May 18: Yay Apartment
I moved into my apartment after having
to jump through all the school's hoops to get checked in including
running all over campus before all these places closed, and I finally
realize how economical the property value is in the midwest. For
what I could have rented a rather spacious apartment with quite a good
view, I got a hole in the wall. Like every apartment, it came
with its own quirks:
When I moved in, it turned out I already had a roommate: Link.
Once I pointed who this was, my cousin declared that this was the
perfect apartment for me since (a) I knew who that was, and (b) he was
on the door.
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This is my little air conditioner. This may not seem so unusual
for California, I really don't know, but for someone who has been
described as "a polar bear in size ten shoes," it was a bit
disappointing. My cousin thought it was broken, it turned out it
just wasn't plugged in. He's never going to grow out of that.
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This was what I moved into. Note: it was only 70 degrees outside
when I moved in.
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My cousin helped me out by giving me a
ride to campus from the airport and show me around campus, all of which
I promptly forgot. According to him, I'm "not allowed to get
bored" while I'm in LA, which could either be a very good thing or a
very bad thing. We will see.
May 27: Beach Volleyball
Played my first game of beach
volleyball this weekend. All of those years (well, it was more
like one season) of me killing my knees in indoor volleyball finally
paid off. When you're playing on sand, it doesn't matter how hard
or often you fall over because it simply doesn't hurt. This is a
great thing.
Ok, beach volleyball: great. Hanging out in the sun on the
weekend: great. Being sore from the waist down from playing
volleyball on the sand for two hours: not fun. Took me two days
to recover from that...good thing it was a three day weekend.
June 5: Neighbors
One of my neighbors moved in this
weekend, and while this may not be particularly momentous in its own
right, let me first set up the story. My apartment has a balcony that
is shared with the neighboring apartment. Both of the air conditioning
units of these two rooms have their back ends sticking out onto this
shared balcony and are slowly leaking water onto it. Since the concrete
of the balcony is not graded properly and sinks in towards the middle,
all of this water pools on the balcony forming a sizable puddle that a
Beta would quite happy to call home. Now that this is set up, on to the
story.
Saturday night, my roommate and I were sitting at the kitchen table
while I was helping her with her resume. We're just minding our own
business and joking around a bit when we hear a knock on the door...our
balcony door. We look up and see this guy, who neither of us had seen
before, standing there smiling. We both give each other this look that
can best be described as "err" and after what seemed like a good 30
seconds, I decide to go over and open up the door a bit. He introduces
himself as our neighbor and says that he thought it best that he
introduce himself now rather than us randomly meeting out on the
balcony, because this evidently to him was more weird and random than
him knocking on our balcony door at 9 o'clock at night. When the
introductions were over, he proceeded to walk back to his apartment,
well more jump back, through the puddle in a way that could be best
described as a drunken frog. After this, my roommate and I commenced in
a good five minutes of hysterical laughter.
This was definitely the height of our weekend.
July 20: Spring Break
Yesterday I did some major work on my costume and had unagi with the
roommate. She is so excited about coming to visit me in St. Louis over
spring break, since hers and mine are at the same time again this year
(my cousin happened to be in town last year). We might even make a day
trip up to Chicago, but she became a bit more pesimistic about that
once she found out how long of a drive it was to get up there.
July 27: Animals
The lab has been trying to get a fishtank for several months,
evidently. When they finally got a tank, it turned out that it was the
wrong kind of tank: a reptile tank, which cannot hold the ammount of
pressure generated by having water in the tank. Instead, they got an
iguana. Yesterday the lab post-doc decided that we should put him in
his box and take him to lunch with us. He (Watson) sat outside with his
box open without trying to escape, or moving really at all. Once we got
back inside, I guess that he decided that the air conditioning was a
bit too much for him after the warm afternoon heat, and decided he
wanted to escape...right into the newly closed elevator. It took us
three floors to manage to catch him, but in the end we got him back. I
can't imagine how they would have explained why there was a little
iguana wandering around the building if they hadn't caught him.
August 4: Otakon
I'd been working on my costume for this convention pretty heavily
during
my spair time at the end of my stay at USC, so I feel that I should
put a post to this here. I didn't take too many pictures from
the convention and more pictures are likely to come (on my personal
webpage
here),
but this is good
for now. Clicking on the pic will take you to the full size
image.
