Steps

Today I took my life in my own hands--at least, it felt that way--summer's over and I drove down to Kalamazoo to get started in on moving into my own personal very first apartment at Western Michigan University.

Mostly that boiled down to spending about 3 hours with a tilex-soaked sponge and a little extra with a vacuum. It really wasn't too dirty. The previous tenant, apparently a young muslim woman, left behind the following:

2 Romance novels;
1 handwritten letter to an unnamed boy, discussing the reasons he should marry her to keep his honor before Allah;
1 pair of scissors;
1 boxed pregnancy test, open (I didn't see if it was used);
1 donation tract for an Islamic Society of some sort;
and
1 Western Union reciept for a money transfer of roughly $475,000, in spanish.

So that was kinda weird. It's hard not try to put these things together in some logical way--the money receipt especially has me hoping some angry people don't show up looking for something--but I have bigger fish to fry, such as getting furnature down to school, and this game of Bioshock that just finished installing. Bye for now!

hi?

Hey to whomever reads this one, how's things?

I'm doing okay...all right, better than okay, but hey, I'm apparently two and a bit weeks out from jumping back into school, and it'll be a big, uncomfy change and all. It looks like I'll be moving into my own apartment down at school, and for my assistantship, I'll be teaching Comp class to freshman...sounds like we're getting a week's worth of crash courses to help us get started but then we're off and into the classroom. This is kind of scary; I mean, I bet I can do it, but I never even took this sort of coursework at LeTourneau, so aside from reaching back (way back) to my highschool days, English educational material is, well, a tad bit unfamiliar to me yet.

So far this summer, looking back, I did a lot of wakeboarding, a lot of work, but only some writing...the novel redrafting is coming along, but more slowly than I wish it were; what's come out so far, though, I'm very pleased with. 20k down, 80-100k to go? I'm hoping to finish it by November, more or less. A goal. I also saw a man die this summer; the son of one of our neighbors, an epileptic, about 30 years old, who had a siezure in 7 feet of water near the end of our dock. I helped get his body onto the dock, and some other people did CPR until the paramedics arrived, but even though he'd been under for just about a minute, it was already too late. Sobering and saddening; my friend, who was on the scene before I was, is still having nightmares. I've been all right, though it was sort of hard to sit through a mandatory CPR class at work the other day. All I could think was it didn't work, it didn't work, although the autopsy showed that the man had had a heart attack sometime during the process, so all in all it was never looking good for him. Anyway.

And for those who asked, like Freezy, I have no idea what is up with my site. I need to switch hosting. It goes down; soon as I complain it comes back up, but never before. And my chatbox seems to have died, and the company that supported it seems to have a broken site. Arg.