September 23, 1999

Wow.

So much has changed over the last month! I promise I'm back and soon things will be better than ever over here at orangeparade. In the meantime, I'll fill you in on the happenings of the past few weeks!

August 20th my Mom and I packed up my car and headed out of the Raleigh-Durham area and began the drive back up to Michigan. It took us two days to make the drive and the scenery was beautiful until we reached Ohio. Let me just tell you, that after driving through mountains and cool tunnels, Ohio is less than thrilling and it's a really big state! It felt like it took forever to get through Ohio. We finally made it to Michigan after 6 or 7 hours and then it was only another 2 to get home to Grand Rapids.

Unpacking the car was fun. You never quite realize how big (or small) your car is until you have a chance to pack it completely full and then unpack it. My Dad and Jeremie could not believe how much stuff we pulled out of there. It took me about a week of washing clothes and airing things out on the deck to get the smell of stale smoke and smelly dog out of my stuff. Totally gross. I guess I had gotted used to the smell while I was down there, but once I started breathing clean air again I realized how disgusting things were. Ick.

I had a few days at home dealing with unpacked stuff and then repacking things for school before it was time to move back to Ann Arbor. Our move was fairly uneventful; we rented a U-haul to move the big furniture out of our old place and into the new. We got our keys on a Sunday morning and headed over there quickly, as we hadn't seen the house since we signed our lease in January. We were shocked at the splendor; it was clean, very tastefully decorated in white, black and grey, it was clean, nice tiled floors in the kitchen and bathrooms and it was clean.

I stuck around for a couple of days to unpack and then I ran off to Minneapolis to visit my family, which was very nice. The rest is all a blur; I came back to Ann Arbor, continued putting stuff away, bought some books, school started...all of a sudden we're 3 weeks into the term and I don't know where any of the time went. I know I spent some time fixing my computer, which was d.o.a to the new house. Having to install a new hard drive, amongst other things, was a good excuse to install OpenBSD. So for now I'm dual-booting with Win98 so I can use Photoshop and the like, but I can see blowing all that away in the not-so-distant future.