The News at Eleven: Life, Work, and maybe a little Cleavage

Well that meeting wasn't too bad. I got out of there after a little more than an hour, and I regained my position of Board of Directors Intern! Free breakfasts and lunches for me! The system works...

Onwards and upwards, with a bit of info on what's happened since the end of exams.

Not a lot of interesting stuff happened between the end of exams and Christmas. I did my shopping, did stuff with my dad (who took the 2 weeks I was home off from work, kind of a blessing and a curse) and most importantly; played some Starcraft. Blake and Liam had their asses handed to them by Wolfgang and I in an intense 2 vs. 2 battle. I believe Liam's lack of posts since then is a result of his still-wounded pride and has nothing to do with him being busy at work.

Christmas was a good haul. I got my 120 GB external hard drive, and a handful of Xbox games to keep me entertained this work term. More importantly, I bought Zelda: Twilight Princess for Stu and I have put in 45 hours on it to date. (Stu has yet to play it, he wants to beat his DS games first.) I spent most of my free time on Christmas holidays playing, since playing a game in bits and pieces really takes away from the experience. I'm not done yet, though I suspect I'm close, but I won't discuss anything here because Jordan hasn't even gotten his copy yet. I'm thinking I'll have it beaten 3 weekends from now, since I'm not going home next weekend and I don't think I'm far enough to finish in 5-7 more hours.

I went to two parties over the break, with one being infinitely better than the other. Some of you know the details, but we'll start from the beginning for those who don't.

The first party was with some folks I know through the Karate club. Now, I knew in advance that this would be a drinking party, (not my cup of tea) but I figured I'd go since when discussing it with a certain young lady she enthusiastically declared "we could go together!" I am not particularly taken with said young lady, but I'm not one to decline such an offer. The original plan was since Nancy (the young lady) lives in the Stratford area and was going to have access to a vehicle, she'd drive me up, and we'd head back around midnight. (the party started at 7:30) However, we ended up getting a ride with someone else so that she could get drunk and stay the night. The host seems to be attracted to her...

It wasn't such a bad night really. I played some Tetris on the Xbox with some Canadian Forces guys, since they were in uniform (costume party) they have a two drink maximum. Classy guys. We also played a drinking game. Since I wasn't going to start my drinking career in a strange place surrounded by mostly strangers I substituted drinking with eating a pear from a large container of canned fruit. Apparently it was hilarious, so I was awesome. Anyway, I prearranged with my dad to pick me up at 11:45, since I figured the night would go downhill as people got drunker. When there was a knock at the door at 11:40 I assumed it was him. I ran up the stairs behind the other Andrew (who was answering the door) to greet him.

It was a police officer. Oh, I thought, I guess we have a noise complaint.
"Did someone call for an ambulance?"
Andrew and I give each other a look. "No"
"Did some young lady have too much to drink here?"
"No, everyone's fine"
"This is (insert address)"
"Yeah, this is the place, but we never called for an ambulance."

Suddenly somebody rushes past me and says "yeah, sorry she's this way!"

Apparently Nancy had too much to drink and was in some terrible condition in the next room. Let me set this up for you though, there are a grand total of 12 people at this party and there are about 3 rooms. My immediate question in my head was how does somebody get to the point of needing an ambulance and nobody in the next room even hear about it? Now, Nancy and the host had been alone together in the next room for about 2 hours, but that was the hot tub room and everyone assumed they had been getting it on. But seriously! Anyway, my dad ended up getting there 5 minutes later, with 2 cop cars and an ambulance still parked outside.

Luckily, my reputation is as such that I didn't get in trouble for being caught at said scene.

So all in all I'd say I don't really miss much by not going to drunk-fest type activities. Oh, and the consequences of said night did not end there. You know those pears? Yeah, pears have more fiber than any other fruit, and I ate a lot. My bowels would literally rumble in anger every time I got up. I spent a good 3 hours after breakfast the next morning playing Zelda, so that was fine, and everything cleared up by about 6:00 or so. Still, it was a thorough internal cleansing.

The other party was our good old fashioned New Years party! Jenn was the only one with a camera, so here's a picture of me!

This was a much more enjoyable party. We got together, ate at Kings, went back to Aaron's place and played video games. I think we all had a good amount of time on the Wii, and Jordan and I continued our rivalry in all things that are possible to compete in. This is my kind of party, lots of stuff to do, people generally feel comfortable, and at the end of the night everybody's in good enough condition to safely get themselves home. Also, I thought Aaron did a really good job hosting, he did a lot of furniture moving and refreshment-retrieving, real classy of him.

Nextly, my new job! Hurray! I'm two weeks into it now and it's going pretty good. I'm working at the help desk at a software company, basically just fixing computer problems for people when they let us know they have a problem. Some things are easy, and some things are complicated, but if I don't know how to do something I can always ask a more experienced help desker. I work with another student, a 1A Computer Engineering guy name Mike and he's pretty good to work with. On Friday he was messing around with C++ when we had some down time and I bought a license key for his program Truthteller 1.0 for a total of 4 cents that I found in my desk. He never actually got the program working before the end of the day, but it was pretty advanced, it actually made you enter the license key before it would run. The program he wrote before that simply printed the words "Andrew is smelly" so I have a good idea of what Truthteller was going to do for me.

It's okay though, his screen saver is currently a marquee that says "Mike really stinks."

The three other people at the help desk are all pretty good to work with. I find if I don't know how to do something they're helpful, and if I ask for something to do they don't give me some crappy "make work" project, it's usually something that's alright. My boss is pretty cool too, and she just graduated from the math program at UW two years ago, so she's close to my age. She still remembers what it's like to be a co-op student.

I've been keeping busy after work too. I'm signed up for Karate and Hockey this term, as well as Econ 202 as a night course. In my free time I've been playing some GTA: San Andreas, Sid Meier's Pirates, and Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. GTA is fun for its freedom, but I think I'm going to hold off on that until I've gotten through some of my shorter games from Christmas. Pirates isn't a new acquirement, but I got it on the very last day of my last co-op term (it was fate! Ask if you want details, its a bit of a tangent so I won't go there now) so I haven't played it that much. It's fun though, and you can play for 15 minutes at a time (like before work) if you want to. Brothers in Arms is a pretty darn cool game, and I really like the emphasis on tactical strategy. It's not just a shooter where you have some guys to command, you have to use them well or you'll get blown away, even on Easy.

I've also gotten together with some of the locals. Binks and I played some Splinter Cell co-op, on the first week of classes, and last Thursday (4 days ago) we made dinner together and played Starcraft. Binks has gotten impressively better at Starcraft since my last related posts. Binks and I teamed up and took on 3 computers at once, and won. Neither of us expected that one, since a team of Jordan, Binks and I were bested by 3 computers just last term. It was an intense match, by the end of it the map was almost completely mined out. There were two mineral things left, in total, each with about 1000 left. That's it. Everything else was gone. After the match we just sat around and talked until like, 4:30 in the morning. Yeah, I shouldn't have stayed that late, since I had work the next day...

I survived though. I about one hour of sleep, got up, and got to work on time. At work I was totally fine, but my time between waking up and getting there was pretty risky. I could barely keep my eyes open, and I ended up watching "Saved by the Bell" in the common room to keep me awake. Between the time I woke up on Thursday and the time I went to bed on Friday I had 40 hours going with only 1 hour of sleep. Ouch...

Oh yeah, Binks, I saw that I missed a call from you on Saturday (my phone tells no lies) but I didn't figure that out until Sunday when I got back here, so I figured by that time it was irrelevant. I was walking the dog and everybody else was at Stu's hockey game.

Don't wanna get flagged now. You all saw it anyway.

So that's what's up with me. I didn't put in that much hilarious commentary, but I think this post still has some charm.

I'm hoping to update regularly on the work term, so check in every once in a while.

-Stay classy San Diego.