WITH Crunch Berries

11:11 yet again...make a wish!

So, today I bought my first tupperware.

Ever.

I mean, I've had tuppewares before, but they were always hand-me-downs from Mother, or one of my Aunts. Today, however, I bought a $1 oreo-sized rack of cookies which necessitated the purchase of a hermetically-sealed device to keep them fresh.

On that note, it's nice to have a $1 pleasure when you've spent $800+ in back-to-back rent and a security deposit for the Fall.

Yep...pretty nice. Thank You Uncle Al's Vanilla Cream cookies! Cookies with just enough taste to make you say, "Wow, I may have spent only a dollar on these cookies, but they sure make it barely worth it!" Shipped fresh from the cookie vineyards of Alabama...

It's also nice to have things to look forward to, such as the knowledge that tomorrow I will be eating Captain Crunch With Crunch Berries! instead of Corn Pops.

Wait...is that nice, or is it really sad and pathetic?

I'll still go for the former.

Nerd Sidebar

I'm doing more remedial (relatively) tasks at the lab, but soon I will start work on my research group's website, subsequently moving on to Matlab tasks, such as image enhancement and other lab work suitable for a fluid mechanics greenhorn such as myself. It's nice to have this opportunity without in-depth knowledge of fluid mechanics. Martin, the post-doc whom I work with, tells me that once I take a class in the aforementioned subject area (in the Fall), I will have the opportunity to do my own research, perhaps as a UROP or simply sponsored by the lab. More to come on this exciting, unprecedented offer! Just send in three easy payments of $39.23 to Dunk Co! c/o...

Duh...Looth?

First of all, please accept my most sincere and humble apologies for not updating this site for over a week, as I have been busy with...

a) work
b) settling in
and
c) Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door

But now that I've finaggled (fenaggle?) a much more convenient way for me to compute and access the internet at the house, I should be able to update my log with the regularity of a Metamucil-laden geriatric.

I also haven't updated this weekend because

d) I've been in Duluth with Marie

...which happened to be our first road-trip (albeit a jaunty, two-and-a-half-hours-away one) during our three-months-this-weekend (a significant figure for our protagonist) coupleship. The trip was filled with family introductions, enjoyment of the splendors of Duluth, walking, walking, seagull flocks flying in our face, touring, and merriment. Oh yes, and much bountiful eating occured. Directly to the stomach went much good foodses this weekend. Oh yes. Thank you, family and Marie, for a wonderful weekend!

I got back to the house at about ten o'clock from Marie's, greeted by the usual mess from the roommates, with my kites on my back, my clothes-bag in my left hand, and my box of Captain Crunch With Crunch Berries! in the other. I am confronted with a significant challenge:

Will I begin my journey with Crunch Berries tomorrow, or will I wait for the Corn Pops to run out?

Alas such is the most significant question on one's mind when he only works full time during the summer and isn't concerned with summer schoolwork, like his roommate.

I won't be so long gone now, so until next time...

Sha-zibby...

Sha-ZOOOBY!

Sir Emperor Erik Axdahl, Spaceman Extrordinaire

A Day in the Life

It's 11:11, make a wish...

Well, it's been a couple days and a couple hundred dollars, but Chris and I, room-mates extrordinaire (but not in that way), are starting to just get settled in to our room in a house in Dinkytown right by the U of M campus in Minneapolis in Minnesota in the United States of America on the face of Planet Earth in Our Solar System in the Milky Way in the Universe floating on a Brane in a sea of Branes.

Also, I've learned that if you go into a grocery store without a list, you spend $53.15. I mean, you get a couple week's worth of food so it works out in the end; however, you leave with a pit in your stomach at the thought of spending $53.15 on something that will be pooped away. Yes, poop. Away. Poop away.

But it all floats away as I lie on my cozy air mattress on my softest of soft sheets on my bed bought at Ikea.

Plus, I've got my great friends, a wonderful girlfriend, and a supportive family--so you know what? Life is good.

*Action* Throw Beret *Freeze and Cut*

Just watched CSI: Las Vegas

The bad guy was an aerospace engineer. You know, the one that buries Nick alive in a glass coffin, surrounded by red ants. Oh, not to mention he blows himself up in front of Grisholm. I'll infer that they went out of their way to say that he was an aero-engineer as a nod to his intelligence. So I'll take it as a compliment!

Tonight is the eve of my departure. At two o'clock tomorrow afternoon, my ship sets sail from Duluth back down to the Twin Cities to begin my full-time job at the lab. I know this is the right thing to do, and definitely the right career and academic move, but I can't help but feel anxious.

I'm recently only 20 years old, and I'm about to move into a sublet with a friend of mine, a roommate. A real roommate. From now on, nobody can take care of me but myself. Not my parents, not the maid that cleaned the dorm's bathrooms, not the cooks at the University Dining Service (UDS [uuuhds])--me and only me.

But enough Mary Tyler Moore business.

Here's to adventure!

T-minus 16 hours and counting...

Bagels, Blue-Hairs, and Brownies

Today we find our protagonist wandering through a tempest of the tundra, frantically looking for shelter. Or, relaxingly driving his '95 Bonneville through a light rain to a coffee shop in his Duluth neighborhood.

Whichever makes my life sound more like an epic.

I decided to head over to Bixby's (after three hours of Star Trek first, of course) for a nice, quiet, relaxing afternoon of reading with a toasted chocolate chip bagel with a full scoop of cream cheese and bottle of cream soda (orange).

After turning around from the counter with my purchase, I scanned the place for a nice, comfy chair. There were two chairs in the corner, one unoccupied, and in the other sat a "coffe shop-type" tourtured-artist, new-age looking woman talking intellectual snobbery on her cell phone. Nix that.

I opted for a seat by the fire by a couple of kindly old ladies.

I take a bite of my delicious bagel.

"Do you use all of those pockets?"

From which commenced a semi-lengthy conversation about how my pockets remind one of the ladies of her purse, each section with it's purpose. The other one, with a slightly disapproving tone, began talking about how all her grandkids wear that style now, with some even wearing pants that zip at the knee. Imagine that. I was about to comment on how I usually carry a lot of stuff with me, and it would be difficult to put everything in two side pockets (which would subsequetly resemble saddle bags), but instead I just nodded and assented, like the upstanding, nice young man I am. ;)

I read for about and hour with the gentle lulling of the ladies' banter in the background, after which they left. However, not before one of them gave me the rest of her bag of the biggest jelly beans I've ever seen. I really didn't have a chance to politely refuse (I did gain ten pounds over the semester, after all), and ended up picking out all of the red ones and eating them.

In rains an entire troop of young girl scouts (brownies?). I brought my garbage to the proper authorities, and on the way back to my seat chuckled how the bagels that some of these girls were eating were bigger than their heads.

I read over the next half hour to slowly crescendoing background noise, the girls, in a classic scientific example of diffusion, gradually spreading out throughout the cafe. I was kneeling towards the back of my chair to talk to a friend that had stopped by, and at the conclusion of my conversation turned around to find a pudgy little girl smacking on a Ring-Pop right in front of me, quickly scurrying off to her next intra-cafe destination.

The brownies drained out of the place soon enough, but there was no hope for concentration on reading, even if the cafe was now quiet with a handful of readers. So, I decided to stop by the nearby grocery to buy a box of 12 Star Crunches for $1.29. $1.29, the exact change from the $5 bill I used to patronize my small neighborhood cafe.

It was a good afternoon.

Sincerely,
Erik-Tok Bot-Tron Techno-Tron

Don't Click Here

You know what's annoying? When people obliviously click here to "see something cool" on AIM.

And then I have to get that same message from a billion different people who clicked there.

For the love of Jeezit, please stop clicking it.

*Squee*

Behold, ire incarnate; the enemy that will bring our End of Days. His flag bears a roadrunner:

Love,

Colonel Erik T. Ticklepants