Oy Vey… »
Oy…
Well, quite a lot has happened since my last update… Let’s go through it, shall we?
Ash got in on the first, and all was rejoicing and happiness, whee! Mom and I went to pick her up at the airport and we brought her home to a fine home-cooked meal of Gold Star Chili (it’s a Cincinnati thing, nevermind), after which we talked in the living room for a while before going to bed.
Wednesday we started day-tripping to the sights and sites around town. We went to the Cathedral in Covington (links will be added later… maybe…), then to Eden Park, Krohn Conservatory, and finally Union Terminal, one of the damn coolest pieces of art deco architecture ever built. Ever. Thing’s freaking enormous too.
Thursday we had brunch with my grandma, then we went home and I finished up my final project and we headed off to school to demonstrate it. Hutchins (my teacher) was speechless. He gets really annoyed when I do this kind of crap, and he made that rather well known. Not to say he was mad or disappointed… more like he just couldn’t find anything to critique me on besides a strange floating pink box that ended up in the renders of the observation deck (I think Marcel accidentally unhid it when he was helping me with the final images and animations… for which I am very very grateful… Marcel is awesome, I must send him thank-you somethings). So that was a huge success… thank god. Bloody thing nearly drive me insane, especially the hotspot programming bit. Oy.
Anyway, Friday was a rather short day because it was graduation, so we didn’t really get much else done. Graduation was at 7, and I was rather confused and worried when I flipped through the graduation program and couldn’t find my name… Hutchins came over and teased me about it (bad idea teasing someone who just spent the last three weeks panicing over a project by coming up and telling him the floating pink box failed him…). What actually happened was that for some reason they forgot to list me under the Multimedia department, though I was, in fact, listed under the Highest Honors graduates (kept my 4.0 all the way to the end, woo-hoo!). There was a small seet inserted into the back of the program with a “corrected list” of Multimedia graduates… all three of us. Anyway, got through the ceremony with diploma (will scan it later) and highest honors trophy in-hand (had to give back my honors cords and National Technical Honors Society stole because ITT is cheap :P) and Ash, mom, dad, Tim, and I went down to the riverfront (a 3 minute walk, tops) to have dinner at TGI Fridays. After that we went to Blockbuster to rent some movies. Unfortunately, Blockbuster is no longer a movies-only kind of store, which has destroyed their selection, much to my annoyance. However, we did find two things to rent, so we came home and watched one (Kaena: The Prophecy… an older but very well-done CG film, which to my fascination had one of the Revelation team members in its character animation department: Pascal Blanche [I'm too tired to do accenting on the E, but it's there]) before trekking up to bed.
Saturday was the family graduation party, so again, not much tripping was done. Got a fair amount of moolah, and afterwards we went to Best Buy to get a copy of L.A. Story (which for some reason we never bought despite mom’s adoration of the movie). We were going to rent it, but as I mentioned above, Blockbuster’s selection sucks now, so it’s now a permanent spot in my movie library. We also bought some printer ink for my Epson because I’m totally out of everything, but I still need to get 2 more cartridges. Been buying them in stages to spread out the cost… ink is NOT cheap, and it’s even less so when you own a 6-cartridge photo printer :P.
Aaaanyhoo, the rest of Saturday was spent working on a project which I am now contracted to do for an exhorbitant amount of money, much to my delight, amazement, and relative terror. Can’t post anything more about it, but it’ll be keeping me busy for the next couple of months.
Sunday mom took Ash and me out and about downtown Cincinnati to see more sights. We got to go to the top of Carrew Tower (tallest building in Cincy) and look around on the observation deck. After that we roamed the streets and ended up at Sawyer Point Park, then we roamed some more and ended up back at the car with a significant number of photographs. Since it was after 5 we figured (correctly) that the Art Museum (which we’d tried to get to Wednesday but ended up at Union Terminal instead) was closed, so we went home, had dinner, hung out around the house, watched Last Samurai, and went to sleep.
Monday we tried going to the art museum again, only to discover to our dismay that the art museum is closed on Mondays. Apparently such information was news to everyone in the family. So, with that plan again foiled, we decided to literally walk around the art museum, then took off to see the University of Cincinnati, which has, much to my surprise and amazement, made huge progress since I was last there. They might actually finish their MainStreet Construction project on-time (maybe not on-budget, but possibly on-time… a real rarity in this city). It started raining while we were there, and the ride back home was rather unceremoniously interrupted by me spilling my bottle of coke all over the truck because my hands and the bottle were both slick from the rain. I never claimed to be coordinated. The rest of Monday and all day today were spent in a fairly mopey sort of way, wishing Ash didn’t have to go back to Portland without me, which really only got worse after I dropped her off at the airport. And to top the day off, I had to close booth.
Which brings me to my penultimate paragraph… Apparently while I was gone, the “MP3 players keep Booth employees from going psycho and killing people” policy was over-ruled by the “floor people don’t think it’s fair that Booth employees get to wear mp3 players while they’re working” policy, which means no more Benton at work on Thursdays to keep me from being in a really pissed off mood. This only served to piss me off, and then I didn’t have my music to calm me down again (and I was already in a crummy mood before I got to work), so it took Pat getting out a hack saw, a dremel, and a steel rod to cheer me up again (we were working on one of Pat’s super-insanity projects which involves steel rods, film rollers, and new film syncing paths). Tiffany going and getting me snackies certainly helped too. Generally speaking, though, it was a quiet night, which is good, because I don’t think I would have been able to handle Ash leaving, losing my MP3 player because the floor is full of whiney bastards, AND having to do an NCN changeout plus 3 weekly cleanings all in one night. As it stands I only had to do 1 weekly projector cleaning and there was no NCN changeout. My sole comfort in knwoing that I still have to work at AMC until I get a permanent full-time job is that this contract job will bring in almost as much in 3 months as I make in a year at AMC< so I'll be in the money for a while... can finally get to fund some professional purchases, like a Photoshop upgrade, a Power Mac, a 23" cinema display... the works. w00. And what doesn't go into professional stuff will go towards the truck and my student loans.
Last paragraph, and then I’ll shut up. I may also be getting a third job working with my former classmates and hutchins to do some math tutorials for ITT to help decrease their apparently massive failure rate since the math classes went online-only. So hopefully that’ll pan out as well.