Aimee finally called me today so that I could finish making those DVDs for Merlin and they’re duplicating away right now. Hopefully we won’t have any bad discs or jams or anything tonight and they will all be ready in the morning. Aimee I’m glad that you’re coming home soon and I can’t wait to finish our “conversation.”

I had to get up early this morning for the Festival of Cultures assembly at the high school. I can’t believe that my winter break of sleeping in everyday has already been killed… and only on the second day! That’s alright, I think I’m going to live. Things were crazy today as we had some serious problems with the sound system and it just seemed like there was problem after problem elsewhere. In the end it all came together and probably only about 50% of the audience even knew there was a problem.

After the assemblies, I stuck around to tally up the votes from the class elections and fortunately no problems this year! I’m glad we didn’t have to do any run-offs or anything like last year cause I know the kids wouldn’t have wanted to wait through winter break to find out. We do, however, really need to find a good computerized voting system – something that will just verify the students information (id number, phone number and birth-date maybe). If we had something like that in place it would be so much easier to vote because the students could vote all week long and we would immediately know who the winners are and I don’t think we’d have to worry about all the problems we have now with people putting in extra votes, etc.

On my way out of the school, Ryan called me and we ended up going to Oscar’s for a late lunch. After that we headed to Best Buy, and after striking out there I decided that we had to go torment Norma at Target, but she hadn’t come in yet to work so that was no fun! We’ll have to get her another day… any good ideas on what we can do to her? The best I could come up with was buy a bunch of weird off the wall stuff and then come back and return it. Or we could always buy some stuff at another store and then try to return it to Target. (She’s been working the customer service counter recently.)

Well, pyro called and he didn’t want to travel back into Vista from Fashion Valley because of traffic and he wanted us to come down and join him. After some coercing, I dragged Ryan down to The Cheesecake Factory for a quick dessert and then we walked around the mall for a bit. Then Ryan and I came back into town and I came home to make some DVDs. That’s my fun filled day!

Ryan – I’m glad that we had so much time to talk today. Thanks for all the input. Megan – don’t worry “p00kie” is her screen name and not something I made up. Oh yeah, and I won’t tell anyone for at least a couple more days… Pyro – you need to sign up for some classes at Palomar and make Lane work around your school schedule! I think he’ll understand your desire to take classes. Just do it!

I’m so glad that I’m out of school! I spent most of the morning just lounging around – not wanting to do much of anything. Once I finally decided that it was time to go to the school I headed down there to see what the deal was with the assembly tomorrow and guess what… no music! Oh well. I guess it’s a good thing that I’m not running things tomorrow – cause it would be kind of quiet. I just hope that nobody shows up with an audio cassette or any crap like that tomorrow.

Then I came home for lunch and went back to the school for the winter choral show. Everything there went pretty good except for the problem we seemed to have with the direct box for the guitars, but everything seemed to work fine later when we tried it out. We also had a problem with the 8 channel compressor/limiter – it smells like it’s been fried.

Apple sure has been rolling out the updates here lately. I’ve got so many of them at this point that it could take me hours to install on both machines. I’ll have to get online and do it one of these days. Well, I’m going to finish watching Without a Trace and then I’m going to sleep so I can be up early in the morning!

Do you ever just light up at the sight of something while driving down the road? Well, I was driving down Deer Springs (or probably Twin Oaks at this point) this morning on my way to my accounting final – not really into it – wanting to be at home sleeping – when all of a sudden wham! Immediately the day has changed. Now the question is – how do I get this guy or gals attention and get them to look at my license plate? (Figured it out yet?) It looks like this guy was an artist and i guess his tool of choice was the Mac for he was sporting a nice white Apple logo on the rear window of his truck’s shell. I don’t know if he saw my plate or even my sticker – but maybe I brightened up his day too!

I’m sooooo happy that school is out! I don’t think I’m normally in such a hurry for school to get out, but man I was ready for it this semester. I guess because I was taking a bunch of classes that I really wasn’t challenged in and therefore they weren’t interesting to me. I’ve now sent in my grade report to Fullerton so hopefully I’ll hear back from them fairly quickly so I can figure out what the heck is going on here in the spring. I’m honestly so tired of being a Palomar that I’m really hoping they accept me even though I don’t know what the heck I’m going to do if they do accept me. (If you’re still stuck at Palomar – don’t worry – it really isn’t that bad, but it just got old after a couple years. Develop your plan and get the heck out of there. Talk to me if you don’t know what’s going on.)

Now, as to what the heck I’m going to do for the next month plus that I have off, I really have no clue but hopefully part of the time will be spent cleaning up this room that has come to look like a bomb went off in it a couple of times. I’ll probably be going out to Arizona for a couple days on like the 26th, depending on if James does the wedding that weekend or not.

Pyro and I talked about hosting plans today so you can settle down now Rande. i think he’s working on getting them online right now and then you can know what the deal is.

Interesting new forum over on SpyMac that showed up today… check it out for yourself at http://www.spymac.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=40 . I thought this thread was particularly interesting: http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=53819 . How many of you think that Steve Jobs is God? What are your takes on the whole Christmas deal? Just some more food for thought.

Well, I should probably be going to sleep now so that I can try to fight off this annoying cold and maybe go for a ride in the morning. Talk to you later….

This cold I seem to have come down with is trying to kill me. I’m always tired and can’t seem ton concentrate on doing anything. I can’t say that I accomplished anything today. I started working on the presentation for my speech class tomorrow, but didn’t get too far with it. I did write to Goodwill to ask them if I could use their images and such – so I guess that’s a good start. I honestly couldn’t even tell you what I did for the other 10 hours in the day, but I guess it wasn’t too important…

Oh yeah… I remember some of it…. I’m trying to refinance my truck so that I can save about $2000 on it. They think they can drop me from the 6.5% I’m at now to a 4.55% loan for 60 months which will lower my monthly payments by $62 and will lower the total I pay in by about $2,000. The only catch is that I have to come up with the difference between the blue book value and the amount I owe which is like $1700. No big deal, except this means that I’m going to be a little short on cash for a while here. I also did some budgeting stuff and it looks like I really need to cut _way_ back on all the eating out and driving and all those other miscellaneous expenses. The numbers just say that I can’t do it anymore. Well… it was fun while it lasted and I guess I’ll be eating more Crispix and Special K now!

I watched 28 days tonight. Kind of an interesting movie, kind of a weird movie. It does have some good food for thought though…

Well, wish me luck on my accounting lab final tomorrow morning and my speech presentation tomorrow night. Oh yeah, and help me get over this cold or whatever it is so that I can “live” again.

1 Final down and two more to go. I can’t wait to get out of school so that I can sit at home and sleep in all day. Well, really I guess I have a lot of stuff to do, like clean up this room! I can’t say that I did much today – just took the final in accounting and then went to lunch with pyro. I came home after that and pushed some paperwork around. Now it’s 7 o’clock and I’m ready to go to sleep! Maybe I pop another movie in and see how far I can get into it before I fall asleep.

We got our Christmas tree this morning so I think I can officially say “Ba Humbug!” Once we got that home and all that I turned around and went to the Bob for the final Ballet Society performance. I think everything went good – thanks to all the extra people that showed up. Came home, looked at my accounting stuff for my final tomorrow and am now watching a movie, but I don’t think I’m going to make it through it. I’m really tired. I even get to sleep in tomorrow! Wish me luck on my finals!

Field Hockey banquet this morning. Nothing out of the ordinary. Showed a video, had some food, gave some awards. I do wish that I had spent more time at the games this year – only going to 3 of them and running away as soon as they were over kind of took a lot of the fun out of it.

Home for a bit and then off to the Bob. Things went fine tonight – I guess there were some little problems, but nothing bad for the fir consecutive run through. After the show Nate, Stephanie, Ryan and I went to Friday’s for some dinner. That was fun and was the first time I’ve been out to eat for something like a week (except for lunch on Mon/Wed at Island Brothers).

I’m way too tired to continue typing so I think that’s about it for today! Oh yeah, I guess Nicole is now engaged, sorry if this is old news, but I just found out. Pookie – hope you had fun tonight, sorry we didn’t get to talk tonight… I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go to sleep without staying up for hours pyroBashing…

Today wasn’t too horrible of a day, but it was kind of long and seemed to progressively just keep getting worse – until it finally hit rock bottom (at the Bob) and then it started climbing back into the black. Started off with waking up at 6 something and finding that the duplicator hadn’t actually copied all the discs I gave it when I got up at 3 something to feed it. It had only done 5 discs! That put me about 3 hours behind schedule there… not good considering I only had about an extra 1/2 to begin with.

Then I had to fly to an orthodontist appoint to get my retainer fixed (one of the solder joints broke a couple weeks ago.) Nothing bad there – in – out – and back to the house to finish duplicating and get ready for work at the Bob.

This is of course when I find out that pookie was feeling sick. She of course thought she was going to die (because of the recent flu related deaths), but I told her that I wouldn’t allow it. – This was step two in my day getting progressively worse. Then UPS didn’t show up with the new cases for the discs and the client was getting restless about not having them. After ransacking my house, I was able to find enough clear cases to make up for the shortage (pretty amazing that I was able to find 50 cases considering that I throw most of them away)! I was able to get Matthew to help me out by packing up the remaining discs while I flew down to the high school for the Classical Academy loadin.

Things went fairly well at the Bob today. The loadin was actually quite easy, but it was kind of frustrating many times not knowing what we were doing. It was really nice of Mike (Floate) to stop by and help out – and then both Ryan and Doug decided to stick around and help out. — I think they were really just there to scope out the girls – but hey… they were still there and helping so I’m not complaining!

Once we finally got out of there, I had to call my sick pookie to see how she was doing and it turns out that she hasn’t died yet although she decided that she has a cancerous bump on her leg and a bunch of other stuff and that she’s going to die here pretty soon. We then figured out what we were going to do for her last days – and we’ve planned all the restaurants that we need to go to, the places to go and the movies to see. It’s going to be a busy week here! (Of course – we’re just kidding about her dying… I WON’T allow it!)

Well, while I was on the phone, Ryan was frantically trying to get a hold of me because he was worried that I had flipped my truck into a ditch or something because I didn’t show up at his house as planned for dinner. — Sorry Ryan — I was just trying to take care of the sick child! I ended up going to Ryan’s house and eating dinner (I can’t say what) and watching some TV for a while. I just missed the rest of the dinner party – but that’s ok – it was still fun! Sorry for making you guys wait and thanks for keeping the food warm for me! BTW – Thanks for all the dinners over the years!

Amongst other things, Bouse is trying to convince me that I need to get out of Fallbrook (I don’t think he’s the first) and is trying to convince me that I need to move up to LA with him and Tina. I am going to have to figure out something if I get accepted into CSU Fullerton for the spring or fall – so maybe that will be a possible solution.

Well – I have to be up in 7 hours to get ready for the field hockey banquet so I better be thinking about sleeping here. Pookie – hope you feel better and don’t forget to “smell the roses.”

Wow! I can’t even remember what I did today. Oh yeah. I did something in the morning before I went to the Bob for the ASL play. I was able to get Lauren out of class to come and run sound and Nate showed up too – he was “off campus.” Now I know why his mom doesn’t want him out of class and it’s probably a good thing he didn’t turn 18 any earlier! The play went pretty good, except for the cool fire alarm we had minutes after starting. That was our nice fun for the day. Lauren did good on the sound, even if she was trained by Gary (Ryan).

I came home from the Bob and started duplicating the rest of the 150 DVDs that I need to have ready for Pat in the morning. According to my calculations I’ll be ready at 9:30 as long as I’m here every 3 hours to restock & clean the machine. Should be an interesting sleeping night. I’m still waiting for the cases though… I’ve collected 41 “spare” cases around the house so I only need 9 more now, but hopefully UPS will be here early in the morning with my cases so I won’t have to worry about it. Tina also came over and we re did her CDs for her dance on Saturday night. I guess her other people didn’t like all the old songs we had on there and they wanted to replace them with some more “up-to-date” songs.

Oh yeah.. how could I forget… shows where my mind is today… I got my Christmas present from Bouse & Tina today … I should have had the camera going today so you could have seem my face… I knew what it was as soon as I saw the name on the box… “oneshare.com.” I just figured that it had to be a share of Apple, cause I mean, what else would be that perfect??? i continued to open the package in full anticipation of what was coming and it was great! I’ve got pictures that I’ll get online here soon… They’re all ready to go, I just can’t get them to upload. (Netmondo says I have too many active ftp connections.) Anyways, Thanks Bouse & Tina — it’s wonderful and already earned place on the wall. (Now.. for the rest of you looking for something – oneshare.com seems like a really cool idea if you can’t think of anything else. (I already have mine though.) — Speaking of which… Batchelor, I was thinking that we need to get together and get something for “the staff” at the Bob.. any ideas?

After Tina left I finally got some dinner – another day of Special K – and watched “At First Sight” while I was waiting for the evening festivities to begin. The movie was pretty good. Kind of makes you think … Change is hard .. and change isn’t always for the better.

Kristi – it looks like I didn’t make it down to the wild animal park tonight, but I’ve got my ticket right here! After our marathon of emails, pookie has finally given me permission to go to sleep (although no cookies tonight!) and seeing that I have to be up in 3 hours to restock the duplicator, I figure I should put my head down for a while here.

Well, I got a 95 on the final in speech even though I didn’t actually read all the chapters. Not bad considering I think I only got about half way through the book. Sadly enough, that was the extend of my day today – school, home to do homework and then back to school. I didn’t even have time to drive into town today to get the mail (not that there would be anything there!).

The first 100 of the DVDs are done and now I’m just waiting to get the blank discs from UPS tomorrow. Then hopefully I can get everything running and if I don’t verify the discs, they should be done by midnight.

p00kie… that was fun… You brightened my day… can’t wait for tomorrow and my burned cookie!

I’m so happy that this is the last day of school before finals. If you ever take a class at Palomar, make sure you don’t get stuck in room B-5 because the chairs and tables have probably been here for as long if not longer than the building – which was built in the 60s I think. Unfortunately, I think I’m going to get stuck in this classroom again next semester if I’m still taking classes here. We’ve been in this class now for an hour and we’re still going over the homework that was due.

I want to go home and go to sleep, but I still have 7 chapters to read in my speech book before class tonight and some research to do!

So… I lied when I said I was going to sleep. Compressor was done compressing and then i started playing with DVD Studio Pro. I’m working on testing the first copy of the master right now to make sure that all is good. I must take back anything I ever said about the G5 & panther optimization of the pro apps… Damn … they’re fast! I think it took about 45 minutes to do the 25 minute video using one pass VBR 6-7 mbps w/ AAC audio and meta-data. Last time I used it I think it took me 4 hours to do a 30 minute video!

Anyways, I’m getting in bed again and going to fall asleep watching this video! Yeah! Almost 3 hours of sleep!

I spent most of today doing homework. I’m trying to get caught up in my speech class and I’ve got 3 of the 10 chapters read that I must have done by class on Wednesday evening. I may have to start reading a little faster cause it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it. I also never got my accounting homework done, but maybe I can get it done tomorrow morning.

We had the winter band concert this evening at the Bob. It was a nice little show. I have to admit how much I love how great of a job Russ does. They’re in and out and no waste. I trained Lauren on the audio board today and she got to monitor the sound for the show. (Batchelor – that’s what the picture was of – her working!) We had fun tonight during the show, even though no fire alarms went off.

Also today I started a DVD duplication job for Blue Sky – but after making 25 discs he decided that he wanted me to make menus for them and make 250 copies instead of the 150 I was going to be making. I guess the issue is that his set top recorder doesn’t really conform to the DVD-R standard and therefore may not be as compatible with older players as the discs that I make. I’ve imported his video and am letting Omega encode it while I go to sleep for a while. Hopefully I’ll have enough time tomorrow morning before I have to leave for class to get things burning again and all that fun stuff.

Nothing too crazy again today. I know… my life is boring. I did go to class this morning though… pretty good for a Monday, huh? Our teacher was even there so that was a plus! I even tried to concentrate on the class in class today, but I was lost reading spymac forums because everything just goes so slow in that accounting class.

I had my traditional lunch at Island Brothers … and wow pyro you were right! the steak is much better! After that I came home and after settling in I actually started working on some homework for my speech class final on Wednesday. After reading one chapter I got sidetracked talking to April and doing something with my website. In any event, the time got lost and before I knew it I was headed to the Bob for the school board meeting. Boring as usual, but they ended early and then the fire alarm went off so they all left the building.

I came home after the Bob and watched “First Knight” while eating ice cream and working on the site. The movie turned out better than I was expecting, along with longer than i was expecting, but I was happy. Most of you have probably already seen it cause it was released in like 1995 or something, but if you haven’t, it could be a decent movie worth seeing if you don’t have anything better to do.

Anyways, I added some stuff to the site & the forum, let me know what else I need to do! I’m going to sleep now so that I can get up tomorrow and finish this speech homework… I’ve only got 9 chapters left and some other stuff to do! Anyone in the speech class.. hit up the forum at www.schester.com and let’s discuss the final!

Just another day in paradise…

Did a show at the Bob.. they showed up like 2 hours late, but hey, I don’t mind getting paid to train people. Lauren talked to some of you today on my computer – so if I seemed a little weird, I probably was. Just remind me of what I said to you so I can make something up.

I don’t want to go to school tomorrow, but it’s the last week of classes so I guess I should probably go. (We have finals the week after this.) A week and a half left! I can’t wait! Then I get to do nothing for a month or so!

I’ll stop boring you now and actually try to go to sleep! Have a good night…