit petulantly in front of the filing cabinet waiting for the toys to come out. The movie itself was about what I expected in terms of entertainment value; there was more in the way of history, explanation and theory than I was expecting, and less of the actual telling of the joke, but the directors did a good job of it and it was thoroughly enjoyable.
Tuesday evening, Sean, Joanna and I went out to SF to see Japan Nite 2006. I went not expecting too much, but actually enjoyed myself a whole lot.
There's more to say on this, but long story short, it was an awesome concert, we got back home around three-ish, and I woke up the next morning with my left ear still mildly deaf.
Sean's got some pictures up here, though he only got pics of the first three bands. This is especially sad 'cause the last two bands were really, really good.
Wednesday was the first day of classes for the Spring quarter and because of the lack of sleep of the nights prior, I managed to miss my first class of the last first day of class of my undergraduate career.
Read it a couple times, it'll make sense eventually.
I went into my second class about forty-five minutes late (two hour class) and immediately wished I hadn't gone at all. It's a junior level course and so I'm largely familiar with all the material we're going to be going over. I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time playing my DS in that class.
Went to the bars that night and had a grand ol' time with friends. It was, not too surprisingly, really crowded out. Drivers were designated, drinks were had, random people were met, drunk munchies were sated, and eventually we all went home.
Now, this morning, when I woke up, my eye was all sorts of irritated. I half woke up, popped out my contacts and tossed them, and went back to sleep. When I woke up again later, my eye was really, really irritated. It was red, and tearing and blah blah blah. Through the day it got better, but it kinda fluctuated and now I can still feel that's not very happy. I'm mostly worried because I remember a teacher of mine in HS once ripped a piece out of his cornea or some crap when he had had contacts in for too long or something. I'm hoping this will be better by tomorrow.
Oh, and I also went to some classes : archery, bowling, robotics. Being a senior is awesome.
I'm not entirely sure what the next few days will hold, but it sounds like it should be fun. People are back for break, and we're hopefully getting together and catching up and such. What's also nice is that tomorrow is a holiday so there's no school. What's irritating about that is that if there was only gonna be two days of school this week, why did they even bother bringing us back? They should have just given us the two days off, given us a week long break, and extended the quarter two days later down the road. Oh well.
# posted by Yann : 23:50
