Last night, I unpacked my books, which was a relief. They are all on my bookshelf now, and they are meticulously organized. They are categorized, and then alphabetized by author, unless they are in a series, in which case they are in series order. (Discworld, for example, is not alphabetical, but sequential.) The classics books are in a bizarre sort of made up order, which I thought might be about chronological, but I wasn't sure. (Was Livy, for example, before or after Virgil? Virgil, surely, was after Cicero. Was Cicero before or after Livy? Where does Plutarch fall in?) Reference type books are clumped by type of book (dictionary, grammar aid, thesaurus, etc), and then language, and the chronology of language, except for English, cause it was the biggest book (Greek books go before Latin books go before French books). I'm very proud of my bookshelf, see.
_
respond?
(2)
01:15:29 PM,Tuesday 7 September 2004
Today we had a meeting, where we talked about what is supposed to happen with this program, and then we have individual meetings, which we scheduled at the meeting. I was sitting next to a girl who had gone to Berkely, and when the room was full, I looked around and said "I don't think any of my classes had this many people." She'd been in a class with 800 people, and thought it was very funny that I was finding the amount of people odd. After the meeting, a nice young man who had just graduated from Penn and is doing the PostBac program as well showed another girl and me where to get our PennCards, and where the bookstore is. The bookstore is huge. It's run by Barnes and Noble, and the downstairs (and part of the upstairs) looked like normal Barnes and Noble, and then there was the huge text book section, and then there was also the stuff you need for living on campus section, and the place where they do stuff like sell Penn tee-shirts and other stuff, and in one corner there was a computer store. It was all very overwhelming. He pointed out the library, and showed us the Classics reading room and the computer lab in the building where most of the Classics are. Then I came back. It turns out it takes half the time to get there as I thought it would, so I got there half an hour early, and sat outside and wrote part of a letter to Katherine, mostly telling her how nervous I'm feeling. I got home, and someone from the Philadelphia Inquirer called to try to sell me a subscription to the newspaper. I was a little annoyed and kept trying to blow her off, but she wasn't about to let me.
_
respond?
(6)
01:11:55 PM,Tuesday 7 September 2004
My computer may not go online, in fact, because apparently you need to have OSX or higher, and I have OS9. Which is all very stupid. I am on Molly's computer, which she is generous to let me use, but I cannot stand Internet Explorer, and it's constant popups. She has a popup blocker, but as far as I can tell, all the popup blocker does is block AIMExpress from opening. I would like to go back to my Netscape, with my tabs and lack of popups, but I don't want to download anything on her computer without asking first.
_
respond?
08:40:17 AM,Tuesday 7 September 2004
My computer may not go online, in fact, because apparently you need to have OSX or higher, and I have OS9. Which is all very stupid. I am on Molly's computer, which she is generous to let me use, but I cannot stand Internet Explorer, and it's constant popups. She has a popup blocker, but as far as I can tell, all the popup blocker does is block AIMExpress from opening. I would like to go back to my Netscape, with my tabs and lack of popups, but I don't want to download anything on her computer without asking first.
_
respond?
08:40:14 AM,Tuesday 7 September 2004
Clothes are the facade you put on each day, especially the first day. You think, what will I wear today? And you are, in a sense, asking yourself who you want to be. Do you want to be normal, goth, hippie, preppy, nerdy, yuppy? Once you've narrowed down which style of clothes you are going to use to present yourself, you come to the details. They are generally easier, but you have to think of things like, should I wear the white shirt instead of the black shirt, cause I'm wearing black pants and I'm being "normal" today, and black on black doesn't feel right, for that look, but then, what if I cook, and spill something? (I spill stuff all the time, which is why I don't wear a lot of white.)
I used to wear hippie clothes. I'm now far more into normal clothes. Your idiosyncries are found because of who you are, when you dress like a normal person, rather than found because they are expected of you. People will discover who you are because of you, rather than because they guess at a personality based on a stereotype on the way you dress, and you find yourself conforming to it.
_
respond?
08:37:54 AM,Tuesday 7 September 2004
I wound up sleeping at my grandparents' house the first night I was here, cause of the lack of bed and cool air thing. Molly had said I could sleep in her room (she was visiting her family, and has a window unit up), but they had an air mattress I could use. Our third roommate isn't quite living here yet, and I'm not entirely sure when and if she'll be moving in. Last night I had my air mattress set up in her room, cause she had a window air conditioning unit. Molly and I put together my bookcases (my parents gave me Ikea bookcases as a housewarming present, as I had none), and I felt all competant, like "I can put together furniture which is designed to be easy to put together. This morning I put together a slightly more challenging stepstool. You wouldn't think the stepstool would be the thing that was hard to put in, but the bookcases were made out of particle board, which meant everything went in really easily, and the stepstool is made out of real wood, which means it's much harder.
_
respond?
07:58:47 PM,Monday 6 September 2004
And so, I am here. I would like to say that I'm all moved in, but I'm not. My books are still in boxes, my bed is in pieces, and the mattress is nowhere to be found. The mattress is a bit of a sore spot, for me. My parents had promised to buy me a mattress at Ikea as a birthday present, and then Ikea was sold out of mattresses. It was unreal. And so I have all the pieces of my bed, propped up against various walls in my room. I'm still deciding where all my furinture will go, and how to hang curtain rods. I was trying to hang curtain rods this morning, and they kept falling out of my hands. Molly found me a great air conditioner on Craig's List for $25, but we have to go pick it up. We were going to do that this evening, but we're both feeling a little fried, and she has real classes tomorrow, which she has to study for. My computer isn't set up, and we need a router. And networking advice. Can someone please help us figure out how to do this? Cause we really have no idea what we're doing. I was going to get a laptop before classes started and we were going to hook up my families airport and it was all going to be fine and dandy, but there is no laptop for Tori. My room will be very nice and pretty, I think, when it is done. Molly is a great roommate, and her dog is very very sweet. We spent the afternoon at a winery an hour away. It's probably not actually an hour away, but we got lost in West Philly, which is probably not the best of places to get lost.
_
respond?
07:55:31 PM,Monday 6 September 2004
And so now we go. Goodbye house.
I don't know if we have our internet set up yet, and I'm entirely sure we don't have a router, so I don't know when I'll next be online.
_
respond?
(1)
12:15:49 PM,Saturday 4 September 2004
Dude, my bed is in Lewisberry.
_
respond?
(1)
09:50:57 PM,Friday 3 September 2004
Tomorrow I move. Today I drove on a tire which was too flat to drive on it, and my mom is disappointed in me. And I have lots of packing to do. And we're going out for a nice dinner.
FedEx thinks my bed will show up at my new apartment sometime tomorrow. I am very excited. It's a very pretty bed. It is, technically, a canopy bed, but I'm not going to put curtains on it (that would probably wind up leading to dust, and dust is evil). I'm going to string white Christmas tree lights around it, instead. I might put a bed scarf part, cause a bed scarf is easier to take off than a curtain, but I don't have one, and I don't have a whole lot of money. But it's a very pretty bed, and I'm very excited.
_
respond?
(1)
03:09:33 PM,Friday 3 September 2004
Has anyone else looked at the health insurance you can get through Sallie Mae? Does anyone know how well it works out for you?
_
respond?
09:44:36 AM,Friday 3 September 2004
I am going to get a new fish, when I get to Philadelphia. Maybe two new fish, at that, as I have two bowls. I am out of names, though, for fish, as my first fish was Hector, and my second fish was Astyanax. (My third fish, which I got at the same time as Astyanax was Ozymandias, cause I had a nifty Egyptian bird thing for his tank.) But Astyanax got thrown off the wall of Troy when he was a baby, so I'm going to have to switch lineages, or something. Maybe my next fish will ge Aeneas, cause you can get pretty far with Aeneas, and then the child of inderminite age whose name I can never remember, and so on.
_
respond?
09:41:42 AM,Friday 3 September 2004
Yesterday was my birthday, and we slowly went home from my grandparents house, with a stealth visit to Annapolis, where we wandered around (briefly) ate lunch, and I closed my BB&T account (yay! it's only taken me a year!), and then we sort of raced home, and went out to dinner in Lancaster, cause Jamie is back at school, and it's her birthday too. We had an absolutely delicious dinner, and they wrote "happy birthday" on our plates in chocolate, and didn't sing, so it was nice of them to do something, and it wasn't embarrassing, so it was all fun.
_
respond?
(4)
12:54:28 PM,Thursday 2 September 2004
So, I am home again, from my vacation at my grandparents's house in Deleware, where they have no computer, and therefore no internet. We couldn't do a dial up thing with Jamie's laptop, but we did with Walter's, but didn't do much with it, cause, well, dial up. It was a nice weekend. We went to the beach, where we saw dolphins/porpises (I don't know how to spell that, and I don't know which I saw). We think they were like having an orgy or something, but it was very cool to see them doing something more than swim by (swimming by is cool too). Nattie learned that she likes to swim the first day she went to the beach, so she jumped in my grandparents lake which is turning into a wetlands, and so she was all covered in black stinky gook. Ellie had fallen in her first night and been all distressed. I made two dish clothes, and started a scarf, and learned that it is in fact faster to crochet with cotton yarn than to knit with novelty stuff that feels like feathers.
_
respond?
12:50:59 PM,Thursday 2 September 2004
I did it! I built a spaceship in Civ III! I've never done that before! Especially not before they decide the game has to be over!
_
respond?
(2)
01:24:10 AM,Friday 27 August 2004
Proposed interview with any (American) Olympic athlete: "So, what do you think Michael Phelps thought of the Koreans protesting Paul Hamm's medal?"
_
respond?
10:20:00 AM,Tuesday 24 August 2004
I had read the word "catcalls" and didn't really understand it, particularly when people booing was called "catcalls" until I watched the men's high beam tonight. Dear god, the Greeks are amazing at holding stuff up.
_
respond?
12:51:36 AM,Tuesday 24 August 2004
We have had our third wave of tornadoes, while we were away. We got home, and there was a note Marija had left, from the guy who rents out our little house, saying that there was some storm stuff, and he needed help with tree damage. My mom thought branches were down, and that it was odd that he called for help, cause he never asks for help. She walked by his house today, and found out that while we were away tornadoes had hit, that most of his trees were down, and there was one leaning on his roof. The tornadoes in the Harrisburg area this summer a nuts. They have happened like once a week for the past several weeks (the week before last being the exception). It never happens. There were also tornadoes in Massachusettes (which I cannot spell) while we were in New Hampshire. I blame global warming.
_
respond?
03:02:48 PM,Monday 23 August 2004
We spent most of the week in Manchester. We took Connor to school around Boston one day, but mostly we hung around my mom's new apartment and set up furniture and upacked boxes. It's a very nice apartment. It's probably the only place she's ever had where we worried more about getting a TV set up than a phone. We were very upset with Comcast for not being able to set up cable on Tuesday, and so we missed the Women's Team Gymnastics. They were there bright and early on Wednesday, and so we got to see the women swimmers win the relay, and we got to see Paul Hamm do his amazing gymnastic stuff.
She has a nice new apartment, all clean and white, with nice new furniture (except for a few old pieces). She hung a plate I made in the fall, and masks I made in like 1st grade. Her house is neat and clean.
I am exhausted. We left the apartment around 10:30 (Mom said "we must leave at 9:30" she woke us up early, so we could all be ready to leave on time. Jamie, Chris, and I were ready to go, to start taking stuff out to the car, it's 9:40, and she gets in the shower. So Jamie and I went to the grocery store and bought the stuff she'd promised to bring to Connor on our way home. It's totally ludicrous, the way our family leaves.) We drove and drove and drove all day. Why is it the Mass. Pike, but the New Jersey Turnpike or the Pennsylvania Turnpike? Does that strike anyone else as odd? Anyway, there was terrible traffic on the Mass Pike at some point, and that made us all miserable. I got bitchy nasty, cause I somehow wound up with everyone's purse and half the food at my feet. Then we rearranged stuff, and all was fine. Then there was terrible traffic on 81, and 81 is almost home (when you hit Scranton and think "gee, I'm almost home" you know you've been in the car for a while. Scranton, along with most of Northern Pennsylvania is terribly depressing. It was all coal mining up there, but it mostly isn't anymore, but the land is all destroyed. We stopped at at gas station once, halfway to Scranton and all the teenagers were hanging out there, cause there was nothing else to do. I felt dreadfully sorry for them.)
_
respond?
12:32:23 AM,Monday 23 August 2004
If I get a powerbook and an iPod together at the same time, I can get a $200 mail in rebate.
_
respond?
(2)
08:27:47 PM,Saturday 14 August 2004