blog.marcwiesner.com

Been a fun few days leading up to graduation. Spent a night down at Chabad with Mike, Lisa, Katie, et al stuffing envelopes following the Chabad break-in and robbery. The other day Lisa, Katie, Mike, Cath and I went out to BJs for drinks and dinner.

Yesterday I got together with a bunch graduating history students for drinks at The Hut. It was a good experience； I hadn’t really had the opportunity to enjoy the company of other history students outside of the classroom relaxing at the end of the year in a cool evening made me feel more connected with my peers.

Friday was an honors ceremony for members of societies. I got a token for my participation in Phi Alpha Theta, the history honors society. More of a treat was getting to see my Uncle Mark after so long though. He flew up from So-Cal for Friday and Saturday.

The commencement ceremony on Saturday itself went well, smooth. I didn’t trip (nor did anyone else I noticed) and our valedictorian and keynote speakers did a pretty good job. It WAS sunny though, and between the heat and my exhaustion I managed to fall asleep for most of the BS degrees. Between my mortarboard and sunglasses I woke up with an awesome (and amusing) sunburn on the left side of my face.

After the ceremony we got together for an amazing vegan lunch Mom put together with her usual skill. Oh..what will I do in China?

It’s amazing - okay…maybe not that amazing - how many people can’t wait for this quarter to be over with. It’s been a pretty stressful one. I don’t know how I managed to have more work this quarter than last when I had to worry about that senior thesis. Oh…maybe the business with Mike that’s getting off the ground, CollegeConfessional, my freelance work, evening Mandarin classes, a bit of on-the-side consulting would explain away things. Yeah….that could be it.

On the horizon:

• Monday: HIST 109 final (done now, w00t for posting delays), evening Mandarin class
• Tuesday: CHIN 3 final, HIST 153 Final
• Wednesday: morning coffee and muffin to celebrate the end of the quarter ^_^, file for visa in SF, evening Mandarin class
• Thursday: History student get-together, toast the end of the year
• Friday: Honors convocation
• Saturday: Graduate, countdown until China

Got a pleasant email from JapanFiles.com’s Dave Cirone letting me know that a link to my pictures from Fanime Con 2006’s MusicFest were features on the JapanFiles Myspace blog and I got to meet one of our neighbors this afternoon.

Wheee! almost done with the quarter. Done with my papers, one more presentation,  then finals. Graduation, two weeks, then fly off. It’s a bit of a trip that I’m leaving in less than three weeks now.

CollegeConfessional’s doing well, I’d say. More than 1,000 visitors and inches from the 100-confession mark. I’m hoping traffic will increase once we’re fully indexed through Google Sitemaps.

I’m thinking about finding a travel buddy for going through China with. If anyone knows someone, put ‘em in touch, yeah?

Other than that, my biggest concern is securing a job before I leave so I don’t have to worry about it once I get there. Some time I’ll have to grab extra memory and battery for my camera, I think. I’m sure I’ll be running through both like there’s no tomorrow.

How have I gone so long without realizing how freaking good a lime squeezed into food is. I had a bowl of pasta for dinner with a lime squeezed into it and it was fantastic. Oh yeah…..soooo good.

I’ve got a date in mind for where I’m leaving for China. June 28. A wednesday. For some reason I like the idea of leaving in the middle of the week. It’ll give me 10 days after commencment. The to-do list is already started. I’m going to keep making notes on the “China Plans” page of this blog.

Planning the end of the quarter. This week I’m putting aside for my Philippine History paper and term paper. The week after should belong to Helenistic Greece.

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This isn’t some obscure corner or storage closet in the library; SCU’s Orradre Library is closing on June 16. The day before commencement where student’s are recognized for having completed their course of study and celebrated before heading out into the world, Orradre will be thanked for its 42 years of service before the doors are closed forever. Already, most of the shelves of the library are stripped bare and half dismantled. The library that will take its place will make use of the Automated Retrieval System (ARS). After two-quarters of using the system myself I must say I don’t enjoy it. Way of the future, I suppose.

I just hit a half way mark of another sort; after today I’m done with half my classes’ finals. Today I finished the tests for Hellenistic Greece and Intermediate Chinese 3. They both went better than I expected, but when have my expectations ever been a fair indicator of actual performance? Midterm for Beginning Chinese three is on Wednesday, Philippines Under Spain on Thursday.

In other news, I’ll be getting all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. I’ve got an appointment for next Thursday, but that might have to be pushed back if I need to wait for insurance to come through. Expect pictures of stitched gums and, if they let me keep ‘em tooth fragments!

^_^

Somehow I managed to SNAFU my blog yesterday. Did a particularly good job of it.

After a lot of frustrated FTP swap around, faking headers, and SQL surgery with a chainsaw, my blog has a happy new home (though I sincerely hope no one noticed too much, despite the messiness of the process I think things went fairly smoothly if seen from the street).

My blog’s moved from http://blog.marcwiesner.com to http://blog.marcwiesner.com. I’d encourage everyone to make a note of it but I’ve hopefully got the redirects set up smoothly enough that all requests to the old side will slide on over to the new one.

Only concern is with the RSS feed but I can worry about that after the presentation that’s part of my midterm in Chinese III (only 12 lines, it’s a cinch).

Later, All

Holy Heck…this quarter’s rushing by so fast. 5th week already and even that’s half-over.

This weekend I got my first official photography gig Saturday night taking pictures for WildCrush, a fundraiser put on by an environmental group called the Environmental Volunteers that does a lot of work educating children on the environment.

The event was a lot of fun; I learned a lot about tasting and gauging wine, got to sample some, and got to meet some nice people. Best still is that there’s a chance that my photos will be printed. Some names that were thrown at me were Gentry and San Jose Magazine but we’ll see what actually comes through.

Earlier on Saturday, Mike, Cath and myself went to Cupertino to enjoy their local Cherry Blossom Festival. That was fun too. Saw some sumo and ran into friends from SCU. Totally worth the six block walk from and to our parking spot.

Spent today cleaning up around Manchester (the shelving on the patio tipped over last night) and visited the JSU’s Israeli Independence booth (more to visit Lisa than show political support).

Midterms are next week.

Skippy

Fun couple of days.

Yesterday Mike and I (with V-dawg’s help, natch ) changed the brake’s and rotors on the Stratus. That evening about two-thirds of the Manchester and Park houses had a night of cartoons and games.

Today I was mistaken for a grad student twice. Is that what hair does? Makes you look older? Or just more downtrodden? Commuted up to Palo Alto for Foothill’s Intermediate Chinese three course and to hook up with some of the gang for Maria’s birthday (oh! Maria! Maria!). Went out for Thai. Ooh….so good and so spicy ^_^” . Fell asleep on the bus commuting back down, but woke up in time to hop off at Monroe.

Props to Mike for shrugging off the burden of automotive transportation! Today was his first day (of many, I hope) as a bike-and-train commuter. We’re going to try to hit up some bike swap-meet this Sunday and find him a truly fly ride (hopefully with spokes with clickity-clacks ).