So Long Considering

I graduated May 22nd, left the 23rd for Salt Lake City with my Mom, came home the following Wednesday and left Sunday for a week at the beach with Kyle's family. Salt Lake City was great as I haven't seen my cousins for a while and they had a little girl back in April. Hannah is very cute and while we were there over Memorial Day, we went up to Lava Hot Springs, ID. It was her first vacation and it was a ton of fun. Karen and Dan had been there before, but we stayed at a new place that had its own hot springs so we just had to walk downstairs rather than go up the street to the public ones. Idaho is gorgeous, as is Salt Lake City. They showed us the house they are considering buying. It's up in the mountains rather than in the city and seems lovely. We could only peek in the windows, but it would definitely give them more space as Hannah gets older and more privacy.
The beach was a lot of fun this year. We didn't really do too much, but we spent two days at the beach, one day hiking at the island preserve, and one day we went and saw Star Trek. Other than that we just relaxed a whole lot.
Since the beach, I have been rather busy with things going on most weekends and one or two days a week. I had a job interview scheduled for last Monday, but the guy had to cancel due to a meeting that came up. I don't have his contact info or anything so I can't do anything about rescheduling and I haven't heard from him or my contact. It's a little frustrating as I have been out of school for over a month and technically unemployed since December. I kept working in the lab during my last semester, but I wasn't actually getting paid for it. I've been looking for jobs, but I am constrained by location as I need something that I can commute to from the southern end and also from Kyle's house if I am still at the job by the time I get married. Hopefully something will work out. Also having to say that I will need to have off two thirds of October is not a great thing to have to tell a prospective employer. But seriously, considering I haven't had a job or anything major to do since May, I haven't been posting at all. The problem is that I just check email and read the various blogs I follow on my ipod touch and don't bother turning on my laptop. I'm definitely not typing a whole blog entry on my ipod.

Commence Real Life

I am done! I turned in my last paper Monday and have done very little since. Let real life commence. After graduation, a trip to see family in Utah, and a week at the beach of course. I think I'm allowed two weeks after twenty-two plus years of non-stop education. I just hope a job offer comes soon. Any archaeology firms in southeastern PA need a lab tech? I'm available June 8th. I'm pretty sure something will come up and I can always get something for the summer locally until the wedding.
So I have done one thing since my coursework ended. My mom and sister came down Sunday night so we could go to Mt. Vernon while I was still close. Mom has wanted to go back and Ang and I have never been. It was a gorgeous day and a lot of fun. Sadly, I got most excited seeing the super awesome sifting screens the archaeologists in the upper garden had set up. I am a dork, but they were great because the screens were on wheels on a frame with chutes for the screened dirt to go straight into a bucket or wheelbarrow. They were at standing level so no bending over forever and killing your back. Seriously cool and all archaeologists probably wish they had one. I know I do.
Anyway, I highly recommend people visit Mt. Vernon because it is just a really pretty property on a nice day. We walked all over the grounds before heading to the gristmill and distillery down the road. Definitely worth the extra time to go see those.
Besides Mt. Vernon, Mom and Ang came to get most of my furniture before there would be other people in the van when they come down for graduation. Sunday night we tore down my bed and the futon. Both of these, my dresser, and my comfy living room chair and footstool were all shoved in the van, literally at some points, but it all fit. Mom decided she had to cram as much as possible so she even took the table my tv was on so it is now sitting on one of the dining room chairs. The living room is ridiculously empty, but at least now the only furniture left is the table and chairs and my desk, which comes apart.
Today I have to pack everything. I've barely scratched the surface besides packing up most of my dishes. I usually like to pack, but I haven't got in the right mood yet. The other thing I am dreading about today is calling Comcast to end my cable service. I hate Comcast and just know they will do something to make a simple phone call ridiculously complicated. Plus I have to drop the cable box off at the closest location. That's just going to suck probably. Oh well, I graduate tomorrow!

Someone else is curious too

I have been working on one of my last big papers today and this afternoon I was conducting research while watching some tv. Despite how it sounds, I was productive while doing this, but one commercial did catch my eye. This paint commercial kept putting parts of questions up on the screen in large font. The first part would show and then the picture would change and the second part would come up, which was usually what the store would be able to answer for you if you come in. The question that caught my eye was "When did school bus yellow... become school bus yellow?" It was split there in the middle so when the first half was up on the screen, I was curious if the second part would be my question and it basically is. For years I have wondered who decided that school buses should be yellow and why that shade? It really isn't yellow, but it has become the color synonymous with safety. It's one of the questions that I like to come up with out of the blue and over the years my mother has learned to just shake her head and move on. No one ever listens to the questions, but now the Sherwin-Williams commercial has proven that someone else out there is just as curious about the random things in life as I am, including the color of school buses.

Got Milk?

For something a little ridiculous, I have to share what Kyle's roommate did recently. He has two roommates, E who has lived with him since freshman year of college, and J who moved in last August when he started technical school in the area. J is much younger than Kyle and E and the rest of us, but his family knows E's family who got him into the spare room at Kyle's. Coming into an established group can be difficult and he often tries to just make everyone happy and be entertaining, but he's a little odd so it often fails. He also lives on cereal, which means that milk consumption at Kyle's shot up drastically since J moved in. Kyle does the grocery shopping and charges E and J $50/month. He often spends a little over that so it's understood that if something runs out before the next month, E and J can pick a few small items up. This obviously includes milk as J uses so much and you can't buy milk for a whole month.
Kyle stopped after work last week and got a gallon of chocolate because he wanted some and also a gallon of white. He got home and found that J had bought two gallons of white so they now had three gallons of white milk and gallon of chocolate. Kyle told J that they all really needed to drink milk since they ended up with so much. A few days later, J tells Kyle that he's been working on the milk and is almost done the chocolate. Why would anyone with a mind think that out of four gallons of milk (three white and one chocolate), that you needed to finish the chocolate off first? J told Kyle that he had told him to drink the chocolate, which is obviously not what he said. He just said to drink the milk and he assumed that J would use his common sense to see that he needed to work on the white milk. Obviously some people don't have any sense, and sadly, this isn't a case of having brains, but no common sense, but having little of either.

"Box o' Morons"

I have this comic set as my desktop background because it makes me smile despite all my work. I also find it rather appropriate after some of the stupid things I saw people do yesterday. If you have two rectangular boxes, one approximately half the size of the other, how would you combine them? I was looking for something in the smaller box and noticed that it had been put inside the larger one. Instead of placing them inside each other lengthwise, the smaller one had been placed sideways in the larger box so that its longest side was parallel to the larger box's shortest side. If this makes sense, you can see that this caused the sides of the larger box to be pushed out because the smaller box was too wide to fit that way. What goes through people's minds when they do such things?

Grad School

So I am seriously worried about getting everything done this semester. My last one. Ever. I just cannot make myself work. I've already compiled my list of things I do every day and I add to it all the time. I find new things to explore online and new books to read. Or I just reread old books and replay the same games (My win streak in freecell is up to 134). Really, I have three books checked out of the library (the public one) and I have reread all of them at least four times. Have I moved the stack of seven books that I checked out in February for my tourism class paper? Nope. They are all still sitting on top of my printer where I stuck them two months ago so they wouldn't be sitting in my floor anymore. I epitomize procrastination when it comes to school work. If I was paid to do this, it would be done. I hate people who do nothing at work and complain about their jobs. If I'm working, I'm working and things get done promptly. It just doesn't work that way for school related items. Hence I am posting to my blog, which if you notice, I started at the end of last semester when I needed something new to extend my procrastination. The wedding also helps with procrastination because even though everything is pretty much done, there are details to discuss. Kyle and I spent about an hour debating how we would display the seating cards for the reception. I think we figured them out so now I'll have to come up with something else to discuss in order to avoid my work. Only three papers, two presentations, one workshop, and my last final ever to complete. And 32 days to do it in.

What I'm Doing in Grad School

My big internship was with the Hampden Community Archaeology Project and I'm just wrapping it up now. Visit the blog listed below for info and if you live in the Baltimore area, come check out the workshop April 22nd to see a little of Hampden's heritage in person (I'm bringing artifacts to show everyone). You can also learn a little about actual archaeology.

http://hampdenheritage.blogspot.com/