2) My registration time isn’t until 1:45pm today, right about when I’ll be boarding an airplane. Who schedules registration the day before Thanksgiving??

3) My mom has flu so I have to stay at my grandparents house in order to avoid getting sick because I never got a flu shot.

Today’s sunrises

• Ann Arbor: 7:31 am
• Chicago: 6:45 am
• Providence: 6:41 am
• Silver Spring: 7:00 am

This is the first place I have moved to where I have really noticed the difference, probably because of the huge difference between Chicago and Ann Arbor. It still feels like the day is starting 45 minutes early.

• My family
• Maurie and the Kathans
• Maddie
• Parkway Deli
• Occasional pleasant waves of high school nostalgia
• Free laundry
• The sound the cicadas make at night
• Montgomery County Agricultural Fair

Things I dislike about being home:

• Humidity
• Very bright cloudy days
• Car dependence
• Feeling bored and awkward
• Rockville Pike
• Mosquito bites

Although I clearly wasn’t destined to be a sports photographer, I loved going to those meets. They were more exciting to watch than the other sports I also tried to photograph (track, cross country, lacrosse, football) I got to hang around right next to the pool with the team and vaguely feel like I was part of a school-related activity.

All of this is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching Olympic swimming this week, the highlight being definitely Michael Phelps 8 gold medal quest. (Did you know he’s from Maryland? In an painfully sentimental way this makes me proud of my home state.) And I’d like to think that I appreciated it more because of all those Saturdays crouched on the floor at MAC and MLK in high school.

¹ At one of my first swim meets an angry parent yelled at me for interfering with light that goes off to mark the start of a race. The camera I was using at the time didn’t even have a flash, but I still felt horrible, and once I got a new camera with a built-in flash it took me months before I felt comfortable using it.

I went home last week. Hung out with Maurie and the Kathans, which was very very good. Should have taken more pictures.

I have been trying to learn as much as possible from my coworkers at ITG. In addition to the formal-ish PHP/MySQL lessons, I’m trying to pick up Illustrator and Flash while I’m at it. This is what I have made so far:

For the longest time I was really anti-Flash, because of accessibility issues. I guess I still am a bit — I still get frustrated too often when trying to navigate Flash-based sites. But for making animations, and even certain types of graphics, it is a pretty amazing piece of software. Clearly I have yet to master the semi-realistic-looking walking ostrich (it’s not so bad if you try not to focus on the legs), but what I have done so far only took about an hour, including a fair amount of trial and error, so I don’t feel that bad.

I also decided that I am going to move to Chicago at the end of the summer. I am excited, but also stressed out about moving my stuff, finding a place to live, getting a job, and making new friends. Even so, it feels good to have a plan.

I’ve been home for over a week now. It’s nice, even though I haven’t been doing much. Went shopping a bunch of times, went to a couple doctor’s appointments, ate a lot of food at Ma and Papi’s. On Friday night we went to see the Festival of Lights at the Mormon Temple. It was very beautiful but inside the Visitor’s Center although friendly Mormon women tried to convert us about every 10 minutes.

I also saw Juno with Mummy a few days ago, and as expected, liked it a lot.

Katie is visiting. She drove down yesterday. I think we might go downtown today.

Other than that I have been knitting and glued to C-SPAN Iowa caucus coverage. It’s an All-Politics Weekend.

At this time next Friday Mummy and I will be driving North en route to Ashfield, MA, the current residence of one Ms. Katie Gray. We’ll spend Saturday there too, and then on Sunday it’s off to Providence to move back into good old Andrews Hall.

I am going to spend the rest of my time here packing meticulously, planning shopping period, messing around with my bike (lights and a rear rack are in the mail), and pondering over what to do during Winter Break. It would be stupid to come back here and sit around for a month, punctuated only by a possible short trip somewhere with Mummy. Maurie won’t even be around. The best I have come up with is subletting a room during break either off or on campus, and working some extra hours at my job at the library. Maybe I could also pick up a second job on campus, fill in for someone who will be gone during break.

Possible Classes, which I will have to whittle down:
* PPAI1700T-S01: Good Government
* PPAI1700W-S01: Privacy in Networked Society
* ECON1480-S01: Public Economics
* POLS1030-S01: Modern Political Thought
* POLS1820D-S01: Civil Liberties: Moral, Political and Legal Approaches
* POLS1820O-S01: Methodologies of Political Thought
* PHIL0990O-S01: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
* ANTH0800-S01: Sound and Symbols: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
* HIST1180-S01: The Rise of the Scientific Worldview
* HIST1220-S01: European Intellectual and Cultural History: Exploring the Modern, 1880-1914
* PHP1680L-S01: Science and Power: A Bioethical Inquiry
* PPAI2200-S01: The Political Economy of Punishment
* COGS0090-S01: Quantitative Methods in Psychology
* EDUC1130-S01: Analyzing Education Policy: Lessons from Economics
* ENVS1350-S01: Environmental Economics and Policy
* COGS0500-S01: Making Decisions

And, there is a never any food I want to eat.

Microeconomics is fully enrolled: 45 people. Every chair was filled. (Coincidentally it meets in the same class room as Criminology does, immediately afterward.) The instructor is an Italian guy with a dry sense of humor. Everyone else in the class who is an Maryland student has supposedly taken an entire semester of introductory microeconomics, whereas at Brown introductory microeconomics and introductory macroeconomics are combined into a one semester course. From reading the first chapter of the textbook I think I’ll be all right though, as long as can remember how to do simple integration correctly. And math at all, I suppose. I haven’t done it in awhile. There are no graded problem sets which is nice, especially now in the summer, just multiple choice quizzes and tests.

I’m in class from 9-12:20 Monday-Thursday which is tough but not too bad. Last year I took a three week course that met for 2 hours and a half every day and I got used to it very quickly. Amazingly adaptable Natalia. Ideas ideas ideas.

I reinstalled Wordpress yesterday in an effort to get the http interface for the theme editor to work. I had some trouble restoring the MySQL database backup but then realized my problem came down to leaving off a prefix in the Wordpress configuration file. The theme editor still doesn’t work for editing .php files. I get a 406 error:

Not Acceptable An appropriate representation of the requested resource /toast/wp-admin/theme-editor.php could not be found on this server.

A quick Google search narrowed down the problem to the mod_security Apache module. Unfortunately the solution that seems to work for everyone else, disabling mod_security in the .htaccess file, causes me to get 500 Internal Server Errors for all of Wordpress. Oh well…

Anyway. For now the archive index is down because I haven’t reinstalled the plugins I was using the run the page. But I’m sure none of you really cared about them anyway..

My room is still in ruins. Salvation Army is coming to pick up my old desk today, perhaps that will be the final catalyst. I’ve finished my first book of the summer: Number9Dream by David Mitchell. I didn’t like it as much as Cloud Atlas, but more than Black Swan Green. But really, everything he writes is solid. Now I’m tackling the small collection of contemporary Russian literature I acquired from McComas, leftovers from a Vassar class. First up is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Putter putter putter.