A few brief snippets from the last couple weeks:

I can ski!

I briefly tried to ski six months after I hurt my ankle and was in such intense, stabbing pain I had to come down after two runs. I hadn’t skied since I had the surgery to fix my ankle almost four years ago, and I was really afraid that with everything this stupid ankle has taken away from me, it was going to take this too.

Since the NU ski trip was at Tahoe this year and a lot of my friends were going (well, in theory – in practice almost half our group got stuck in Chicago due to the blizzard), lift tickets were included, and ski rentals were seriously discounted, I decided to give it a shot. I tried to mentally prepare myself for never being able to ski again, but I’m not going to lie, the thought of not being able to do something I’ve been doing since I was two made me really, really upset.

About five seconds into my first run, I felt a huge burden lift off my shoulders. My ankle was fine. I felt like I’d never stopped skiing. I don’t think I’ve been that happy in a long, long time.

Now all I have to do is start making enough money to be able to afford to go skiing on a regular basis. Also: Probably start weightlifting to get my knees in better shape more than a month before I ski, because sweet god my patellar tendons are STILL mad at me for that one.

School suddenly got to be a lot more work.

My Android programming class is a ton of work (which is good, because I feel like I’m actually learning something in it). I’ve got a group project in another class where I’m doing about 50%-80% of the work in a given week because most everyone else a) is too consumed with their jobs b) doesn’t give a shit or c) both. Going to Tahoe for four days and getting approximately nothing accomplished didn’t help, and I wound up with all my midterms on the same week about a week after I got back. What also didn’t help was…

My damn computer went insane on me.

Kernel panics (complete system crashes, akin to the Windows Blue Screen of Death) galore, to the point where I was getting them hourly by the end of the debacle. I wound up having to drag it to the Apple Store to get a hardware issue ruled out. The good news is that it wasn’t the hardware, the bad news was that it meant I had to completely reinstall my operating system and then reimport all my files, which was a giant, time-consuming pain in the ass.

The biggest downside of it was that it happened right in the middle of my midterm week, so I wound up taking some time where I probably should have been studying and dealing with this horseshit. I’m getting my Database Management midterm back tonight, and I have a feeling I booted a couple questions I probably wouldn’t have if I’d been focused on studying and not on desperately trying to resuscitate my computer.

I’m probably going to have to replace my laptop sometime in the next few months – it’s clearly on its last legs, even with the fresh OS install. The good news is that I was expecting to need to take 4 classes next quarter and I only actually have to take 1, so all the money that I’m saving on classes is basically going to go directly into the New Computer Fund.

Overall though, despite being ridiculously busy, things have been going pretty well. As long as I can make it through the next couple weeks before my group project is due, then I think I’ll survive.

Do not try to move, relearn trigonometry, and begin to learn calculus in the space of two weeks (not necessarily in that order).

You are just asking for trouble.

Clearly, I’m ready to start school  next week with the goal of getting a Masters’ in Computer Science when I failed so hard at researching my new monitor/TV combo for the bedroom that I ordered one that can’t be controlled by a goddamn remote.

I took one guy’s statement in a review about being able to control the volume with the remote to mean it was the volume on the monitor, but after trying and failing to get my remote set up, I went back and realized he was controlling the volume through his Home Theater PC, not his actual monitor. The monitor doesn’t even have an IR receiver. Oops.

I’m super, super excited to pay the return shipping and restocking fees that dumbass move earned. I’m still debating if I want to order a different one online or break down and rejoin Costco for their far more generous return policy.

At least I had two better pieces of technology news today, which helped mitigate my expensive stupidity:

1) I got my iPhone replaced for free after the lock button finally died completely, 10 days before the warranty ran out. I won’t go into the details because it got a bit complicated, but hey, brand refurbished phone!

2) I got my new dual-network setup up and running with a minimum of issues, so now I have my regular network and my N-Only network ,which is SUPER fast and means I can transfer files about three times faster than I could before. Basically, I can transfer an SD episode of Futurama in its entirety in 2 minutes. Win!

I’ve been trying to figure out how the hell the next 2-3 years of my life as an academic are going to work. The process has led to the creation of this ridiculous flowchart:

Click to enlarge. Or really, don’t. Even shrinky-dinked, you get a nice little taste of the clusterfuckyness.