Alright, sorry kids. Put down the pitchforks, torches, and hostage kittens. I had been doing so well updating this thing with consistency every 3-4 days, and then I go and so something brash like not updating it in a week. Apologies. Apologies all around.

I came home-home on Monday and, to be quite honest, I do so love coming home. I don't really do anything other than just hang around with my family, watch TV at night, and then retreat to the room that I spent so many hours in while growing up once the rest of the family goes to sleep at an oh-so-early hour. It's just, primarily, the fact that I'm home that's so comforting and super fantastic. I have a bunch of the pictures of the house, something that I never had thought about getting before, on my lovely little digital camera. These shall get uploaded and displayed for all to see when I get back to Ann Arbor on Sunday and get the cord that my camera just begs and pleads to have in order to fulfill its function. I also got to play basketball outside on our little cement slab in front of our garage today and yesterday, which is another thing I've missed being able to do just whenever.

As much as I love being home though, I'm actually kinda looking forward to getting back to Ann Arbor for my summer "vacation." And, by vacation, I mean spring and summer classes which will take all but three or four weeks of my actual summer vacation up. Spring term, in particular, will be quite the little bitch as I'm taking a class which contains the word "Intensive" in its title. Now, spring/summer classes in general are pretty rough in that they have to get an entire curriculum done in half the time that a normal term class has to. In spring, I'm taking Intensive Second-Year Spanish. What this means is that not only am I taking a Spanish class at twice the speed of a normal term of classes, but I'm taking a class that is twice the speed of a normal Spanish class during the regular school semester. So, let's do the math: one class at about four times the speed that it could normally be taken. Honestly, though, the only thing that really irks me about this whole setup isn't the four of class four days a week, but rather than the damn thing starts at 8:30am every day. I haven't had to wake up before 8:00am as a routine since my junior year of High School. This makes me, a person with admittedly trying sleeping issues, a very, very sadpanda. Oh well; it's only six-seven weeks of this thing. I can do it.

Plus, and this is just what I'm hearing from a little birdie who heard it from grape vine, I think this summer is going to be one of the bestest ever. My reasons are super-secret -- and to follow the old cliché: if I told you, I'd have to kill you -- but let's just trust me on this. I think it'll be pretty spectacular.

Oh, and hey, a friend urged me in the direction of GameDev.net's Image of the Day (IOTD) saying that the queue for the future was feeling a bit lonely, so I went ahead and submitted my last known project as a programmer to the thing. Check it out if you feel so inclined.

I started up work on the third chapter for Paradise a couple of days ago, and while I was talking to one of my friends I had the whole chapter appear before my eyes in a startling flash of revelationary light. This chapter is the point in which the real plotline of the book begins to take form. It's also the point in which I inject some romance by finally fleshing out the relationship between the main character and his, presumably, dead wife. The first three page draft I wrote for the chapter's flashback was, at the time, decent… But when I looked back at the thing I was simply revolted by how bad it was. I'm keeping the same general structure of the flashback, but I think the newly rewritten draft is most definitely superior to the bastard first draft. I'm stuck on a very crucial paragraph of said flashback at the moment, but as soon as that's done I think the rest of the sequence will come together very nicely. I'll post snippets and such at the appropriate temporal juncture.

Since I have a tendency to give my one-sentence movie reviews after I've watched a large amount of movies in a fairly short time I might as well make it more of a habit. So here are all the movie-viewing occasions which I have partaken in over the last two-three weeks. There's a lot and in roughly the order in which I watched them. eXistenZ was positively captivating which left my mind reeling by the time its ninety-seven minutes of film had come to a conclusion. Videodrome was, uh, well it was a weird damn movie; I'm not really sure what else to say. Do not watch Spider unless you like watching Ralph Fiennes mumble and stumble for almost one-hundred minutes -- I truly believe that the script for the movie was, at most, four pages long. Silent Hill was bad, long, but very enjoyable for me. Jacob's Ladder is a fantastic movie along the lines of The Sixth Sense, but which remains far more interesting throughout while ending with a bit of a whimper whereas Shyamalan's movie is very slow-developed buildup which ends with a bang. Hostel was less "revolting" than I had been lead to believe, but a far more enjoyable movie at the same time. The Grudge was a very faithful recreating of its Ju-on, which I, overall, enjoyed more than the Japanese original. And, to end this very long paragraph, Love, Actually was the single most fun movie I've seen in a very long time.

Alright, next time I'm just going to do these one-sentence reviews as I see the movies, rather than letting a large-ass list slowly build and build until it nears its breaking point. Unfortunately, I'm now at the end of the very long list of movies that I'd been waiting to see for such a long time. I think Blue Velvet is one of the few remaining titles that I have but have not yet seen. And I don't care how batshit crazy Tom Cruise may be, I'm still looking forward to seeing Mission Impossible III on Friday.

I'd also like to point that, while I still have yet to get a grade for the last of my four classes, I'm currently sitting at a 3.554 GPA for the last semester. I was an absolutely horrible student for my first three semesters here at the University of Michigan, but I'm very slowly starting to come around. This will be the best semester I've had yet with two A-'s and a B+. I'll update this paragraph as soon as I get the last grade to see if I've set a new academic record for my time at U of M.

i know that's a strange way to tell you that I know we belong