Return of the Blog

I know everyone always says "Don't write posts about not having posted in a while." Well f that, I'm going to do what I want. I've been ridiculously busy these past months. Applying to graduate school, accepting to graduate school (!), coaching two teams to the state championships, and having one win, planning a trip to Las Vegas, having a birthday, working a crappy job, quitting that job today. All in all, I've had my hands more than full. I would like to talk about a few of these subjects, possibly over the course of a few posts. Applying to graduate school was not a last minute decision, but a last minute action. I got most of my applications out just before the last deadline (of February 1st), and waited. First (and so far only) to respond was University of Maryland, Baltimore, which was the top school that I applied to by the numbers. I went, interviewed, and was accepted one week later. Probably much less stressful than many other people's application processes.

Let me tell you about some of the other schools I applied to however. University of Delaware has requested my personal statement three times, my application fee, my transcript, and a recommendation a second. As I'm sure you can guess, they've been taken off my list. I applied to Seton Hall just in case I got in nowhere else (no offense to Seton Hall as a school, I love the Pirates, but their graduate chemistry program is a little small). UMass spurned me from the beginning, and Case Western is being slow. All in all, I got in my top choice school! Sweet. That's about it for now, I have much to talk about over the next few days of semi-unemployment.

Thoughts on the latest Indiana Jones film

Finally got to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night. All in all a pretty damn good movie, a good plot and a decent length (124 minutes). It was a good fun movie, with all the classic Indiana Jones stuntwork (note that I never saw ANY Indiana Jones movies until less than 6 months ago) and shenanigans. It was however, far less plausible than the previous three movies, which, in some cases does not say much. However, as a man of science (not scientology!) I am much more willing to suspend my disbelieve magic and aliens in a movie far more easily than I am to believe that Indy survives a nuclear bomb in a fridge, regardless of if the fridge was made of lead or not, the remains of Trinity, the first nuclear test was complete destruction. Following up with that, the fridge was blasted into the air and hit the ground, no, no, no that could never happen, and if it did, he'd never survive it. They also clean the radiation off of him with soap or something, but the radiation emitted from a nuclear blast is equivalent to several lifetimes of x-rays and the hemapoietic cells in his bone marrow (the ones that produce white blood cells) would be shot. But, I am nitpicking. The movie was excellent, Harrison Ford can still play Indiana Jones very well. There was even a "I have a bad feeling about this" line, which as a colossal Star Wars fan was a big deal to me. Also, as a fencer, the sword fight on two cars blew me away, it was expertly choreographed as well as well executed, alone with the side commentary. There is a spoiler concerning one of the characters, but honestly, I was negatively surprised by this and pretty much saw it coming the minute s/he became a main character. All in all, if you have not seen it yet, I would highly recommend it, each character plays their role well.

I'm also trying to get my recent trip to the Mets online (Johan Santana's 100th win!), but it just doesn't seem to want to get up there. The problem is that I have the pictures on one computer, which doesn't seem to have Microsoft office for some reason, and it doesn't want to put those pictures on the internet, nor can really email them at the resolution they are at. Confounding my problem is that the computer only has one USB slot (wtf Sony), and that is being used by the mouse; hopefully I can use my love of keyboard shortcuts to work this out. As always, thanks for reading.

So I graduated

Wow, I made it. Granted that was a few weeks ago at this point, but it feels like months. I tried writing this up before, but it just didn't feel right, so I will try it again. I've been just sitting around since graduation, I tutored a little bit, ran some errands, but other than that, I've not done much. Well, I did go to the mets game the other day, but a post on that is coming as soon as I get the pictures sorted out. I have been playing a stunning amount of xbox 360, and have been enamored with first person shooters recently, specifically Team Fortress 2 on the Orange Box. I've even been slacking on my posting over at Your Comic Relief, which is no good because I really need to keep up with that. The problem there is that I have not had the chance to catch up with my comics recently, and I have well over 200 comic books to get through, and these distractions, such as studying for the GRE's doesn't really help at all. I say that as if I have been studying consistently, the closest I have gotten is that I've started reading daily to help prep myself for the literary comprehension section, I need to get on this, making flashcards etc... but I just can't seem to find the motivation. Know what I mean?

Yesterday was Intense

So yesterday I stuck myself in the dorm lounge, and wrote a whopping 16 pages of paper on the research I've been conducting all semester. It was intense. My last undergraduate assignment, and all I have left to do is correct it. Four days till graduation, that's not many. The guys across the hall keep playing indoor kickball or something, and its loud and annoying, especially because I'm trying to edit my paper. Know what really bugs me? Teacher's handwriting. I want to be a teacher myself, but when you edit a paper, I can't fix it if I can't read what its talking about.
An update on Ebay week over at Your Comic Relief, I'm still looking for a guest contributer. And it will likely be in two weeks. However, here at Life of a Welshman, I'll be kicking it off early with a special Day Zero event discussing collecting in general, and the utility of Ebay to help build your collection. Including excerpts from my own private collections. So stay tuned, and check back. Further updates also include a recap of the Everclear concert that I attended, as well as graduation excitement!