So now I’ve officially been to Gainesville. My parents and I went apartment hunting there this past weekend. I had a list of seven or eight places that I had originally wanted to take a look at. After we saw the first place, I had scratched four of them off of my list. How, you ask? Because I noted that they didn’t have washers and dryers in them, and after taking a look at the first place’s “laundry facilities”, I knew that a washer and dryer was a necessity, not an option.

So we looked at a few other places before deciding upon a complex called Hidden Lake. It’s very new; in fact, I’ll be the first person ever to live in my apartment. I’m about a mile and a half away from campus, but the buildings I’ll be going to the most are on the other side of the campus. So I’m really about 2 1/2 miles away.

Anyway, we set a move-in date, and paid all the up-front fees (that is to say, my parents paid them 🙂 ). Come late July, I’ll be in Gainesville for good!

Notes on the trip and other things:

• I’ll just come right out and say it…Gainesville has the worst street-numbering system ever. Here’s an idea of how it works. Gainesville consists of approximately 15 different zip codes. If you cross into another zip code, street numbers can be (and will be) used again. This may be fine for the locals, but for tired newcomers who just want to know where NW 23rd Blvd. is, it’s not good. On our trusty map, we found multiple NW 23rd Streets, Terraces, Places, Avenues, and even a Court or two. But no boulevards. Even if we had found one, we’d have to know the zip code. We eventually wised up and started calling the apartments for directions from one place to another. I get the feeling that map’s going to get some use from me in the future…
• The campus is huge. I’m not sure how I can emphasize this. I know that I didn’t see even a quarter of the campus. It’s not quite like Alabama, where driving on the perimeter of the campus lets you see a good portion of it.
• The bus system in Gainesville is apparently a big thing. Such a big thing, in fact, that practically every complex we talked to touted their closeness to the nearest bus stop. I guess it beats trying to find a parking space among potentially 50,000+ cars. And it’s free for me, since I’m a Florida student. Rock on!

Well, at least this time my staying up until 5 in the morning resulted in something productive.

Fueled by a burst of inspiration, I’ve started sketching details on a pretty big project I’m looking at starting up. It will be my first foray into creative writing in quite some time. Hopefully, it won’t take too long to complete, and then you’ll get to see it here.

Tonight, there will be a meeting of 1122 Productions management to discuss the organization’s future web plans. Oh, yeah, and we’ll probably play some Playstation or something too. But most importantly, tonight…we grill!

More 1122 stuff: the 1122 timeline has been updated to reflect the events of the past nine months or so.

Did anyone else watch VH1’s “Top 100 One-hit wonders” last night? It was really enjoyable. I had the most fun, actually, from two things: getting that “Oh, yeah! I totally forgot about them!” feeling when the next song was introduced (that happened quite often) and from trying to guess what the biggest one-hit wonders would be. I did reasonably well. My choice for #1 at the beginning of the broadcast (“Ice Ice Baby”) ended up #7. Once I saw what was voted #1, though, I had to wholeheartedly agree. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it.

Yesterday, my grandmother got her hair done. This has no point in the story other than since she was out of the house, my grandfather decided to do something that she didn’t want him to try to do – fix the overhead light in the dining room. Of course, yours truly quickly enlisted in the cause. You don’t think I’m going to let an 80-year-old man get on a ladder by himself, do you?

Anyway, my grandfather went and got a new light socket for the light. The old one had bakelite that had worn away and somehow caused the whole thing to not work. He insisted upon trying to install the new one himself. So I held the ladder for him and shined a flashlight into the crevice where the socket was going. He needed to connect the two wires to the new socket. But he got tired. So I told him to let me try.

We now have a working light fixture. It really wasn’t that difficult of a task; getting two wires connected to the screws on the sides of the socket and tightening the screws to ensure the connection is not that tough. But to hear my grandfather talk about it, you’d think I’d built the power plant for the city of Birmingham.

My grandfather doesn’t understand why I like school so much, and he doesn’t think much of the computer topics that I’m learning about. But he’s convinced now that school’s all right – after all, if I learned to do that in school (and I must have, seeing as I’ve never done anything else, right?), then school must not be that bad.

This morning, I made my first omelet. Well, pretty close to an omelet, anyway. I could pick up the entire contents of the pan at one time and flip one half over the other, which qualifies to me as an omelet.

My previous omelet experiences involved making a lot of attempts, then making a lot of scrambled eggs. But today I ate my one-piece “egg beaters” creation in triumph! Okay, so it still tasted like one big scrambled egg. I didn’t have anything to add to it. That’s not the point, anyway. The point is, I could have, and now there’s another dish in my somewhat limited repertoire.

So I called up a temp agency this morning and sent them my résumé. The lady told me that if my qualifications matched something, they’d let me know. I guess I should get off the phone line…

And now for the moment all (2) of you have been waiting for.

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For the past week, until this morning, I had not been on the Internet at all.

That is the longest stretch that I can remember not getting online voluntarily since I started college. I just haven’t wanted to. To those who e-mailed me (hey, Ricky!), I’m sorry that I haven’t e-mailed back sooner. I just haven’t felt up to it.

I was sick the first part of the week. The last half of the week, the only avenue that I had to getting online was unavailable to me until the evening, and I didn’t take advantage of it then.

I’m at my home. Well, the home where my parents live. The lines have gotten blurry over the last year, as I’ve divided my time between three dwelling places. I’ll pop up from time to time again on my online home, but until I get back to Birmingham, updates are probably going to be sparse, unless I just get rolling.

Hope everyone out there’s doing all right.