School starts yet again

So in the past few weeks of not posting, a decent amount of cool shit has happened.

Vacation: so I ended up spraining my neck or pulling it, or injuring it somehow (most likely due to my poor posture while playing WoW), so we ruled out actually going backpacking. We did want to go camping, so we ended up going on the crazy ass drive to Utah to check out Zion National Park. It's really awesome there, and the canyons are beautiful, but since it was in early August, it was hot as shit. Crazy hot. Hot like a fucking oven. Like a fucking oven in Hell.

And if you know me, you know I don't like hot. So after hiking the Narrows (hiking through a riverbed upstream with huge canyon walls on each side), we proceeded to take a nap. I woke up thirsty, but we decided to drive past this huge arch thing, and we decided to do a little .5 mile hike. We figured it would be no big deal, but with the heat, only 1 Nalgene between the 2 of us (filled with warm water - yuck!) and a large elevation change, and as we headed back to our camp, we both started getting heat exhaustion. Fortunately, Eve had just gotten her Wilderness First Responder Certification, and busted out her handy rehydration salts. I was much worse, progressing from just a dry mouth to a headache to nausea. Eve started to feel better, and we decided that Utah is just too hot for us, so we packed up (2 days early) and drove back. I was too messed up to drive, so Eve drove the first 5.5 hours to Barstow, where we found a place to stay. We encountered some Asian-fetishizing white trucker dude at the check-in, but we managed to finally bid him farewell and after a series of mistakes (Card key not working, smoky room when we asked for non-smoking) we got a nice room. However, the tap water was unusually murky, so we ended up using our backpacking water filtration pump to pump the tap water from the sink to our water bottles. Pretty damn ridiculous.

The next morning I drove us back, and we stopped at Anderson's Pea Soup for an early dinner. Overall, it was a fun time, although much of it was spent on the road.

Other than that, Eve and I tried unsuccessfully to get a table at the SF Zine fest, but we hope to still make an appearance.

Eve just read me parts of some of her first journal entries while she was first joining Theatre Rice. It's funny hearing her thoughts on me, the cast, and Rice as a whole from a beginner's perspective (since I've long became a grumpy old member and lost that beginner's perspective).

Let's see, I saw SuperBad with Mike (funny, yet unsurprisingly offensive), and Eve and I have been on a movie renting binge, watching Bridge to Taribethia, Predator 2, Alien 3, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum (in theaters, obviously), Intacto, and The Fountain.

The Fountain was pretty fucking cool. Kinda trippy, but we liked it. The Bourne movies were also pretty good.

Let's see, Eve and I hit up Green Apple Book's big sale, where everything at their clearance store is $4.95 or cheaper...we got a huge stack of reference materials and sociology stuff for like $50! For like 14 books! It was flippin' sweet.

We also spent a bajillion dollars on our school supplies, but it was less than the bajillion dollars we spent last semester as we already had like 50% of the stuff this time.

I start classes tomorrow at the brual 8:30 time slot, but alas, such is life. At least the buildings are closer this semester, so I don't really need to be on the bus until like 8:10. Beats having an hour commute.

This semester I'm taking a shitload of drawing classes, so I should better be able to at least decently draw people after this. Intermediate Figure Drawing, Clothed Figure Drawing, Intro to Anatomy = drawing lots and lots of people. Plus, some digital illustration class that is probably just going to teach me what I already know about Photoshop 7. But hopefully I'll learn a lot of new tricks..I hope they teach us how to do more painting and stuff and less editing.

Anyhoo, I have tons of projects on the back burner (why do I only get inspired to do cool shit when I don't have time to do so?) and I gotta kick this WoW habit I've been fueling the past week or so (but I do have some uber shoesies to show for it).

Oh yeah, also, it was nice seeing Mitch and John post-Japan trip, and it was cool hanging out (unfortunately for only a short while) with them and Seich, Mike, Ashwin, and Raj.

Okey doke, time to make sure I'm ready for classes and then off to bed for Rick! Huzzah!