After spending the holidays with my family, I took my car, which had been sitting in my mom’s driveway in Iowa since I had left for Basic Training in August, and drove myself back to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. I returned a couple days early, so I didn’t have to go back to my classes immediately. I was nearly finished with my training; only a few more tasks remained ahead of me.
I’m falling behind on updates for this blog. I need to rededicate myself to this project, as well as to others. Mostly, though, it’s just because I’m so damned busy. Between working 30 hours per week at two jobs and taking a full-time courseload of 12 credits of upper-division history classes, I don’t have a whole lot of extra time left over for, well, anything, and most of what little free time I do have gets eaten up by playing video games. (Star Trek Online is, in fact, a key offender in that area.)
As I sit here, basking in the glow of my computer screen, munching on Edamame, it’s time to reflect on the past two weeks. It’s…
I’ve always been interested in my family history. I know my paternal grandmother has been researching the family tree for the past 15 years; I’d seen the book she’d produced when I visited, and she’d share her discoveries with me from time to time, but I never really had the time to just sit down and pore through the book when I’d visit.
That changed this Christmas. My grandmother made copies of the book and gave them out as Christmas gifts. I don’t know how my relatives felt about this, as I haven’t spoken to any of them aside from my siblings, but my brother, sister and I were all justifiably excited by this treasure trove of genealogical gold we’d received.
This is the third and final paper I had to write for my English class. The assignment was, effectively, to write a history paper with a personal interview and research to support that interview. For mine, I interviewed my friend, Darren, who served in Somalia while he was in the Army. I’d initially intended for the paper to focus on his time in Somalia, but it quickly morphed into the history of Somalia from WWII to the present.
Last week I bought an old IBM Thinkpad A22M on eBay for $150. Damn good deal. It’s an older system, but $150… Seriously. 900MHz Pentium-III, 128MB RAM, 10GB Hard Drive, DVD drive…
So what’s the catch? No operating system installed. Like that’s an issue for an alpha geek like me, right?
Originally published in the Fullerton Student Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 2; 14 Feb 2000
A day for lovers it wasn’t.
