Paul's Pictures - January 2004
The beginning of a fresh, new year! What surprises await us? Will they be good surprises or bad surprises? Made any New Year's Resolutions yet?OK, enough with the New Year's stuff. Except I'll probably still write 2003 on all my checks for the next month until I get used to it. As always, I'll try to remember to update the site regularly, since I know I have at least one regular reader.
January 22
 |
I think I mentioned I moved apartments. I moved into a much smaller
room, and still haven't found a place for all my stuff, which includes
some old monitors I should throw out. This is a view of my room from the door. You can see a bit of my bed on the left. Around the corner on the right is a small alcove, with a closet at the end. Here is a rough ASCII drawing of my room. +-------------+ |DDD C| | +----+ | \ |BBBBB \ +--------+ B is where my bed is, D is my desk, C is the closet. The diagonal lines are the entrance. |
January 25
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This is Rob the goldfish. He lives in apartment D, upstairs. He is a
survivor. Let me tell you a little about him. He was bought at a pet store with four of his brothers, and put in a regular fish tank. For some reason, the other four died off within the first week or two, but Rob survived. Then, throughout last semester, the guy in charge of Rob never cleaned his tank, nor refilled the water. By the end of the semester, the tank was extremely dirty, and the water had evaporated to the point that the bubbler-- which hung from the top-- didn't even reach it. Still, Rob survived. At Christmas break, he was put in a sealed bag with not very much water and was like that for over three hours in transit between here and Kansas City. He survived the trip there, and he survived the trip back, which I assume was similar. Now we see him living in what looks like a large glass, and still he swims. The future of Rob is uncertain. What is certain is his perseverance through adversity, determination to survive, etc., yada, yada, which is a lesson to us all. The End. |
January 19
 |
So here I am supposed to be cleaning up the living room, where all my
stuff from the move is piled, and I find this game of Go. When doing
something like cleaning, I am easily distracted, as anyone who knows me
can tell you. I read through all the instructions, then noticed it
didn't mention how many pieces it came with. So I made this to count them. What this means about me psychologically I'm not sure, except what I've already been told: I'm somewhat of a perfectionist, and I'm a procrastinator. Does this behavior mean I'm also partially obsesive-compulsive? Or just strangely artistic? Possibly just bored? In case you're wondering, there are 187 black pieces, and 181 white, although to fill a whole board, you'd only need 181 blacks and 180 whites (black goes first). I guess they're figuring you'll lose more black pieces. |
January 17
 | I finally thought of a way to put multiple pictures in the same day, at least if they're all related. The new guy moving in (Matt) wanted to room with one of the guys in another apartment (Jeff). So I agreed to switch places with Jeff. My apartment was quite a mess while I was moving, as you can see in these pictures. He got his loft moved in and rebuilt by that night, which you can also see here. |
January 13
 |
Ben (a housemate) and I were wide awake one night, so we decided to
make cinnamon rolls. We spent some time looking for a simple recipe
on the internet, spent even more time figuring out how to print it on
a 3x5 card (we're both computer majors, so it was fun, not frustrating.
If we were like normal people, we would have written it down.), and had
already mixed most of the dry ingredients together before we realized
the recipe looked simple because they left out some key points, like
how long to cook it at what temperature. We made some guesses to fill in the missing points and what we got was-- well it wasn't cinnamon rolls. It had cinnamon, certainly. But it didn't "roll" too well, so it was more like "cinnamon bread", except cooked on a cookie sheet instead of a loaf pan. At any rate, it was edible, if a bit on the dry side (we didn't make enough glaze), and we told each other we'd never tell anyone about our little kitchen mishap, then defining "never" in this case to be "until it doesn't matter" a.k.a. a couple days later. |
January 12
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Tonight I needed to go shopping. Not having a car, I put my phone to
good use and called everyone I knew who was staying in town during
Christmas break. Finally, I found someone, just as they were getting
off work. So we went to the grocery store. I knew exactly what I wanted in all categrories, except bread. This is the bread aisle. Yes, an entire aisle devoted to bread, of all kinds. I guess bread, being the staple food of humanity for thousands of years, probably deserves its own aisle, but this seemed ridiculous. After gawking at the bread for a good five or ten minutes, I finally broke down and got the cheapest wheat bread I could find. When I can't decide on type, I always have price to fall back on, but I do prefer some flavor in my bread, unlike white bread. |
January 9
 |
Today a few friends and I drove to Salina to watch a movie. They have
a theater in the mall there. We were about an hour early, so we just
walked around a bit first. Then we saw this: a floor to ceiling fishtank, full of huge fish. I was reminded of the scene in the "Mission: Impossible" movie at the restaurant and the huge fishtank. Fortunately, noone at the mall was using red light/green light gum. I had some other pictures of people in front of it for perspective, but the difference in lighting made the fish not show up at all, so this one turned out the best. Coincidently, the movie we ended up watching was "Big Fish", which is very good and I'd recommended it to anyone wanting to go to theaters but dosen't know what to see. |
January 5
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It snowed a couple days ago, and hasn't melted since. This is what I
see when I look out my front door. I decided to go for a walk today, since I haven't been out much lately, and needed something from Walmart. I bundled up with a sweatshirt and a coat, then a scarf, hat, and gloves, and walked outside. I got about two blocks before I realized it was not a good day for a walk. The wind was blustery and bone-chilling, and I clearly did not have enough layers on, because it felt like I wasn't wearing any. My nose started to drip like a faucet, leaking into my scarf, which was wrapped around my face and kept getting hairs in my mouth. I stopped at a friend's house a few blocks away and used his radiator to warm up. I must have stayed a good half hour of warming up, after only five minutes of freezing cold. I braved the cold again and walked home, foregoing my Walmart trip until I got a ride. When I got home I checked the temperature: it was 8°F (-13°C)! Definately too cold to be walking anywhere. BTW, here is a nifty temp converter I made in JavaScript. Completely self-contained in the <form> tags. Feel free to use/copy it. |