I'll just pretend there's nothing wrong with this.

Right now I'm on a balcony overlooking Balm Beach, typing on my new laptop and messaging people via a wireless network. Some of those factors might make it easier to see why I didn't update the site for four months. Really though, I did write those last two journals, then never uploaded them because I was intending to convert the site to use small amounts of PHP which I think I may have explained more deeply a while back. Then that didn't happen, due to a few little setbacks. Mainly some confusion about PHP (worked differently than at school) and the fact that I couldn't get the crap installed on my computer for testing.

Even with HTML, I still tend to test locally to make sure there aren't some ludicrous number of broken links. Of course, weirdnesses still slip throgh onto this site every so often. I just noticed some bugs on my arm because I'm in the beautiful outdoors, and realize that certain bugs with this nonsense may in fact be caused by bugs. Like, insects.

It was actually a pretty good time not to update the site. Nothing interesting happened romantically, and fun events were pretty sparse (although there was the strange tale of Brian's brothers, who announced their wives' pregnancies the same day, having their babies last weekend twelve hours apart... that's just neat), and I was working at Wal-Mart again. This time I worked from the first week of May until the second week in August, about the same length as last year, but these last couple of weeks have felt a lot more like a vacation.

It wasn't really any better this year. I worked in household chemicals and crap again, and halfway through the summer they changed overnight managers to this guy who seemed very results-oriented. That is, he didn't care about process, and he made up results. Furthermore, when I told him "I quit next Wednesday", he told me, "No, you can't do that because I let Adam quit Wednesday, so you quit next Friday". Then I left the next Wednesday. That was my least favourite thing this year.

I very deeply hope that I'm done with the whole Wal-Mart business. It's not that bad... I like a lot of the dopey people I worked with. Real highlights for me mostly involved Adam doing really stupid crap in the sports department (like stacking coolers really high and trying to block me in my aisles with boxes, tape, whatever...), but also this one guy Kris who I believe had analyzed Wal-Mart's system to learn exactly what he could get away with.

My personal favourite Kris story (courtesy of Adam) was that he had two pumptrucks in two stackbases at the front of the store and Adam was looking for a spare pumptruck. Adam asked if he could use one of the two, and Kris said no because he had to move two stackbases. When Adam was telling me this, he said, "So, rather than explain to him that no human can operate more than one pumptruck at a time, I just did the work for him. I wonder what he would've done if he had to move all of them."

I think that may be it for those kinds of stories. I can't imagine that many people find them that funny. So, also during the summer, I made up my statistics course. Reflecting on it gives me a serious sinking feeling. Why? Because I was underslept and impatient with the course material, and didn't do one actual practice question on paper, and got an A. We were allowed study sheets, and I made mine on the bus on the way there. They all ended up looking like my dad's horrendous writing and about a third of the allotted length. And then I'm looking at the tiny blob of mathematical notation, thinking, "I've got to be missing something... what am I missing?".

Then I got an A. Wai is jealous, because he got some C- or D of some sort by passing the course during the school year. He remarked, "We should take all of our courses during the summer!". Now, two problems.

Problem 1:

It was easy. I approached everything with a half-assed shift worker attitude and I got an A. My study sheets had like no information. I asked no questions during class. I was always rediculously tired and annoyed that I had to rush home to go to work at night after class. Still, an A. I feel more like it was handed to me than any other class I've ever taken. Actually, there may be one exception to mention below.

Everyone else was cheating. All the kiss-ass ding-dongs asking all the questions, "doing the work" and filling their study sheets completely (in one case transcribing the semester's notes onto a single sheet of paper... of course, I don't see how that could help anyone when you need to find a certain piece of information), they were all cheating. Actually, the crazy girl with the transcribed notes I didn't see cheating, but everyone else... I saw the plans for the notes being passed, and thought it was a joke. Then I saw the notes being passed. It was incredible. A network of about 5 guys, basically in a circle around me, all passing notes during the final exam. I got an A, and I had a chicken-scratched wad of crap to assist me. How badly could these guys have needed the help? I could have seriously screwed them over. Furthermore, I had to honestly fail once at this course, why shouldn't they? God that made me angry. It's a good thing I'm so inert, or someone would hear about something!!

I just refreshed my memory by reading the last journal update in which I was concerned about my database mark. Heh, last semester, markwise, was my best semester overall so far. For some reason I got a B+ in database, probably because Mastoras likes me a lot, the final got bellcurved, or possibly he changed my midterm mark based on the assignment (which I still feel was well done, albeit a day late).

Another neat thing that happened probably before the last couple of journals was going places with Jaime. Lidianne had once told me about this phenomenon such that when she took her baby brother out, people everywhere looked at her like she was a vile whore/teenage mother, but when her older brother took their baby brother out, everyone thought the young single daddy and his little boy were the most adorable thing in the world. And as always, everyone's judging stares are perfectly right: young men can have children outside of marriage and that's cute, but if women do it, it's wrong.

So yeah, the first few times I went out with my mom and Jaime it was really weird. Jaime wasn't saying or doing much at the time, but when my mom wandered off to get the food at a restaurant or whatever, I'd have all these people staring at me. And I'm thinking, "so... I guess I should... entertain her". After the first time I kind of thought people were probably more viewing me as some kind of authority, watching what I do as one would watch a cooking show. I thought that was kind of cool. It didn't take me long to get into the swing of passing objects back and forth, and guessing which words her sounds were supposed to be. Now hanging with Jaime is perfectly normal and there's no real acting going down. I'm also honoured that she can make a noise that's about 80% of my name (okay, it's actually my name... geez).

This journal business is hard. It was four months and some 85 text lines have exhausted the highlights of my summer. Maybe I should start writing about more insignificant crap, like which animals I see each day.

Oh, I got another good one: the cottage renovation is done. It's nice here. The pictures are on my other computer, though... so uh... bye.