5/12/06 - I'm Halfway Down the Happy Trails.
Here's how to get me to interview you:
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions.
3. You update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
sarapada asked me:
1) How do you know kimbyrle?
2) How's Albequerque treating you?
3) What is your favorite book? (If that's too hard, try top 3.)
4) Who has been the most influential person in your life?
5) What is your favorite comfort food?
1) When I was a junior and she was a senior, we went to the same high school, the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities. We dated for a couple of months, and have been friends since.
2) The ABQ has been treating me alright. Despite the extent to which it has dominated my journal "lately", there is only really so much I can say. I've always felt more like a visitor than a citizen here, like my studies were some extended trip. Good or bad, easy or hard, I'm just not that invested - the city just rolls off my back.
3) There are so many great ones, I have to go with top 3. Duking it out are Virgil's Aeneid, Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, and Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, although the last one may not qualify. I've never had the time to actually finish it, but every time I pick it up, it's always such an amazing ride.
4) That's a tough question. I'd probably have to go with my wife. My parents were hugely influential in my life through high school, but since then, she's been the major motivator in my life. I can see who I am now, and who I would have been without her, and my world has become so much better with her in it.
5) Lately, it's been double chocolate chip blended creme frappuccino's from Starbucks. It's like a milk shake without the ice cream. And, since my lovely lady gets all Starbucks drinks half off, it's easier on both the waistline and the pocket book.
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Three months? It's really been three months since I last posted? It's amazing how life flies by.
The last few months have been a whirlwind of grad school and mini-vacations. Since January, the lady and I have seen the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Taos ("The Aspen of New Mexico"), Santa Fe, the Petrified National Forest, the Painted Desert, Hoover Dam, (Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef) National Parks, and Natural Bridges National Monument. We're the only 20-somethings I know with a National Parks Pass.
(Hoover Dam is not nearly as big as you think it is. But still very cool.)
School has been brutally busy. Two in-class finals, one wicked 24-hour final, and a research paper - all put away in the last couple of weeks. Which means that I'm done with all the classwork for my degree, and next week, I start working on my thesis like it's my job. 'Cause it is.
With all of that, though, the big event is not with me, but with the lady. She wants to be a hot librarian.
She needs a grad degree for the "librarian" part; she's already got the "hot" part down.
To that end, she applied to six grad schools around the country at the beginning of the year, and she's officially been accepted to five of them. The eventful part, though, is the funding. When I applied to grad school, all of my acceptance letters also had the financial aid info included. I made The Big Choice within a couple days of getting the last letter. However, with the lady's schools, the library sciences departments are ironically not organized well enough to be able to make both an acceptance decision and an assistantship decision at the same time. So, while we know where she is accepted, we don't know where she might get money from. And that makes all the difference. We could probably afford for her to attend a school where she gets no financial aid, but it would be a world easier if we had something, anything coming her way. FAFSA said that we should be able to put our entire annual income toward tuition; we're hopeful, but not optimistic.
What makes this eventful is that all of her schools start in the fall, so we know that we will be moving in a few months. However, until we get that financial aid information, we have no idea where. Which means we can't arrange a moving truck, I can't look for a job, we can't look for housing - we can do nothing to prepare for our next step until we get those financial aid letters.
It's a touch stressful.
We do have a hard deadline, though. My brother's wedding is June 10th, and we're going to be arriving a few days in advance. Since virtually all of the schools are in New England, the plan is to make a day-trip from Pittsburgh to our future home so that we can figure out housing and such.
Unfortunately, this now means we're living that old saying - "Plan for the worst, hope for somebody to start flinging money your way."