This Side of Lost

I'm back from Minnesota. My sister's grad party was a moderate success -- people came, food was eaten, money was given, etc. Thanks to the three of my friends who showed up. Nice to know you care. Other cool things about the short trip: My sister's car (can I have it when you go to college?), Hypnotoad, and the Asia Buffet in Beloit, WI.

And although I am glad to be back in the company of Samantha and my adopted hometown, foremost in my mind now is that I have two days to shove the rest of my and Samantha's worldly belongings into a 5x10x8 storage space in order to hit the road Thursday morning for Georgia and other places southerly. Thank goodness that my dad's ability to utilize every cubic inch of a small storage space seems to have been passed genetically on to me.

In other news, the antenna on my cell phone broke off last night. So you may have trouble reaching me by that route. I think I'm going to be making a trip to a Cingular store today.

Have I mentioned I hate moving? I hate moving. I am placed in the sad situation of having no milk for my cereal, and neither is it worth it to go buy some more. When else would this situation occur? Sad, I tell you -- sad. It goes without saying that my life will improve immeasurably upon August 18th or so.

So I suppose I should quit complaining and get to work. I'll try and post again before we leave town. Peace!

The server that hosts this weblog will be undergoing an ISP change effective August 9th. The DNS server needs to be notified, too, so you may have some trouble accessing fomps.net for a few days after then. No need to worry -- this is all for the better.

Also, this is my last post while residing at the Limestone Manor in Bloomington. A sad day, indeed -- it was good to me. My new address is included in an e-mail to many of you who regularly read this. If you haven't gotten it and want it, drop me a line.

Wish me luck getting everything else packed and moved. Talk to you from the road soon.

So here's my post in order to test my weblog to see if it works on the new ISP Steve got. Can y'all hear me?

Notice the use of the southern dialect contraction. Chalk it up to hanging out with people from Georgia. 'Cause I'm in Georgia. I'm currently writing from Heather Anderson's apartment in Savannah, in between batches of muffins. Our journey has been successful so far:

Thursday: Drove 9 hours from Bloomington into the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in northern Georgia. Holed up at the abode of Pete Appel and DJ Martin, Samantha's fencing parents, for three days. Watched a lot of baseball and worked on a database for DJ's fencer armouring responsibilities. Was generally lazy and caught up on sleep.

Sunday: Brunched at the American Roadhouse in Atlanta with Roy Youngs, sabrist. Poked around Five Points neighborhood, imbibed rum and coke. Dinner at Albo's of Italy with Roy and more of Samantha's friends: April, Bob and Eric. Crash at Bob's for the night.

Monday: Samantha's birthday! :) Breakfast at Waffle House with Pete. My first Waffle House experience -- and it was a good one. Drove 3 hours to Statesboro, Samantha's hometown and location of Georgia Southern University. Visiting fencing practice and Ben at work briefly. Dinner at Hachi with Heather, Tim (Samantha's other brother) and Austin. Mmmm, sushi. Commenced Samantha's birthday party proper in the basement of Casa Humphrey. Good times were had until the early morning hours.

Tuesday and Wednesday: Poked around Statesboro and Savannah. Saw the GSU campus and some sights from Samantha's youth. Visited Kevin Barry's and saw Harry O'Donoghue, Irish folksinger. Played volleyball with friends. Had fabulous pizza at Vinnie VanGoGo's and visited some drinking establishments around Savannah.

Today: Tour Savannah during daylight and make it back to Statesboro in time for karaoke (aka scary-oke).

More later, prolly from South Carolina. Prolly isn't a word. Peace!

I own Nickel Creek's new album. And it is awesome. Being so rudely reminded of Nickel Creek's incendiary awesomeness has caused me to add a link to their website and a couple others to my left-hand column. It's different from their first two albums, but in a good way. And it will appeal to more general pop/rock sensibilities. (Read: buy this now.)

Quantum mechanics is weird. It's difficult to understand and even harder to explain. Like, try this: the position of an atomic particle can only be described using probabilities. So the particle is never in any one place -- it is "smeared out" over a range of possible locations depending on its particular set of probabilities. It will never actually be anywhere until it is observed, at which point it seemingly "chooses" a location.

Yeah, I can hear you now: Huh? It's strange stuff to say the least. So a guy named Schrödinger came up with an interesting (and somewhat sadistic) situation to let this play out. He proposed (note: he proposed, he never actually did this) to place a cat inside a box, and place inside the box a machine that would watch the radioactive decay of a one atom of an element. And when the machine senses that the atom has decayed, it would break a vial of toxic gas, which would instantly kill the cat.

Now, the element has a half-life of one hour, meaning that at the end of the hour, there is a 50% chance that the atom will have decayed, and an equivalent 50% chance that it will have not. So after one hour, the likelihood that the cat will be dead will be exactly the same as the likelihood that it will be alive. But we don't know until we open the box and find out.

Here's the strange part: According to quantum physics, until we open the box, the cat is neither alive nor dead. It is in an indiscernable state, and depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, it's hard to say what exactly the cat is. But we do know that until we make an observation, nature will not decide; we must be the cat's executioner or savior.

I have been in Bloomington for approximately one full year now and things are awesome. Let me rank the following... aah, never mind. I think I'm starting to outgrow attempting to nostaglize the things I or those close to me have said in the past.

But things are awesome nonetheless. Samantha and I now have successfully coalesced our respective belongings into one location and they are currently intermingling to form a sort of Samanthandrew Thing Stew. Or something. The apartment itself is nice -- lots of big windows for kitties to perch in, a second bedroom that we're using as an office (we have an office! damn!) and a kitchen that is not huge, but easily double the floor space of Samantha's old kitchen. Most of the boxes have been emptied and we are in the process of acquiring some last pieces of furniture that we need (anyone have a dining room table they'd like to donate?).

I can't believe that there's only one week before school starts again. I'm putting in my last week at the Chemistry Library and then I'm sort of unemployed... sigh. I've got, like, 12 hours a week between my two jobs right now. I need to get cracking on this...

The rest of our Georgia trip finished well. Karaoke was indeed scary-oke, although Samantha is, as advertised, a wunderkind at it. Friday, we drove through the wond'rous land of South Carolina. We stopped in Columbia for a few hours to visit Bill and then landed in sunny Spartanburg, SC, and visited Steve "The Damn Man" VanDahm, webmaster extraordinare and all-around cool guy for a couple days. We took it easy -- Samantha read Nancy Drew books and I listened to my new Nickel Creek album. :)

We then limped our way back to Indiana (via a stopover in Frankfort, KY) and wreaked havoc on our new apartment. The wreaking continues... in fact, I should get back to that. Peace, dudes. And dudettes. Is dudette even okay to say anymore?

That's about the best I can come up with right now. Today's been a strange day.

Many of you are probably aware that I could be conservatively called "a man of habit." As it pertains to the current topic, this means that I like to have a schedule. I don't really have a very good one right now. Though I now have three jobs (more on that in a moment), the schedules relating to all three are still up in the air. This lead to a day where I wasn't quite sure where I was needed and when I needed to be there. I haven't exactly done much of consequence either (except buy a bookcase).

Compound this with the images of flooded streets, looting, carnage, disaster, utter ruin from New Orleans I'm receiving from the media. Yes, I know, as Samantha said to me, Americans act like we're the first people that things like this happen to. But it hits a little closer to home to know that the destination for my next Spring Break trip is now lying under up to 20 feet of water and will not likely ever be the same city again. I'm just sitting here with a worried look on my face, not entirely sure what to do or say.

I feel kind of useless right now. My only (and completely lame) hope is that I'll feel better once I get into some sort of regular schedule. And I'm not sure why this is affecting me so.

Anyway. Hopefully a less depressing post soon.