The first week of classes is almost up and I just finally have a real schedule. I’m taking 19 hours of courses but will have a surprisingly short time of actually being IN class. One class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and just two on Tuesday and Thursday. There are online courses and weekend courses and the ones on Tuesday and Thursday are 90 minutes and the other is 180 minutes.
Not that many actual classes but they sure are long!
So glad classes finally got sorted out. Sad that I have yet ANOTHER year at Mizzou… They add a year for every year I’m here, I swear.
Tomorrow morning I get all of my books and can start doing my homework. Oh, and I get to buy another calculator! That makes five since starting at Mizzou.
Ryan got back in town today, he had been gone for what seemed like a lifetime. It was wonderful to see him again, hold him and be all lovey dovey. Oh how I missed him!
Now I guess it is time for me to leave Starbucks and get home. There have been some really strong storms here tonight which kept me from wanting to plug in at home and was making my internet all sorts of unreliable.
Starbucks has a massive surge suppressor and the internet is battery backed up. Sweetness. The parking spot that I normally put my car into was pretty unfortunate tonight. A huge oak tree was blown over and crashed onto the car that took my place there. Wow, I avoided car destruction for once!
And with that, I’m outta here. Time for some sleep, gonna wake up early tomorrow. So far I’ve been really good about getting up and getting ready for class early in the day. I hate being rushed!
Not only does it not recognize that I’m on an iPhone and thus entitled to use their AT&T WiFi on my device, it won’t even let me log in with my AT&T Uverse credentials or my Starbucks Rewards username/password. Grrr…
Funny how when the signin fails for AT&T, it goes to T-Mobile Wireless. Kind of funny but mostly annoying. Oh well, at least Kaldi’s internet works, goodbye Starbucks until you get your Internet woes figured out.
For the last week or so I have been unable to log into my AT&T WiFi account at any of the three Starbucks here in Columbia. I have three ways to log into the new WiFi network; AT&T Uverse, Starbucks Rewards and my iPhone.
If any of these methods would work, that would be one thing, but for all mediums to be down, and for this length of time, that is crazy.
I celebrated the day I got free internet access at Starbucks through the new contract with AT&T and my family’s AT&T Uverse subscription. Secondly, I have access though my Starbucks Rewards card.
Sadly, the transition from T-Mobile to AT&T hasn’t been too smooth.
Today I logged in to my AT&T.net account only to be logged into a T-Mobile account. It doesn’t change the quality of my service but just goes to show that no one has their head in the game.
A few weeks ago when we were in Chicago, the entire AT&T WiFi network was down, for hours. Randomly I cannot login to my account and a few friends of mine have never been able to access their two hour per day Starbucks Rewards internet.
Come on Starbucks, AT&T and T-Mobile, get your act together! Furthermore, where’s my free iPhone internet AT&T?! Hmph.
I bumped into the Wicked Witch of the Midwest as she hopped on her broomstick and headed out of town. Still, I wish the house had fallen on her, she did have great taste in shoes…
So I’m here in Chicago at Starbucks and it’s out last day here. Actually, it’s our last half day here. How sad.
We have had a wonderful time here taking in the sites, hanging out with friends and bumping into friends we didn’t even know lived here!
Our first day here, we met outside of Orange. It is this really neat breakfast/brunch type cafe off Harrison near the library. I had not seen Ryan in a few weeks so that was a pretty special moment for us both.
We both enjoyed a delicious breakfast, Ryan had these waffle and fruit shish-kabobs and I had a simple small order of silver dollar pancakes and eggs. With the main course we had a tasty treat called Frushi. It’s fruit sushi and it’s really quite tasty. A little but on the sweet side but good none-the-less.
My early flight had me up around 5:00 am and Ryan was on the bus from like 11:00pm the day before. That being said, we were quite tired. We picked up our suitcases and proceeded to make the venture down State to our hotel stopping at a few sites along the way.
They fella who checked us into our hotel room was a nice enough guy but got on our nerves a little bit when he was moving our bed from a king to two double beds. He said a few times, “are you sure you want just one bed”, “are you sure, it’s a smaller room and just one bed”. I took this a little better than Ryan I think haha.
We got into our room and took a little nap before exploring the city. When we woke up Ryan showed me the surprise he had gotten us. A Canon SD870-IS. I was way excited. For a few weeks I had been looking at getting a new point and shoot digital camera focusing my efforts on the Canon SD1100-IS. It is a more expensive, supposedly higher-end camera.
After Ryan’s careful research, and famous frugalness, he decided on the 870-IS. And as it turns out, it is a better camera. You do sacrifice the viewfinder in favor of the large LCD, but you gain in the zoom but 0.8x and the image stabilization is in the lens not the CCD which is really a better way at doing it.
Oh, and despite not having a viewfinder and relying on the screen as the only way to view your shot before you take it, it gets something like 30 extra shots per battery charge.
Ryan and I took the new camera with us when we went out that night to Pizzaria Uno, Starbucks, and wherever else we wandered. I really cannot even remember haha.
Sadly, when I was trying to quickly switch from the computer to shoot some video of this guy collecting milk jug caps, I corrupted the secure digital card, or at least the data on the card. So all those pics and videos were lost. Sad. Here is a video I made with the new camera, Jason Mraz’s new song playing in the background. It’s 20 minutes of Starbucks activity squished into 4 minutes.
After some consoling from Ryan and me pouting a good while, we headed out for dinner. As we waited for the Red Line to show up we noticed this gaggle of straight guys trying to figure out the CTA system. There were with a girl and all acting the stereotypical way that hot straight jocks act.
Well, all but one. He was acting the way a stereotypical in-the-closet gay jock acts. It was pretty hilarious. he would brush up against the other guys for no reason, start wrestling fights out of no where… It was so obvious I could not believe that the other guys weren’t catching on.
We were so enraptured by the scene before us that we almost missed two fellow Columbians-come-Chicagoans walking onto the terminal. Tom and his girlfriend!
I have never talked about this couple on my blog. Tom was to pledge Acacia back in the day and I might have suggested that he rethink that. At that time Acacia wasn’t for him and while I could see that, most of the other guys could not. He would have been a guy that was burned by Acacia and I didn’t want to see that.
We have been friends or sorts ever since then and I used to bump into him and his girlfriend all the time in Columbia. It would seem that everyday I would see at least one of them in the most bizarre places.
And what do you know, here I am in a random city in America on one of only two nights in the city on a subway station that they have never been to since they never go to downtown and there they are. They just happened to be visiting his girlfriend’s mother downtown.
We didn’t hang out but we did chat for a bit, it was so fun to see them. Of course Ryan took this as a chance to make fun of me. He seems to think I know too many people because everywhere we go together I know someone. When we first started dating we couldn’t walk ten feet without someone saying hi to me.
We finally made it to Boys Town where our dinner was scheduled to be. Unfortunately Chicago Diner, a vegetarian restaurant, was closing. Nevermind that their hours sated they had one more hour before closing… grrr
They were nice though and sent us to The Pick Me Up. It was a really neat inde-punk rock-emo-hipster half vegetarian restaurant. We had these AWESOME empanadas, wow.
On the way home from The Pick Me Up we bumped into our sexually confused friend from the subway just a few hours earlier. He and his buddies had gotten off a few stops before us but here he was with two of his friends in Boys Town. They were both saying something along the lines of, “Dude, I just don’t feel comfortable around you right now” and “I feel a little weird about you”… I guess he got a few drink in him and finally made his move haha, something Ryan and I had joked about earlier.
Went home, slept, I woke up early to do some work, we met up with Brett and his really great boyfriend for brunch at The Bongo Room. Awesome brunch followed by some shopping down Michigan Avenue and tea at Argo. We need an Argo in Columbia.
Ryan and I broke off from the fun couple and went back to the hotel for a quick nap. Woke up, got all cleaned up and headed to the Chicago Diner again. On the train with us was this guy that looked quite a bit like Chadd, to me at least.
Well worth the second chance. The food was delicious and the service great. Did I mention how good the food was? Before we had even finished dinner I had ordered a copy of their cookbook off Amazon.com haha. You should get a copy too. It is worth it.
We went to a couple of local shops, met a guy named Paris who said I’d be screaming his name in bed that night, he was fun. Apparently Rhianna was there just a couple of days ago. Damn us for not being there at the same time. I would have loved to have met Jay-Z’s alleged ex gay on the side.
Off to Whole Foods and then the Center which is one of the coolest gay advocate sites I had ever been to. We walked around Boys Town for a bit more before going into a bar called Side Track.
Great bar. If you go to Chicago you must go to Side Track. Great drinks, friendly bartenders and fantastic music videos all around. We befriended a bartender named John who works the fourth floor bar there, outside. He is a paramedic just like Ryan and is going to school for journalism. He was such a nice guy, bought us each a Jagerbomb. Tasty.
We went through all of the bar within Side Track. I think there were five… Really quite the classy place.
Then off to Berlin where we almost met this potentially really cool, accidentally hipster-emo fellow who was actually probably just really dorky but we both thought was probably nice and incredibly shy. Unfortunately we are just as shy and we didn’t break the ice though I did make several attempts.
Back to the hotel room, back to sleep, whew. I woke up early to get online and blog this with some pictures and a video I did at Starbucks but AT&T’s internet is down. Boo.
Oh yeah, and I got a free hug!
Well I’m going to wake up Ryan. We don’t have much time left in Chicago so we gotta make the best of it!
I’ve been lazy posting recently because I’ve been going back in time and re-categorizing and tagging all my old posts. I did some work on my MySQL database and deleted one extra table too many… oops. So I lost all the categories for posts. So, slowly I am putting categories and tags to all my posts. I’m 10% done. Seems like I should be closer to finished. Ugh.
So, in leu of an actual post, here are some videos that caught my fancy this week.
First we have the Skittles Chocolate advertisement. If all advertisements were this entertaining, I wouldn’t “Tivo” past them. It’s so simple, yet so hilarious. Maybe just to me, you be the judge
Next up is a documentary that calls out the coffee companies on their bean purchasing practices. That really irks me about this movie, is how misleading it is. [Disclaimer: I haven't actually seen it, but if it is as the preview advertises and most of these stories go, I think I know what's going on]
They act like companies, say… Starbucks, pay pennies on the dollar for the beans as compared to the price at the store. What they neglect to mention is the fact that when the beans get to the beaneries, they are raw. No treatments have been done beyond maybe some washing and curing in the sun. They haven’t been roasted, flavored, QC’d, packaged and shipped. It is the price at the scene.
It’s like calling out Chick-Fil-A for selling a sandwich for $2.59 when the breast they used for it cost them $0.65. There were so many things that happened between the death of the chicken and the serving of the sandwich.
Now, I can’t say much for bulk coffee companies like Folger’s and Maxwell House, they are both notorious for poor practices. Either way, the movie looks interesting.
Sorry I never post. I’ve just been so busy with school, work, work and life.
Things are wonderful though. School sucks but the hospital job is fantastic. Starbucks is ok… Hmmm. I am scheduled to work on a day off, the day of a meeting at the Hospital and of the Elton John concert that I waited in line for hours to be the third person to get tickets. That’s bullshit if I’ve ever smelt it… which I haven’t but still.
Ummm… Ryan is amazing.
Ummm… the new FX show Damages is the best thing on TV right now. Promise. Followed by Saving Grace, Kyle XY, Greek, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Eureka and Mad Men. No… I never watch TV…
Speaking of which. Since NBC left iTunes Music Store I had to get DishNetwork. I’ve been trying to get it installed for week but I keep having to cancel, put it off, due to work schedules. Boo to having to pay $65/month just cause NBC dropped out but Yay! to getting full HD on my tv.
I’ve been working at the hospital and Starbucks this week… It’s murder. I’m getting maybe a few hours of sleep a day, then off to work, then to class, then to until 1am. Last night we got out of work at 1:30! I am so freaking tired, I can’t really function. French homework? Please… French Quiz… fuck.
Even my hands are shaky from the experience. I need a vacation!
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