Living in the Library

Ho hum :-) So it's 12:30 am and I'm still in the library. What fun! I'm practically living here at the moment. For one of my classes - History of Economic Thought to be exact - we have a 'take home test' to do. It sounds cool in theory but when you consider the fact that it involves writing 4 3pg typed essays it's not so much fun! I've been working on it since Monday and it's still not done. The problem is that I'm really enjoying doing the research and reading about all these dead Economists so I want my essays to be really good. They were supposed to be due today but we got an extension until Monday so guess where I'm going to be all weekend?

I also have a a whole lot of work to do for my other classes too. This semester I'm taking the 2 core classes - Econometrics and Game Theory and then Labour Economics and History of Economic Thought as my electives. Generally people only take one elective but they looked interesting and last semester wasn't that hectic so I decided to do both. I'm glad I did - they're both really interesting. In Labour we're going through some really high level papers which have different ideas to the classic labour economics theory which I'm finding fascinating.

History of Economic Thought is great too. There are only 6 of us in the class so we sit around a conference table and have more of a discussion than a lecture. The Professor knows so much so we get all the economic theory as well as the gossip. Today we were talking about the American Institutionalist school of Economics and one of the gentleman who never used to clean his teeth and taught at a great number of prestigious American universities because he kept getting fired for sleeping with the wives of the Universitys' Presidents' or with his (female) students. Or there's Thomas Robert Malthus who was a priest and lectured about the dangers of an increasing population but had 8 kids (the majority with his multiple mistresses). In general it seems like great economists are either socially inept or highly promiscuous!

Like I said, I'm in the University library. It closes every morning at 1am but the Reserved Book room which has a separate entrance is open 24 hours a day. At 12:30am and 12:45am someone alway announces on the library intercom that the library is about to close then at 1am there's a final message. It normally just goes something along the lines of "The library is now closed. The reserved book room will remain open to SDSU students. Please have you id card out for easy verification". The clown who did the announcement tonight added something from Shakespeare (the 3rd act of Henry V to be exact) about the necessity of being prepared and then said he hoped we all have a good night and an even better day tomorrow. This was all said in a very deep and serious voice and when he was finished the entire library collapsed laughing and started applauding! I guess that's what you'd call 'One o'clock in the morning humour'!

This and That

I am pleased to announce that my car's mirror is well and truly stuck on! Despite the fact that it looked rather strange while the epoxy was drying (see pics below) both the epoxy and the duct tape have done their job.



Aside from that, last night I went to a Purim party dressed up as a vampire/goth. My costume is not important or interesting, what is is that the police showed up at the party! Apparently the music was too loud or something so they came in, turned it off, and left. What a sterling job :-) I thought it was all rather quite exciting - especially the few tense minutes when we thought we might all be asked to leave.

When I got home from the party I was wondering if there was something I didn't know about in the cranberry juice I'd been drinking because I honestly thought it had been snowing at our apartment! The grass by my parking space was white and the cars all had what looked like snow on them. I thought it doesn't snow in Southern California! Turns out I was right - it was very fine hail but even that is apparently abnormal enough.

And in other breaking news (the title of this post is 'this and that' after all) my roommate really amused me today! We generally get on really well but one thing I do that really annoys her is that I'm not very good at closing the kitchen cupboards. That's not to say that I necessarily leave them wide open, I just don't always close them completely. Well today it obviously really annoyed her because she's stuck bright pink and green post its on all the cupboard doors and on the shelves inside saying 'Close me'!

Vroom Vroom and DIY

I have a wonderful roommate! Why? You ask... because she gave me a car! Or more like loaned me a car for as long as I need it but still. It's old (it's done 230000 miles), it rattles when you drive and the majority of the indicator lights on the dashboard flash constantly. BUT it has 4 wheels and it goes! Which is by far the most important thing because it means I can get around. Just for Mom, here are pictures of said car...



Now you may wonder why I am only telling you about my car now when I started driving it at the beginning of the year? Well, when I went to the Linkin Park concert last Tuesday some delightful person bashed the driver's-side wing mirror so when I got back to the car it was dangling by the wires that let you adjust the mirror angle. I was far from impressed! But I made it home safe and sound (as I didn't have a wing mirror I only passed/switched lanes on straight sections of road when I could use my rear-view mirror to see what was coming). I told Sarah when I got home and she was very unconcerned - apparently she'd bashed a couple of poles with it so it was already half falling off.

The only problem is that it's really difficult to drive without a wing mirror! So as a temporary solution Sarah and I were very creative and we duct-taped it back on!

Please note the fact that we even managed to coordinate the duct tape colour with that of the car! (Admittedly it was just lucky because that was the only duct tape we had). That lasted for about a day or two but then the duct tape must have stretched in the sun because today when I got in the car the mirror was definitely not where it should be.

At this stage I should mention that we called Sarah's dad (who's a mechanic) and asked him what we should do about the mirror the day after it happened. He said that we could either call around to junk yards and see if they have one (the car is old ok!) or that duct tape would work as a temporary solution. His third suggestion was to epoxy it back on and considering that calling scrap yards was less than appealing and that the duct tape method failed hopelessly I decided to try that.

So today I went to Lowe's home improvement store. I have never been so intimidated in my entire life! The place was enormous - a massive warehouse filled with DIY stuff. Dad would have been in heaven! I made a beeline for the nearest salesmen and feebly asked "Where can I find epoxy?" Well, did you know that you get different epoxy for different things? and that once you determine the type of epoxy you need you have a whole bunch of different brands/strengths/whatever to choose from? I now do. After explaining what I needed it for (to stick a plastic wing mirror back onto metal) the salesmen conferred and I was handed a tube which I gratefully accepted and then ran for the cash register.

This evening Travis (Sarah's boyfriend) and I stuck my mirror back on. I hope it was successful - at this stage I have no idea. You see, epoxy takes an hour to 'bond' and there was no ways I was waiting holding the mirror on for an hour so guess what we did?.... We used duct tape to hold the mirror in place of course! Duct tape is fantastic stuff. Now hopefully when I take the tape off tomorrow the mirror wont fall off too...

Linkin Park Concert

Last night (it is now morning) I went to the Linkin Park concert in LA. It was amazing! They are so good live. I loved every minute of it. They played all their hit singles as well as a good mix of their new and old songs.

To give you a bit of background to this whole thing - Linkin Park is one of my favourite bands ever! So when I found out they were playing a concert in LA I really wanted to go. Then I discovered that tickets were sold out (they'd sold out 20mins after going on sale apparently) so that dashed all my hopes. But I still really, really wanted to go and where there's a will... there's eBay! (Sorry, i know that was terrible). Anyway, I bid for and got a ticket on eBay. I paid double the original price but you know what... it was worth every single penny! It turned out to be an awesome seat too - raised front row, directly opposite the stage (a basket ball court's length way). LA's about 2 hours from San Diego depending on traffic. I tried to find a lift but I couldn't find one! I even put an ad on Craig's list (awesome online classifieds). There were also no trains late enough to come home after the concert and the hotels were ridiculously expensive if I wanted to stay over... etc etc. So I decided to drive which turned out to be remarkably easy! I think I'm going to investigate the possibility of going to see other concerts in the LA area.

Anyway... as promised I now have an online photo album so you can got there and have a look at the photos from the concert. The address for all my online albums is just http://picasaweb.google.com/kitkatem/ if you ever want to have a look and see if I've uploaded other pics.

And just because I can (I love technology)... here's a slideshow of the pics. You can't see the captions though so you may want to go to the album to have a look at those. Also, the pics are rather tiny. To see them better click on the link above and click on slideshow.

Basketball

I am very proud to report that I have at last found an American sport that I like to watch! I also understand it (mostly) which definitely helps with the enjoying it bit. In case you didn't read the title of this post.. that sport is basketball!

Tonight I went to my very first basketball game ever. It was such fun! The SDSU Aztecs were playing the Airforce at Cox Arena - the massive indoor arena on campus. I think it seats about 10000 people or so. It wasn't packed but it was probably about 3/4 full. Not just of students either, the public can buy season tickets to watch the games. San Diego doesn't have a pro basketball team and SDSU's team is really good so it's very popular. Tickets for students are free, you just have to go to the ticket office on campus and they swipe your student card. It was quite funny today - you can only get one ticket per student card but I needed to get a ticket for my friend Nicky who is a student too but had forgotten to get one. So I ended up asking a couple of people in the general vicinity of the ticket office if they were going to the game and if not would they mind getting an extra ticket for me? I hit it lucky third time round and a very nice girl got me an extra ticket :-)

The game started at 8pm and the atmosphere inside Cox Arena was quite something! There were cheerleaders, the SDSU band and of course all the students jumping up and down and shouting and singing. The students are also very vocal - they boo the ref/umpire when he makes a bad decision (in their opinion) and go crazy when one of the SDSU players score. Also when the Airforce had a free throw facing the side that all the students were sitting on then everyone stands up and jumps around waving signs and big cutouts of faces (like Britney with a shaved head and Borat etc) trying to distract them while they take a shot - it was really funny.

I think the other reason I enjoyed the game so much is not only because it's simple to understand but also because it's very fast paced. Which is totally unlike baseball which is just plain slow or American football which has ad-breaks every 2 seconds (the last 59 sec of the Superbowl, which is all I watched, lasted for about 5 mins!)

Oh and the most important bit of course... the Aztecs won! 49-38!

Super Tuesday

Ho Hum... yes I'm a bad blogger. I think part of the reason is that I'm so daunted by the prospect of posting stuff from all my traveling adventures. So to make my life a bit easier I've been investigating online photo albums and should have one up shortly so that you can view all my travel photos and get some sense of what I've been up to even if I haven't written about it yet.

It's super Tuesday here today which means that it's voting day in California. Not voting for a new President of course... one round of voting would just be far too sensible. Instead there's voting for the person you want to be a candidate in the presidential elections. Do I have any idea who's going to win? No. Do I care? No. The only thing I do care about is that one of them becomes President next year. Not that I have any say in the matter anyway. At least once today's over we'll set a break from the endless TV ads telling us what wonderful people they are.

Although I must say I was quite impressed with Hillary. She came and spoke at SDSU on Friday. There was a huge turnout for her - the SDSU website says 7500 people or so. In true politician fashion she kept us waiting for about 45mins but when she eventually arrived we weren't disappointed. She's a very good speaker... I'd have voted for her after hearing what she had to say and how sensible she sounded. If you want to read more about what she had to say (and see some pics) have a look at the article on the SDSU site. Next year I might also be able to claim that I've seen the President of the United States in person. Who knows.

I have to let you in on a little secret though. Before we entered Cox arena (a huge, indoor arena) which is were the talk was held we were given a whole pile of promotional information. So sitting waiting for Hillary I became bored. Now the seating in the arena is steep - similar to the top of the New stand at Kings Park - and we were quite near the top. I had a serious urge to make a paper airplane and throw it down! But Sarah warned me that I'd probably get in trouble and get kicked out. Her friend Travis didn't help when he made a paper airplane and gave it to me. The urge was just too strong to resist and I threw the plane which had quite a disappointingly short flight. The people behind me though this was a good idea and made a plane too. Before long there were lots of paper planes whizzing through the air (everyone was obviously as bored as I was with waiting for Hillary). Every time one had a particularly good flight and looked like it was going to make it all the way to the media at the bottom of the stands everyone would go wild clapping and cheering for it! The media were rather perplexed! I am rather amused with my contribution to alleviating student boredom at SDSU.

Where I am!

So I'm in Florida! And this is just a quick note to let you know what I'm up to here (and have been doing since my last post). After exams I went traveling with Mom and Dad and our friends Heather and Hugh for a while. I flew up to Monterey Bay (just below San Fransisco) and met them there. We then drove across to Yosemite for a few days in the snow and then headed down to Vegas via Death Valley. Vegas is unbelievable! It's a complete tribute to excess (our hotel was a giant, black-glass pyramid). We also did a day trip out to the Grand Canyon which included a helicopter flip over the Canyon itself. It was spectacular! Mom and Dad then spent a week or so in San Diego with me before flying back to SA.

I only go back to University on 22 January so my roommate, Sarah, and I decided to go travelling! We've been in Orlando for the past 5 days and did Disney, Epcot and Universal as well as Pleasure Island! Today we spent the day at the Kennedy Space Centre which was awesome and tomorrow we're hopefully going on an airboat ride through the swamps before heading off to Miami for 3 days.

Unfortunately I managed to lose my camera on an enormous rollercoaster at Universal and I don't have much hope of seeing it again owing to the fact that it was high, fast and mostly over water. So I can't promise too many pictures from this trip but I will put up pics from traveling with the parental units as well as give you way more details about my traveling adventures!