I’ve gotten completely moved in and am enjoying my new place. I signed up for cable TV and Internet, which has been great so far. It’s nice not having to go to Todd’s for most entertainment. With the cable, I got their DVR feature, which allows me to set up series recordings of favorite shows, pause live TV, etc. Todd and I used another feature of it tonight to rent Monster House; it’s very convenient to not have to leave the house, rent a movie, then return it. I have access to the rented movie for 24 hours, in case I should for whatever reason want to watch it again. I enjoyed the movie, by the way. It wasn’t on par with Pixar’s films, but it was enjoyable. Steve Buscemi as the old man was perfect because Steve Buscemi just sounds like a crazy old man.

Trin was here from Tuesday to this morning at the crack of dawn. We got up at 3 am to get her to the airport, which is a sucky time to get up, obviously. I just put on my Chucks and drove her in my snazzy PJ’s. She had a good visit, I think, even though I did make good on the promise to keep her cleaning, unpacking, and organizing my crap. Besides that, we ate out with Todd and the Chicago folks, Matt and Christine, as well as watched a lot of TV, and colored. Yes, colored. One of her first days here, I bought a Disney princesses coloring book at Walmart along with a box of Crayolas and we colored up a storm. I have my favorites on the fridge now and need to get one of those portfolio dealies with the clear sheets inside in order to preserve the rest of our work. Even after we got TV and Internet at my new place, we still colored.

You can see photos of my new place in the photo gallery. It’s a bit cleaner now (the bed’s made, for example) but I still have some stuff in a box that needs unpacking. I also have dishes in the sink, a quilt that needs to be put away, and a lot of receipts that need to be sorted.

Classes started Wednesday and have been fine so far. Discrete math seems like it’s going to be boring and tricky. I’m dealing with problems like (q → ¬p) ↔ (p ↔ q) (construct a truth table for that) and [(p∨q) ∧ (p→r) ∧ (q→r)] → r (show that’s a tautology), and I’m sure it’ll only get more bizarre. I’m tickled pink, however, that Dr. Jaromczyk will be teaching my algorithms class because 1) I know him, 2) he’s fun, and 3) I’ve heard he’s an easy professor. The logic circuits class is looking good, too, even though I hate dealing with the hardware (i.e. electrical engineering) side of stuff. Its professor has kept my attention very well so far, both with his actual lecture material and his delivery. In the first lecture, for example, he held up a hard drive while talking about how it worked, then tipped it forward slightly, and said ‘whoops’ as its faceplate fell on the ground. Even though I realized he obviously meant for that to happen, there was still that first moment when the geek inside me saw that and froze in horror.

I’ve yet to have a physics lab and I won’t have one this week since it would be tomorrow when classes are canceled due to Martin Luther King Jr’s Day. Biology is a huge lecture in an auditorium, which is what you’d expect from a 100-level biology class, but I think I’ll enjoy it. The professor seems to have a dark, dry sense of humor and looks like Rick Moranis. The first class consisted of him going over the syllabus, but this also included talking about how a past student had called him a “rat bastard” and him analyzing how that term didn’t even make sense. All his jokes were delivered quickly and if you weren’t paying attention you’d skip right over them, except when he held the microphone very close to his mouth and said “gonorrhea,” which he did several times. He kept saying it as part of some story about why a girl had missed an exam, and said he took that bit from a Steve Carlin skit. He also informed us that about 15 of us would lose a grandparent that semester, 4 of us would find out we had cancer, etc.; Trin and I couldn’t figure out if he was joking or not.