Eh, this fall break has mixed reviews.
Thanksgiving itself went very well. Around 3pm we had dinner at my mom’s house. It was a fairly small gathering, just Mom, Frank, Jess, Josh, Nick, and I. Unlike Easter, there was no burnt stuffing this time *grin*. After dinner we had a quick little birthday thing since we wouldn’t be together on Tues. My sister got me this dog doll that humps. You can strap it to something, press its ear, and watch it go at it. Makes very interesting sounds along with movements. Mom got me a new jacket and $50. The rest of the day was spent doing nothing, which was a nice break from the usual.
Friday is where the weekend started to go down hill. I worked at Circuit City on Fri, Sat, and Sun. This is a one hour drive from my house. I had asked PSU if I would be able to stay in the dorms, since most of my break would end up being spent up here in Reading working; I was turned down. So, I woke up at 3:30am (after not being able to fall asleep till 1:30am) and drove up to Circuit City. When I got there at 5am there was already a good amount of people in line at the store, some even with lawn chairs. It was an amusing rush in the door when we opened at 6am. People literally pushed through the doors, and then ran through the store. Most of the good deals were sold out within 10 minutes. I ended up getting pulled from computers to go to TVs. They made the mistake of putting a trainee on register over there and customers weren’t too happy with that. I was stuck over there for a good 3 hours. The lines weren’t as bad as last year to our surprise. It was a constant flow of customers all day.
My long day ended at 6pm when I got to rush home to change and run over to catch up with Reg and Anna and the rest of that group. Reg made the plans to have a nice dinner at Max’s house. The cutting of the turkey didn’t go too well. I swear it is easier than it looks. It took three of us 10 minutes to get all the meat off. It was very funny to watch. Even eating cake ended up being a messy event. At one point we ended up randomly breaking out into saying "mine" as the seagulls do in Finding Nemo. One of us just said "mine" and everyone felt the need to keep saying it without being prompted to. Random humorous actions are always the best. After the dinner part was over we headed downstairs to many hours of Game Cube fun. I got my ass beat many times in Mario Kart. I did win once, I think, but that was it. In all fairness I hadn’t played in quite some time. It was a really fun time, nice to see people I hadn’t seen in three years (wow, I can’t believe its been that long). All that ended around 11pm...just in time for me to head back and get to bed since I worked at 8am the next day. When I got home, the Red vs Blue DVD was sitting there waiting for me! Yay! Too bad I didn’t have the time to sit down and watch it.
Saturday at work was a typical one, not too busy, not too slow. After work I did the same mad rush home so I could catch up with Dad and Jess for dinner at his place. As usual, the food there was *drool* so good. I wish I had more room for food than I did. After we were done that we watched Bruce Almighty. It ended at just about the right time so I could head home and pack up and sleep since I worked again the next day.
Today I was a dumbass and wrote down the wrong starting time for work. I ended up getting there an hour early. This ended up being a good thing. Steph (the manager who advanced her career through sexual favors, aka person we all loathe) forgot to call all the warehouse associates to let them know that we were getting a shipment at 7am and they would need to be there to unload the truck. Mike, the opening manager, was only able to get a hold of one of them in the morning so I helped unload the truck. Took about one hour. Rest of the work day went a bit slow, but not too bad I guess.
Ending work at 5pm and drove over to the campus to move back in (well, unpack my clothes and laptop, I consider that moving). I opened my door, and geez it was hot! It seems as if someone turned my heat on to 70 while I was gone; in a closed small room that heated up very fast. It was 90 when I got in there. I know it wasn’t me cause I never use the heater; we all know I love the cold. All my poster tack lost grip from this, so the posters were all bent and on the floor.
After I got settled in I go to boot my computer up. I notice the screen seems a very dim even though I have the brightness set up, but I think nothing of it while its starting up. I log in and it still dim. I switch the KVM to display the laptop screen, and its still dim. Oddly though when I switch it over to TV or RCA its ok, its just the input from the computers thats dim (you can note how much the TV in the picture (top right corner, picture in picture mode) is brighter than the computer image). Ok so maybe its the cable? Take it to Circuit City (because I wasn’t there enough this weekend) and plug it in using the cable there (its still a model we carry and have on display). Still dim there so its the LCD, not any other part. No problem, I got the warranty on it so I’ll send it out to service. Nope, its still covered by the manufacturer, gotta see if they will fix it. Call them up and they will, but they need a $600 deposit from a credit card, and it will take 5-10 days to get me one. I talk to my manager Greg and we were going to send it out through the store so I could get a loaner while it was out. I had to head up to the front counter to get all that done, and woohoo my favorite manager was up there, Steph. She overhears me talking to Lindsey about what Greg said to do and charms in that we can’t do that. Doesn’t matter about the deposit or delay, if its covered, gotta go through the manufacturer and ya gotta deal. This of course coming from the woman who would let a customer who didn’t get the warranty return a Sprint cell phone one year after they bought it and just swap it out for them on the spot (which is breaking two rules: returning out of warrenty and swaping product in store when its supposed to be sent out to service to fix and they can swap).
I just gave up and left. I arranged everything with Samsung to get a replacement shipped to me. So now I sit here on my dim, hard to read, LCD waiting for a replacement. I am going to go in tomorrow and returning all the City Advantage (warranty) I got on stuff from Circuit City. I get a depreciated amount back, but from the four major things I got it on it should be a good amount back, I think around $300. I’m not going to pay $70 to insure an LCD to be told "tough shit", even if the manufacturer covers it. All’s going to work out in the end; I’ll get the money back and all. I just hate to have to use this monitor like this, its hard to deal with digital photos and web design, but I’ll live.
Speaking of, I put up pictures from the break. Head on over and check them out. Sorry if any look off, its hard to tell on a dim monitor. And for now, I depart.
So I got my tuition bill for next semester, and lookie, it was $800 more than last time. Looking over it, no loans or grants were missing, it was an actual raise. So my mom emailed them to find out what was going on.
Dear Curtis’ Parent :
Thank you for writing to the Office of the Bursar.
As of the end of the Fall Semester, Curtis will have completed 59.1 or more credits. This will change him to upper division status. Students at the upper division are charged a higher tuition than the lower division.
Sincerely,
Office of the Bursar
That’s right, once we have you hooked into our college and the likleyhood of you transfering is very slim...we charge you more! You can’t leave us, transfering would set you back too much time. You don’t get anything extra, not better classes or teachers, nothing. We just charge you more because you aren’t going to leave us now, its too late.
Saturday evening was really nice, the rest of the weekend sucked. Das ist alles.
Today on the way to work the car hit 100,000 miles (of course I had my camera with me to capture this). Should I be worried? I have a feeling its all down hill from here. I already had the transmission replaced a few months back, but there is still plenty of things that can go wrong. Like the muffler that has a hole in it that I just found. I have a lifetime warrenty on the thing; it was only replaced a year ago (I don’t know why it is rusting already). I just have to dig up th recipt so I can get the free parts thing taken care of. I hope this is all that goes wrong with it for a while, I don’t want to have to buy a new car. I’d be happy with 150,000 miles, I hope that isn’t too much to ask.
I’ve been on an odd Ben Folds Five kick as of late. I managed to get my hands on all of their cds, and those seem to be my playlist for the most part. Added to that tonight is James Taylor’s son, Ben Taylor. I didn’t know that James had a son who sang, but my dad game me the cd tonight to rip. He sounds so much like James it is scary.
I found out that I work 6am to 6pm on Black Friday at Circuit City. Incase this wasn’t bad enough, PSU isn’t letting anyone stay in the dorms. As such I have to drive up here Friday morning at 5am to work, drive back at 6pm, and then repeat this again for Saturday and Sunday. Stupid PSU.
Yay! First snow fell yesterday. It was only for a few minutes, but it was there. The massive winds that came with that snow knocked out my internet for 4 hours or so. Very annoying, however I will forgive it :-).
Things are looking good for being able to take up Karate next semester; I should have enough money to pull that off. I’ve been wanting to take it up for as long as I can remember, so I am really looking forward to it. And on a side note, I’m going to be 21 in half a month....I feel so old.
Well, around 2am I was able to log in and schedule for my classes. This time around I got everything I wanted on the first try, woohoo. I think this is a first. Overall my spring schedule doesn’t look all that bad. God know the hell it will be once it comes time for 8am classes though.
I’m sitting here at 1am trying to register for classes, and of course the Web server for PSU can’t handle that. *sigh* Maybe I’ll be able to register by 2am, I hope?
I finally got around to setting up a .Mac account. Now you can see my schedule, better allowing you to stalk me if you so desire. You can find it at http://ical.mac.com/curtis.herbert/Public or on that nice sidebar link I made called "My Schdule". It’s auto-updated based on the information on Poltergeist, so it will always be up-to-date. Leave it to Apple to do something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while (an easy way to publish a calander online). Anywho, back to hitting "refresh" trying to register for classes :-(
Well, I’ve been called a slacker, so now I must update! Not all that much has been going on in my life, just work as usual. Halloween was fairly uneventful. I went out with Ken, Mike, and one of his friends. We drove around, Ken had a idea, but it didn’t work out. Then I came back and coded. *sigh* Yay my life...or not. One thing to note : Matrix Revolutions r0x0rz your b0x0rz. I didn’t like how in the past two movies everthing was spoon fed to you in terms of plot, but overall I think they did a good job at ending the series. It was better than the second, but even the second now is a bit better since the third happened (although the rave scene is still unforgivable).
I ran home two nights ago to catch up with my mom and my sister, that went well. I got some clothes out of it too :-). Then, on the way home, my dad calls. It was nice of him to call, I haven’t heard from him in a while.
The one thing I need to bitch about: NO AC IN THE DORMS! This is really starting to piss me off; its really getting way to warm in here for my liking. And will they turn it back on? Nope, its too late in the year. Yeah, tell that to the warm weather!
