As of Monday, May 17, I am a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada (well, maybe not by local residency ordinances). I’ve already spent some time on the strip, but mostly I’ve just been hanging about in my apartment watching videos on Netflix and playing MMORPGs. I start work tomorrow at the bright and early hour of 8 a.m.

The drive to Nevada was surprisingly interesting with the change of scenery, but I’m sure the drive back will be worse as I’ll have seen it before. I was, in a very weird way, excited to see live cacti for the first time in my life – it’s too bad they don’t have sombreros like they do in Chilis [cue bad joke alarm]. I also saw my first tumble weed, and I saw the Hoover Dam. The damn dam wasn’t as exciting as all the hype would seem to indicate, but now I can say I saw it, I guess.

My apartment is decent, and is very close to my workplace so that’s incredibly nice. There’s even a pool in the apartment complex so I’m probably going to attempt to get out there a bit, despite not knowing how to swim. I purchased a swimsuit at Target – it’s brown with a white floral print – so now I won’t have to swim naked after forgetting to bring my swimsuit from Kansas with me.

Anyway, I’ll be programming in C++ this summer so I’m going to do a little bit of brushing up before I head to work for my first day tomorrow. It’ll be hard not to mix in PHP to the C++ on accident until I get used to it.

As an aside, Mario Galaxy 2 came out today. I’m holding out buying it until I get my Wii hooked up. I somehow forgot to bring my television with me to Las Vegas, so until I get a fancy cable so I can hook up my Wii to my monitor, or purchase a new television, I’m not going to be able to play any console games for awhile.

I’ll see if I can attempt to post more often since I’m here. I don’t know anyone here yet aside from one other intern, so I’ll have some time on my hands. I would really like to attempt a Photo 365 since I’ll be graduating in a year, but the last time I tried that I got too caught up with other things. We’ll see.

By the way, last semester oddly turned out splendidly. I ended up with 4 As and 1 B. I was surprised as I had one very difficult class in which I was expecting to scrape by with C but I guess my hard work paid off. Thanks to all who put up with my whining about the projects and offered assistance when I couldn’t figure things out – you guys are the reason I didn’t have to go and visit a therapist last semester.

Here’s a quick post to prove I’m not dead. Here’s the lowdown on what’s been going on in my pretty un-exciting life:

1. Amazingly enough, even with all of the stressful things that occurred last semester, I made it out with the best grades I have ever received while in college. I received four As and two Bs.
2. I went on a trip with my boyfriend, David, to Las Vegas for some relaxation before classes started again. Someday, I’ll have to get around to posting photos.
3. Completely unrelated to the above, I received an offer for a paid internship in Las Vegas, Nevada. I probably shouldn’t disclose more than that here, but I will say that I’m really excited about it.
4. I completely forgot to post a “year in review” post for 2009. Someone remind me, will you?

I’m in another full load of classes this semester so I’ll be as busy as always. I’m way behind on a lot of things, including Q*bee trades, so my apologies to my bee friends… it’s been far too long.

Since late May, I’ve been experimenting with patio gardening. I’ll just say up front that I have almost no real gardening experience and so everything has been a trial-and-error thing. It’s been going pretty good so far except for the blight (I think) that my plants caught recently. I’ve been spraying them with a baking soda/soapy water/Miracle Grow concoction and it seems to have helped (I hope!). Anyway, I wanted to share some information about how I’ve been germinating my seeds in less than a week (and in some cases less than 24 hours) after “planting” them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve started Folding@Home again. If you don’t know what that is, check out the FAQ. I used to do it quite awhile ago but I stopped and can’t even remember why; it was definitely gone when I reformatted my computer but anyway. It’s a pretty neat way to help out researching diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, ALS, etc. I know I don’t always have the time or money to help out as much as I’d like with the various walkathons and fundraisers they have so at least I can donate my computer’s processing power to helping out. It’s pretty easy — I just run it when my computer is already on, and it runs in the background doing the rest. Without trying to reach any goal I’ve already completed one work unit. There’s even teams you can join which is pretty cool.

I feel like I’m rambling, however, so I guess the point of this entry is that if you’re interested in helping to fight diseases and wouldn’t mind a program running nearly unnoticeably in the background then this is pretty neat. Also for the biology/genetics nerds who like to view the folding action real-time

As I was reviewing my financial aid statements today (which are better than in years past) I realized that I’ve accumulated quite a bit of debt in the form of college loans. I always knew I had quite a bit, but I guess I never fully realized how much it was. I don’t particularly regret it because unfortunately my financial situation didn’t allow me any other option but loans. All the same, though, it sucks to see that I’m already in debt to the tune of $10,000 with two more years to go. At least it seems like I’ll have to take little to no loan help this year because I’ve finally been able to move into a much cheaper apartment which saves me about $2,000/semester.

I’ve begun looking through my stuff for things I might be able to eBay off to put towards paying some of the loans off. We’ll see how that goes — eBay is scary, and I hate the fact they charge you to list items* and then again when you sell them. Amazon might be the way to go, I don’t know.

[Edit] * Apparently eBay lets you have 3 free listings a month. I’m trying it with one item to see how it pans out.

How did you cope with your college debt?