With a bang

Star Wars wasn't really a good way of describing how reality works anyway.

Meh

Staying with my family is an interesting mixture of pleasant and overwhelmingly frustrating. I get along with everyone in my family fairly well, which is a plus. That and their kids are all older than mine, so they surprise me with things like speech, toilet usage, and moderate competency.

My cars front bumper was falling off. You know, the thing that holds the license plate that New York requires on both ends of the car. My dad tends to fix things like this easily, and I hate the idea of blowing a fortune on what I think is a technicality. So he takes the car. Normally, his fixes involve a few hours and a few bucks. It's pretty much what I was expecting. This time, not so much. Now the car is gone for a week, both delaying my trip home, and forcing me (+wife and 2 kids) to rely on borrowing a car from my sister.

Thanks. The big delay? Waiting for the paint to set. Paint?! I don't care if it matches or if it's lime green (which might make it easier to spot in a parking lot, Saturns are pretty common) I just want the dumb car. I'm back in my home town and I'm stuck in the house the entire time.

Short of borrowing a car.

Christmas was nice. It usually is, but I find myself more and more awkward with it every year. I'm waiting for science to "accidentally" create a virus that causes me to miss the awkward parts, but be there for the nice ones. Until then, I make do... somehow.

All of this past fall I kept wishing I was still back at that cabin.

Green

So I'm back in Syracuse. The semester is over (I don't miss it). I'm here for a week until I fly out to Minnesota for awhile. My brother, through various* means, has a Playstation 3. Knowing that I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of Fallout 3 (moreso, a computer that can run it. I'm not much of a console gamer), he decided that whatever I'm pining for is good enough for him.

He plays. His 3 year old son thinks it's better than TV, so he watches. A silent figure on the floor near the TV, taking it all in. Then, when my brother feels it, he hands the controller to the boy. Oh sure, the violence, blood, and gore are never a part of what jr does. He just runs in circles and gets himself killed by a mole rat, but still...

My nephew has played more Fallout 3 than I have. I N V

I'm Finished

I took my last test today at Onondaga. It's an odd feeling, knowing that I need never set foot on campus again. I'm more or less set up at UB for the fall, so I wasn't even distracted by that. I made a lot of friends up here, which is weird because I never thought I would have fallen in with such a lot. I met them on accident, really. I was introduced by one of my skeevy acquaintances, and I was adopted pretty quick. Long story short, I made some friends.

And now I'm half nostalgic. When I left campus today, I had the image of a Ron Howard movie ending, where everyone leaves in a different direction while he narrates what happens to everyone. I don't even like Ron Howard. (See what movie culture does to people?)

Leaving Syracuse is going to be even stranger. I was born here. I've always been the one to watch people come and go, and I always still had the ones that were going to stay awhile longer while I got to know the ones that just arrived. Now I'm going in cold. Definitely an odd feeling. Last time I did that was in Utah, and the culture shock was bad enough. (Water doesn't come from the sky in Utah, it comes out of the ground from metal things. They always make sure to put sprinklers that spray 180 degrees right at the edge of the lawn to make sure they water the roads, too. Just ignore that drought, we'll be fine)