Craziness!

The craziest thing happened this evening. Sarah and I were in our bathrooms getting ready to head out to PB at about 5pm when we heard this giant crash! We ran through to the living room and our glass sliding door was in pieces and there was a couch in the middle of it! Oh, and we live on the 3rd floor. The stupid boys who live on the floor above us were moving out and decided it would be a good idea to lower the couch over the balcony. The only issue was that once it cleared their balcony it swung into ours. What's freakier is that Sarah's desk is right by the door and she was there 2 mins earlier. If she'd still been there she would probably have been killed. She was really freaked out. Silly boys!

So that was my great excitement/story for the day. I'm off to Camp Pendleton (a big US Marine Corps base) tomorrow evening to give a presentation at their Rotary Club. I'm so not looking forward to the San Diego rush hour traffic!

An unexpected hello

I'm currently in Charlotte, North Carolina waiting for my new flight to Nashville. It's Spring Break so I'm going to visit my friend Lisa Glenn for the week. Lisa was a Rotary Ambassadorial scholar to SA last year and she and I met at our orientation in Cape Town and later came up to the Berg for a weekend with us.

So why am I writing to you from Charlotte airport.... how's this for an explanation? We stopped in Dallas, Texas in the middle of the night for a medical emergency! There was a 17 year old girl who was having inner ear problems. I'm not too sure what or why but it must have been serious because there was only about 2hrs left of the flight. Right at the beginning of the flight they paged for any doctors on board and then again a bit later for medicines. Anyway, paramedics came on board and took her off I guess. Then we had to wait on the runway for ages (prob an hour tot) for fuel because Dallas is not a 24 hour airport so it was dead! Ok, it was also 3am or so which probably helped! We then landed just as my connecting flight to Nashville was leaving so I missed that and was a bit stressed. But the yanks are super organised! - as we came off the plane there were ticketing agents waiting for us with new boarding passes for a later flight so my flight now leaves at 9:30 ish. I had about an hour and a half or so to kill so I'm in the Business centre using one of their computers. Luckily I also managed to get hold of Lisa before she left her house so she didn't have to wait for me.

At this stage the Spring Break itinerary involves driving to Gatlinberg which is in the Smokey Mountains when I get to Tennessee and then later in the week spending some time with Lisa's parents who live about 45mins outside of Nashville. It's definitely not your typical Spring Break. Normally that involves lying on a beach somewhere during the day and then partying all night! I'm really looking forward to it though! I'll post more details and pics when I'm home again.

By the way... I just saw the dat and I assure you that this is not an April fool's hoax!

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!