Personal: Internet Trials; Haley the Artist; Bob the Machine
My chief distraction the last few days since returning home has been that I returned to find that Marquette had helpfully disconnected my cable and internet service while I was away. Nice. At first I thought that it might be storm damage: just an outage related to the massive thunderstorms that had hammered the Chicago area, and had also hit Milwaukee in a less powerful way. No such luck. My internet and cable were part of the Marquette University package, offered to students like me who lived in a select number of apartment buildings around campus that mainly cater to students. Although I had signed on to keep my service through the summer so that I would be covered until my move to New Orleans, Marquette's Residence Life saw fit to turn off my service without even giving me notice. Which is about par for the treatment I've gotten from the University over my years here. I was treated marvelously by the Department of Theology, mercifully, but otherwise the way the University treats its graduate students has been astonishingly neglectful. One student I knew who had entered into their Masters of Nursing program after graduating undergraduate here as a Phi Beta Kappa honouree said that it was like being abandoned by parents, the highlight of which was the day we all came back to our graduate apartment building to find that we were being evicted at the end of the semester so that the University could finally fix it up - for freshmen.
Okay. /gripe.
Anyway, my desktop is just close enough to the freshman McCormick Hall across the street that I'm able to get a weak, intermittent MU Wireless signal. It's like being back at my telephone modem speeds of 1997, but it's something, so that helps, especially when I'm trying to get research and preparations/correspondence with Loyola New Orleans done. I've tried to have my service restored into a regular account, but it's uncertain whether I can get that done in time to actually matter for the one month's further service I require.
I uploaded the rest of my photos from the past week (one photo at a time, which is all that my connection could now handle) to my LiveJournal Photo Album while I read last night, glancing up from the books frequently to run through the process over and over again. I noticed that once I saw my photos in their full sizes, the earlier of the two shots that Haley had taken of me and Sophie struck me as fabulous. I had noted the fun she had in taking the one I mentioned in my earlier entry, which was a good, evenly-composed portrait shot, but kind of standard. Haley, going on six, currently aspires to being an artist. I had briefly talked with her about photography being an artistic skill before she took these two shots: I think she'd be pleased with this one no matter her age.
Bob's been a magnificently-disciplined houseguest. Up at six and off to the library to burn through his dissertation's current chapter, and then back here to crash around ten. I get a bit of conversation in passing, but he's saving up social time for our scheduled to-do at the Lloyds' on Friday. I did get a little more hang time with him Sunday night when he surprised me with his arrival, when we ended up over at Angelo's for pizza and a drink before cashing out around midnight. And then last night, after a crummy-looking summer solstice that featured little in the way of sun and had a look of rain as the day wore on, we got slammed with hammering rain and tornado sirens some time before ten. So Bob dashed back over here under the cover of a few copies of The Onion, and then he and I spent the tail end of the alert sitting on the stairs talking tornadoes and earthquakes for a wee bit before he turned in. But I'm looking forward to getting a little more relaxed social time with him.
Okay. /gripe.
Anyway, my desktop is just close enough to the freshman McCormick Hall across the street that I'm able to get a weak, intermittent MU Wireless signal. It's like being back at my telephone modem speeds of 1997, but it's something, so that helps, especially when I'm trying to get research and preparations/correspondence with Loyola New Orleans done. I've tried to have my service restored into a regular account, but it's uncertain whether I can get that done in time to actually matter for the one month's further service I require.
I uploaded the rest of my photos from the past week (one photo at a time, which is all that my connection could now handle) to my LiveJournal Photo Album while I read last night, glancing up from the books frequently to run through the process over and over again. I noticed that once I saw my photos in their full sizes, the earlier of the two shots that Haley had taken of me and Sophie struck me as fabulous. I had noted the fun she had in taking the one I mentioned in my earlier entry, which was a good, evenly-composed portrait shot, but kind of standard. Haley, going on six, currently aspires to being an artist. I had briefly talked with her about photography being an artistic skill before she took these two shots: I think she'd be pleased with this one no matter her age.
Bob's been a magnificently-disciplined houseguest. Up at six and off to the library to burn through his dissertation's current chapter, and then back here to crash around ten. I get a bit of conversation in passing, but he's saving up social time for our scheduled to-do at the Lloyds' on Friday. I did get a little more hang time with him Sunday night when he surprised me with his arrival, when we ended up over at Angelo's for pizza and a drink before cashing out around midnight. And then last night, after a crummy-looking summer solstice that featured little in the way of sun and had a look of rain as the day wore on, we got slammed with hammering rain and tornado sirens some time before ten. So Bob dashed back over here under the cover of a few copies of The Onion, and then he and I spent the tail end of the alert sitting on the stairs talking tornadoes and earthquakes for a wee bit before he turned in. But I'm looking forward to getting a little more relaxed social time with him.