Welcome to Scottland

Sometimes I have so much faith in humanity
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20071221/NEWS01/713228077

and sometimes I have so little
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/crime/2008/06/05/dnt.ct.hit.and.run.wtnh?iref=24hours

Well I’m almost done with school here. I only have 4 exams left, all starting in 2 weeks. School’s actually gotten a little easier, because I now have enough points that even if I do poorly on the next few exams I’ll probably pass all my classes just fine. It’s gotten a lot less stressful for me recently. I’m not sure if it’s good news or not, but about a week ago I got my assignment for prototype, the next 6 months of my training. I’ll be in Saratoga Springs, NY, from July through December. It will be sad to leave Charleston, because there’s a lot of fun stuff going on here. But I think I’ll enjoy NY too because of nicer summer weather, and it’s very close to the Adirondack mountains. I bought a plane ticket home to visit my family and friends over my break. In case you didn’t already know, I’ll be home from July 1 through July 12. Hopefully the weather will be warm! I’m so used to the hot weather now that 70 degrees feels cold.

In another exciting piece of news, my car just passed 100,000 miles. I’ve only owned the car for 25 of them, but I’m looking forward to another 100,000 miles. The only thing standing in my way is the insane gas prices…if they keep going up, I’ll definitely be driving less. Also, I’m now eligible for the Subaru High Mileage Club. I still have a ways to go before I will qualify for the 500,000 mile club! I guess I should probably change the oil.

I can see it! The class ahead of us is graduating next week, and we’re next. Only 2 more months to go. My classes and exams seem to have leveled off, and by the reputation of the exams, I’ve already taken the hardest one (besides the final exam, of course). That’s good news. Once again, I apologize for posting so infrequently. It seems like whenever I get a free moment, I’d rather be doing something else other than posting. But I don’t intend to keep everyone out of the loop. Unfortunately, I had over 1000 spam comments which I deleted all of. If you left a comment in the last month or so, It probably didn’t make it through. Either post it again, or don’t. Either way, I probably don’t like you enough and might just delete it anyway.

Let’s see…big news…my parents came 2 weeks ago for a visit/vacation, and we had quite a good time. We ate at some great restaurants, spent some time doing tours/walking downtown, and got to go kayaking in a creek in Francis Marion National Forest. We saw 3 alligators, plus my parents found one living in the pond right next to my apartment. He’s about 3 feet long (pretty young), and likes to sit out on the grass, just chilling out. I might invite him over for dinner this week. Here’s some photos from their visit:

Here’s the Arthur Ravenel bridge in Charleston. Just a couple weeks ago they had the annual Cooper Bridge Run, with over 40,000 participants. The winner was a Kenyan. It always is

Here’s a yacht with some sweet sails. I was hoping there’d be pirates on this ship, but there were just a bunch of landlubbers out for their weekend sail.

Here’s Fort Sumter, with downtown Charleston in the background. Fort Sumter started the Civil War, so it’s pretty historic. We had to take a 1/2 hour boat ride just to get there.

Mom gets into her kayak as the guide holds it steady. I was surprised to not have a spray skirt, but the water was so flat that it really wasn’t needed.

Here we all are, enjoying the amazing weather and fun wildlife.

big cypress tree. Some of these trees are supposed to be 700-800 years old, I think.

Nice gator, nice gator. We got a little too close and he slipped into the water just after I took this picture. I think he was about to swim up and eat my mom, but we can’t be sure.

Nothing else too exciting is happening here. Mostly just school, school, school. Bill is coming for a visit in May and I think Josh will be able to make it down too. We should have a really good time. The only other nice thing is the weather. It’s started to get pretty hot (regularly in the 80’s), which makes it really nice for going to the beach or the pool. I started swimming as more of a regular workout. Our pool isn’t huge, but it’s long enough that I can get pretty tired just swimming back and forth. Then I can relax and read my book for a while in the sun…then repeat. Okay, I’m going to enjoy the end of my weekend. I didn’t go in to work at all, which may have been a bad choice, but I’ll deal with that later.

1. You’ve been sick for over a week with no improvement, and you can still only get 4-6 hours of sleep a night.
2. You run out of clean underwear…and the rest of your clothes are still in the dryer from the last time you did them 2 weeks ago.
3. Your exam scores start going down :(((((
4. You just spend 60 hours this week at work and your advisor tells you it might not be enough.
5. You find the 5 minute nap between classes incredibly refreshing.
6. Friday afternoon finally comes along, and since there’s no way you’re going to study on Friday night, you go home…only to realize that you can’t decide what to do with a couple hours of free time…so you sit on the computer and blog about it.

Okay, I may be making this sound slightly worse that it is…it’s just that I’ve been studying tons and tons lately, and not seeing any tangible results from it. And it’s not like I haven’t had time for a little fun. Here’s some pictures I took 2 weeks ago downtown:

Battery street, just off the water. Huge mansions.

They have horses and buggies all over the place…tours, private rentals, the usual.

Another amazing house.

Rainbow row. Kind of an unusual spectacle. All the houses have to be painted different from every other house. Kind of the opposite of most neighborhood painting rules.

St. Phillip’s Cathedral. Tallest building in town, I think. Not too many skyscrapers in Charleston!

Palm-lined avenues! How tropical!

Silly slackliners…don’t they know there’s no rock climbing around here? (Perhaps that’s why they’re slacking, and not climbing!) And btw…nice tans!