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It's been a crazy last few days, with a lot of adventures and fun and the school year hasn't even started yet!
It started with a VERY early (got up at 3:30 am) start from Huntsville to try and reach Gainesville without getting hit too hard by Tropical Storm Bonnie. Thanks to a traffic jam in Birmingham where I did not move a single inch in 40 minutes, I managed to miss most of the rain as well as Atlanta rush hour traffic.
I then checked into my apartment and started unpacking the stuff I had used in Huntsville. I was originally supposed to then stay the night with some friends, and leave Friday afternoon to finally get to Tampa, 3 months after I left. However Hurricane Charley put a nix in those plans so I stayed up in Gainesville another night. It did end up missing Tampa, which is good since it would have been disasterous here. Which going off on a side rant, there were editorials in the newspaper today with people complaining about having to evacuate. Seemingly to completely fail simple logic to realize that it's impossible to predict with 100% accuracy what a storm is going to do. I guess they'll just be the people who end up getting blown away the next time one comes through. Anyways, our house was just fine so that was good.
Sunday we then packed up all my bedroom furniture in a UHAUL and moved the rest of everything into the apartment. We got it unfurnished but between me and my roommate we won't have to buy many things at all. We also got an awesome couch for only $40, and then my parents had a big table that's being donated to the Furnish-My-Apartment fund. Which if you have a coffee table or chairs, you too can donate to the fund.
I forgot my camera so I don't have pictures of the apartment, but here's some of us moving and the trip down:
What is wrong with this picture?
Packing everything up
Today then I finally got my ingrown toenail fixed. I've had it almost a month now, but I had managed to get out the worst of it back at the beginning so it hasn't really hurt much since then, except when you hit it just the right way. And it kept pussing up, and then get better, then puss up again, then get better, and so on, so I eventually gave up on it getting better on its own and went to the podiatrist. It was a quick and painless (well once the novacane shot was done with) procedure and at the moment my big toe is wrapped up in bandages like a mummy (see today's cam picture). I've got a list of instructions to care for it over the next two weeks, but hopefully the worst is over.
I've also been trying to get my wireless card to work in Linux so I can stop having to reboot everything I want to be mobile. I managed to get the card recognized finally, but for some reason it won't connect to the network. The fun of Linux strikes once again.
The Republican National Convention is coming up, and there are already thousands of people plotting on how to best disrupt the festivities. Which I'm all for protesting and getting the word out on how bad a president Bush so that he won't be elected for a second term. But property destruction and causing general chaos in the streets won't help that goal at all in any way and at worst will make Bush look better since he doesn't have "those crazy anarchists" supporting them. These people really need to read some books on being persuasive and find out that being confrontational and directly attacking something that the person you're trying to convince holds dear, is the absolute worst way to change someone's mind. Instead they become defensive and only remain even more strongly rooted in their initial beliefs. To win someone over you've got to understand why they feel the way they feel on a matter and appeal to those points. It involves compromise and conceding ideals, but it's much much more effective than saying "You're wrong!"
Secondly, causing mass chaos in the streets of New York violate that old adage of "Your rights end where mine begin". If someone blocks traffic on a major highway to cause ruckus during their protest, then the person who you're causing to miss their flight is not going to be very happy at all. And again, the whole message you're trying to convey gets completely lost since they don't care why you holding up traffic or causing problems, just that you are and they don't like it. What some of these groups are planning isn't protesting, it's madness.
And speaking of all of this, I got my absentee ballot for the August 31st election in the mail. It includes offices for things like US Senator, County Commissioner, School Board members, and Judges. And then a 1/4 cent sales tax increase for health care services for the poor. So now it's off to do research on what I should vote for. I love democracy!
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