In 11 days, I am going to be moving my crap back to Connecticut for the summer. I can't wait. I don't want to be in the same room as my roommate (Preacherman.. who hasn't posted in a LONG time, and doesn't even read this I don't think).

Preacherman has been my roommate since 1999. Every semester, at the end of the semester, we want to kill eachother (at least.. I want to kill him, I am only presuming its a mutual thing).

This semester is no different.

Preacherman is suffering badly from the season.. allergies. See, he seems to be allergic to everything right now.. and our room is particularly bad. It's full of dust/dirt. If you walk into my room and take a deep breath, it's like inhaling fucking SAND. It's horrible.

But.. Preacherman just continues to sit around, play stupid video games, cough, and sputter. I suffer as well from this dust.. it's horrible being in the room. But if I go outside and lie down in the grass, I feel wonderful. I even went to the CS computer lab today to be out of the room. I wanted to be out more to avoid my roommate's coughing/bitching.

I also am sick of fighting over keeping the window/door open. I like it open. He closes it because he is convinced its stuff outside that makes him so bad.. but it makes me better. Anyway.... whatever.

I am going to head to sleep in a minute. I did a lot today, and right now my laptop is encoding a movie (trip to florida with Caniprokis and hunch). This movie has been on my laptop waiting to be encoded since early March! The problem is that I can't get anything to encode it right. I am using the Divx codec (www.divx.com), which is really wonderful, but Premiere ain't too happy.

I got my europe video done pretty fucking fast. But this one.. well.. part of the problem is that its long. My laptop only has 20gigs of storage, and 60 minutes of video eats up 14 gigs or so. It's a pain in the ass. If I could, I would encode this video to MPEG2, and then have my windows workstation compress from MPEG2 to MPEG4. The quality would be the same in the end.. but my laptop doesn't have the disk space to export the MPEG2 file (since it would need ANOTHER 10-14 gigs).

If I had the money, I'd get some firewire storage with more than 60 gigs of space. Mmmm.. money.. I miss it.

Mother's Day came and went this year. I couldn't get ahold of my mom (to at least make that telephone call since I wasn't going to be in town to see her). I like the holiday, because in my family it is usually the first real BBQ of the season (sure, we grill year-round, many times a week.. but this is usually more of an eat-outside type of event too). And yes, this year was no exception.

My cousin brought us this funny grill thing when he came back.. I can't really explain it, I will take some photos for you though. It needed some rigging to get going since the fuel tanks in South Africa are different, but my dad got it going, and today they went to the point (beach/park) and had a cookout.

I need to go somewhere. I am fucking going ot kill someone if I don't see some place different. I get like this every few months, and usually I do go somewhere. Europe was a good fix, but I am itching for more.. even though that was only four months ago. I wish I could go somewhere every 6 weeks. Anywhere really.

I was thinking about this today, and realized that just about every semester and break I have gone somewhere. DC, Pittsburgh, Africa, Europe, New York, etc.. some place, any place, where you can do touristy sorta things. I love to travel, and I really hate to not travel.. and the more I do, the harder it is to stay away.

This summer should be interesting. I haven't announced my plans really, but basically I figure I'll leave mainland USA twice this summer. I am not going to Hawaii this summer (due to cost, it will be next year).. instead it will be Virgin Islands.. this will be the very end of August. It is also extremely likely that I will be in Europe for a bit (work) provided I get the required Visa (fucking fuckers).

Anyway.. bed time. Nothing else to do really right now.