New Beginnings

Upon moving into my new home here at wordpress, I have to say that I’m liking it! Liking it a lot. It looks pretty, I get to customize the look to some degree, and my posts get saved automatically, periodically!

Do you ever lie to get your way, and then when you finally get it, it doesn’t seem worth the lie anymore? I’m feeling that way… It’s not a huge deal and I’m not going to get caught for it, but my conscience is bothering me. Darn that old thing. ><

With no connection to the previous paragraph, aigh, my past two weeks have been just crazy. I feel like I’ve lost so much. Now I’m stuck here thinking about the what if’s, the could have’s, and the why’s. Of course the worst thing you could ever do is ask yourself “why”, but that doesn’t prevent me or anyone else from doing it anyway. Can’t seem to think of anything else. Everything reminds me of it. Especially everything at UBC. All I want is to go back… rewind…

Sometimes, it’s hard
To make things clear
Or know when to face the truth
And I know that the moment is here

I’ll open my heart
And show you inside
My love has no pride
I feel with you I’ve got nothing to hide

I don’t get it. I really don’t. Were we on completely different pages? How close was it, really? I thought we were so close, but maybe that was completely off the mark. I thought my mind and my heart were telling me the same thing, and I thought that was a concurrent feeling, but maybe that counts as a logic conflict? I don’t know, just don’t know what to do…

Busy school schedule isn’t helping either. I’ve found that my study and work habits have changed so much this year, and so has my grades. Swamped with work, I’m not being careful and trying to understand everything anymore. Just trying to get enough work done on time to make it through. I remember last year, I was totally Mr. Consistency, getting pretty much the same mark on everything! But so far on my midterms, I’ve either been getting 100%, or very poor. That’s good and bad… probably more bad than good.

Last Friday (not yesterday) Jonny and I went up to the roof of the parkade and did a photoshoot. No, not of ourselves! O.o Of our zoom zoom machines! In the morning thick fog was passing through the school and it seemed so close and vivid that you could grab it! I could literally see it passing by me on the other side of the street in little webs and curls, lazily but gone in an instant. In the afternoon when we got up there, the fog was still rolling around so we wasted no time and got the camera going immediately. In the middle of the shoot, the sun first peaked through the fog shyly, and then promptly broke out in all its glory, revealing the clear blue sky. It was really a good shoot. Follow this link if you want to see the products!

http://www.cardomain.com/ride/2153564/

As I said in my previous post, I got my class 5 license yesterday!! Let’s all get together and celebrate by driving slowly and cautiously! Haha, this morning I celebrated by going MTing with Gina and her friend. It was fun, but I realized that the game isn’t all that special. The fun of it is in interacting with other players.

Afterwards I drove over to Richmond Park and laced up the blades. It felt good to just skate, as fast as I possibly could. I spent fifteen minutes just standing there doing slapshots, hearing the stick crack as it slaps across the pavement and the ball thumping against the board. It felt good to be tired and out of breath, even though that was a sign of how out of shape I am, and it felt good to sweat and wipe away the sweat as it started running into my eyes.

That made my mood quite a bit better. Mood hasn’t been very good lately. Just been moping around thinking, staring off into space, and worrying about homework a lot. Gina’s helped with that a lot (thanks, Gina, if you read this!) and talking in general sort of helps, I guess. But sometimes it makes me no less confused.

The sun’ll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
‘Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
I love ya Tomorrow!
You’re always a day away!

I see an opportunity, but honestly it’s not one I want to take. I don’t even really care it’s there because it’s not what I want… I am so screwed up…

So what have I been doing lately… I joined the UBC Dance Club (ballroom dancing) and we’re learning Cha Cha, Waltz, and Jive right now. It’s a bit easier learning slowly and learning all the basic steps and doing repetition, but I still feel like I have two left feet. Hehe, it’s okay, though. Interestingly, with some partners we seem to just click, and work, able to understand each other. Or maybe they’re just better at reading someone as confusing as me. Hehe. ^_^ There are way more girls than guys. The ads they placed were actually true. There are a few cute girls there too!

One day while I was walking on campus they were giving out Coke Blak! The new coke with caffeine injected into it. When it hit my lips, I felt instantly re-energized! Haha, talk about a placebo effect. It wasn’t that great, though. I don’t like coke, and straight up coffee tastes better than it. It came in a cool little glass bottle, though! My family still has a glass bottle of coke in its original packaging. Its been sitting for almost ten years. I wonder if they eventually explode if kept for too long.

I signed up for a ski trip! Leaving on January fifth. Somehow it feels wrong to play right at the start of school, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity of a trip like that, especially not to an interior mountain! I’ve never gone to Silver Star before. So excited! And when I joined the club, YOURS, I got a nice little binder thingy, water bottle (which I traded with my brother for his big one), hand warmer, and membership card!

I got a new webcam! I swear, getting new stuff is therapeutic. Not necessarily the act of shopping, which girls seem to get some kind of strange forbidden pleasure out of, but getting brand new, shiny things is just the greatest sometimes! Haha, I know, I’m materialistic. But in the last month, we’ve gotten so much stuff! Webcam, portable hard drive, large CF card, digital camera, laser printer because the fuser in my old one broke, and a set of those amazing pens from Japan. Now I can take notes in style, once again. I was running out of black. I was on my last pen, and getting very worried. This set should last me another two years or so.

The new printer we got is really great. My mom wanted a color laser, but I wasn’t sold on it. It was huge, costed $320 to replace the toner cartridges, and generally didn’t give me a good feeling. So I wasn’t disappointed to find that Futureshop had run out of stock the day I went to buy it. Afterwards I went to Staples and grabbed the HP-2070N. It ’s really a great printer. I’ve got it set up now as a network printer so that it’s completely independent of the computers, connected through the router. It’s quite fast, and prints nice color. I like the fact that it feeds from a tray rather than a top loading stack.

I can’t wait to get my purple license in the mail either. And I ordered a red engineering jacket a long time ago. It’s about time it came.

Gah, I can’t believe I spent so long blogging. There’s a ridiculous amount of stuff to do this week. Two midterms, and my first draft of my section of our technical paper is due. But I just don’t have the motivation.

Moving Forward

Yesterday, I took my class five road test at 3:15 PM; also known as rush hour. After waiting a while reading the paper, I got called up and introduced myself as “Cloud”. My examiner introduced himself as “Rob” so we got the ball rollin’ immediately, stepping outside and towards my bright yellow car. He noted upon entering that the interior was squeaky clean, thanks to the 303 Aerospace Protectant I applied a couple weeks ago. Score! Bonus points! Detailing really is addictive.

We rolled out, after mirror checking, shoulder checking, and checking everything throroughly, and I promptly let the clutch out too quickly and almost stalled on the crosswalk. Haha, thankfully I didn’t though. Turning onto Boundary, the light changed yellow just before I entered the intersection at a low speed, and I hit the brake for a second but realized it was too late and kept going. So at this point I’m getting pretty nverous. Completing the turn brought us right into a brutal traffic jam, on the big hill passing under the grandview highway.

Upon stopping and shifting into neutral waiting in line for the light to change, he pointed out that I could just leave the car in gear, and keep my foot on the clutch. So I’m thinking, okay, I’ll do that just to humour him this time. Easier said than done! After holding it down for half a minute, my leg started shaking. He obviously either has a much stronger leg than mine, or only drives Hondas with soft, short throw clutches. When we finally got going again, the car rolled back a significant amount, and when I let the clutch out, I got clutch chatter, but luckily not too bad a case. At this point, though, I’m thinking it’s not a very good start to a road test.

Then on Boundary, he tells me to turn left at the next light. Well I signal, but as I approach, notice that there’s a no left turn sign, so I say that and keep going. Then he says okay turn at the next one, and as once again as I approach with my signal going I see that it’s a T intersection, where there’s no street to even turn into! And then he goes “woops, we must have passed it” and I’m thinking, huh… okay. So we take the next left where finally a legal turn can be made, and go around the area at 50 and 30 getting people rather angry. We stopped at a dead end street at one point, and did a three point turn, once again checking all around many times.

Things got better, though. Later we went through the Burnaby Central and deer lake parkway area, which was some easy driving, me being so familiar with it. During hazard perception, though, a guy saw fit to run a stop sign, crossing in front of me where I had no stop sign, and then promptly stopping in the middle of the intersection. I chuckled, and pointed, saying “hazard”. Haha, I think the examiner was rather amused as well, in an ironic way. I took the kensington on-ramp onto #1 highway, going the entire time at 30 km/h. It felt absolutely ridiculous. Memories of flying around that banked spiral on a nice sunny day crossed my mind. I was pretty surprised that the guy behind didn’t honk! But as soon as the lane straightened out, it was hard throttle all the way, taking third gear to 4500 rpm, which I generally don’t do (yes, I know, I granny it ). Exiting was a much bigger headache. He made me take the willingdon north exit, where there’s no merging lane, just an abrupt entrance to the street with cars flying down, off the bridge in a hurry. I waited until there was a very large gap, just to be sure.

So that route brought me back to the licensing centre, where he told me I passed, I got my picture taken, shook his hand, and went off happily!

New Blog

It’s a new blog! My old MSN Spaces blog will no longer be updated. Thanks, everyone, for the good times there! Thanks for the comments, and make sure you leave links to your own blog! (if you’re comfortable with that)