I never want to live in Texas.

More news later, as it gets invented.

As for me, I’m going to sleep in a few minutes. “Why?” you ask. It is because I have a flight at Logan tomorrow morning, and I’m getting up at 0600 to be there in time to catch it…

So, sometime tomorrow I will end up in Texas. To embark on a week of stuff.

Yeah. Happy new year, have fun… I’ll be offline for the week, and I expect to have a healthy backlog of spam when I come back… ~800 messages is my guess…

And whatever you do, don’t go to Texas to try to find me. Because you won’t.

I spent several hours catching up with a friend who just flew in from Texas. It’s pretty nice to talk to him… and after only 16 more months time-in-rank, he becomes a Senior Airman! I still can’t believe he enlisted instead of going through ROTC, but it was his choice, and he seems happy enough with the results…

Walking home, I saw the Orion constellation. It’s a beautiful night out, crisp, cold, and absolutely clear. Of course, this may be because it’s too cold to support a cloud right now… but whatever the cause, the effect is beautiful. Sometimes, I wish I knew more constellations, but that one’s the only one that shows up on a regular basis where I live. Sometimes the Dippers are visible, but they’re near the horizon and upside-down, and awkward…

Speaking of Texas, it seems I’ll be spending 1-5 January there. I look forward to this. Of course, it’s a little odd, because I fly there two days before the aforementioned friend…

What with everything going on, I may have less time to spend coding than I had initially hoped. I still hope to get everything done that I had planned to, but… already, as I write this, it is officially 24 December, Christmas Eve. I expect the next few days to be full of holiday things and visiting family, and the following few days to be full of Texas, and after that I hope to go back to school and maybe get things done.

So, vacations are good.

Although I still have to figure out how I’m going to pay to live at the fraternity for the next two quarters… that’s $2000 that I simply don’t have… Eh. I may get a job next term. After all, last term was the best I’ve done academically since I started college, so… obviously I have too much free time on my hands. That must be it. Not enough stress in my life.

Of course, I could always get back to Vertumnus and work on that card game… that still needs publishing… and an artist…

Eh. I’m in a good mood, and even complaining isn’t getting rid of it. So, times must be good.

I don’t expect to be able to catch up on all of your journal entries; if you have something that I need to hear, mail it to me.

I hope you all have a very good summer; unless you’re in the north Texas/western Massachusetts area and stop by, I won’t expect to hear from any of you.

Adios!

And he tells me that he’s got strong feelings for my sister.

Which is cool. There are many worse people who could have feelings for her. He didn’t come right out and say that he was in love with her, but when a guy starts writing love poetry about a girl, it’s hard to ignore. Especially when he tells me he really related to Anakin in Episode II, because of the whole forbidden love thing.

The reason, of course, why the love is forbidden is because he spends a little less than 30 days/year less than 100 miles away, and that’s spread over several small vacations to come visit the area where he grew up. Nobody particularly objects to it.

I just with I knew how much of my ambivalence towards his admission is because I know it will never work out unless my sister decides to go chasing after him and move to Texas, which is about as likely to happen as Elvis stopping by to say hi. How much is it that he’s a cool guy who’s been my friend for two thirds of my life? I don’t know.

The funny thing is that I may see him again next summer. Lackland AFB is one of the Air Force’s biggest training bases; chances are I’ll be sent there for my field training.

Life is funny.

Right now, I have a job at Decathlon as a cashier. Training starts Saturday. There are two problems with this.

The littler problem is simple: a bunch of my friends are going to an airshow at Hanscom Saturday, and I’d very much like to be in their company for this. The big problem is more complex. In essence, it is that until I worked at a job that had something at its basis not cashiering, I hadn’t realized exactly how much I dislike being a cashier. Both of the jobs I’ve had before this involved me going to work because I wanted the money and was willing to suffer through the work to get it. Working at the afterschool program with the kids is something that I actually enjoy; I look forward to going to work. I think that the base reason for this is that it doesn’t feel like work, because work is defined as something that I have to do that I don’t like. This is getting paid to play. I don’t want to go be a cashier again, because that’s work.

So I want to quit my job at Decathlon. I have not logged a single hour there, in training or otherwise, so they have not invested anything in me besides the time their managers spent reviewing my application and interviewing me. I don’t mind taking that much from them; any random customer could take as much of his time without buying a single item. The only guilt I feel is at quitting before I start, but I think that I’d feel guiltier if I don’t quit. This is because if I don’t quit now, I’ll be forced to quit in three weeks, when I go to Texas. I don’t know if I’ll even be done training by that point. They’ll have spent at least 16 hours training me by that point, which turns into something over $100 that they paid me in addition to whatever internal expense they’ve gone through to put together the training program. In short, at that point I’ll have taken their money and run, which doesn’t sit right with my conscience. It’ll be perfectly legal for me to quit at that point, according to their documented company policy, but I’ll feel like an ass.

I hadn’t really thought of that before; it seems I have three reasons to quit and only one reason to stay: that $100 that I would earn before quitting.

Eh. I’m sure that I can find some landscapers who want a short-term pair of strong arms they can use; that should get me the same money, much quicker. With any luck, I’ll have a bunch more than that by the end, simply because they’ll let me work more days.

Tomorrow I should quit the job at Decathlon. I know that I’m gambling a job that I have but probably won’t like very much (though I’m sure they aren’t that bad, as cashier-employers go) for one that I would like quite a bit that I don’t technically have yet. But hey, where’s the adventure in life if you don’t gamble?

I’ve made progress in a few areas that it’s probably good to make progress in; I’ve submitted job applications to a variety of places, and it seems likely that at least one of them will be interested in me. I’ve worked on my webcomics directory, and it should be somewhat quicker and more logical when I finish the updates. Right now, the source code on my machine is in a transitional ‘nothing works because half of the stuff uses an old convention, half uses a new’ state. But more and more things use the new convention as I find time to work on the project, and soon I hope to upload about 50 files to the server and find that magically, everything works.

As if that’s going to happen.

Other news… one side benefit of choosing the same career field as my father is that all of a sudden, we have an unlimited number of things to talk about: current projects that one or the other of us have, clever things that we’ve done to implement them, tough problems that we’ve run into and possible solutions that we bounce off each other; stuff like that. Something that anyone other than a computer programmer would have a hard time following, let alone participating in.

I wonder if all professions have a similar number of things to talk about among people who know that profession. It seems difficult for me to imagine a similar breadth of topic in, say, janitorial work. At the same time, I’m sure that they find things to talk about when they encounter others in that trade…

I’m not going to talk about the status of my relationships right now, because right now I’m just significantly confused on every front. Not confused in a bad way, because I see opportunities daily and possibilities everywhere, but confused in a “I have no idea what she just meant by that” sort of way.

I forsee an interesting summer. Boring work until June 17, at which point I’ll head out to Texas for a PDT, then after that I start work at a summer camp. If they ever get around to mailing me the application… (I’ve had near confirmation that they want me as a counselor but they haven’t sent me anything official yet). Interesting times all around when I’m not working.

Well, I’m off.