I drove on the sedimentary geology field trip to the Grand Canyon this weekend. It was a blast. My van was the cool van. But I didn't realize how tired you get driving those things while everybody else gets to relax. I was beat last night. I'm still pretty worn out today.

On another note, my Visa wants to change the rate on my card from 12% to 17%. My rate is high as it is, but there's no way I'm going to stand for a higher rate. Visa was trying to be sneaky about it by sending a plain-looking notice in a plain-looking envelope. Most people don't even bother to read it, but I did. I guess I have to get a new card now. There's a Visa/Amazon.com card that looks ok. Basically, every $100 you spend gives you $1 at amazon.com (or is it every $1000?).

Kelly and I watched Secretary this weekend...twice. The second time we turned on the director's commentary, which was quite interesting. Kelly likes that movie ALOT! We also went to Barnhardt Canyon on Saturday, which was really nice. We took Ed, and he had a great time playing in the pools. On the way back we came across a guy with four goats. Ed didn't like those so much. I think he prefers to be the largest thing on four legs.

Now that we have broadband internet at my house and a home LAN, I can fix my old computer. I backed up all my documents and mp3s to my laptop, and then burned the files onto CDs (it took 7 of them!). The first day I screwed up and loaded Windows XP without reformatting the hard drive. When my moniter wouldn't work, I decided to put Windows 98 back on, again without reformatting the hard drive. So once it started working again, I noticed that both operating systems were on my computer in the same partition. This is bad news, because things could start to conflict. Plus I still had all the shitty programs that I was trying to get rid of.

After a few days of thinking about the problem, I realized that the first step was to reformat the hard drive. Last night I did that. Everything went pretty smoothly, but my computer doesn't recognize my modem now (not that I really care about modems right now). I was very happy that the computer recognized my moniter, CD-ROM drive, and network adapter. Then I spent most of the rest of the night installing programs from the Windows 98 CD, Windows Update, and other internet programs like WinZip, Adobe Acrobat Reader, PowerPoint Viewer, and Kazaa. I also loaded Works Suite 2002, which came with my laptop, because it has a full version of Word, although the spreadsheet program sucks ass. Everything seems to be working really well now, and my computer is much faster. I'm happy with how everything turned out.

This morning I finished copying all my backup files to the hard drive. I'm also running a little Kazaa test over the weekend to see how downloading files at home compares to downloading files at ASU (which Kelly made me stop doing).

I'd like to do the same thing to Kelly's computer, because it's running worse than mine was, and her monitor driver is not working correctly. I also need to clean her mouse, which I keep forgetting to do.

Lah Dee Dah! I'm blogging again! Not much to say right now. I'm meeting Jack Farmer (AKA Buzz Lightyear) to get some samples with microfossils in them, and I have a few minutes to spare. I'm glad to see that Beth's blog is working now. I hope she does well on her presentation on the Southern Alps today (NOTE: the Southern Alps are not in Italy, as I first thought.)

I want to give a quick shout out to my girl Kelly, for being so nice to me this morning.

Kelly and I watched Donnie Darko in the hot tub last night. It's a pretty good movie. I would recommend it for all fans of sci-fi, or even people who hate sci-fi but like physics.

Here's an update about the film festival. We got to Tucson a little early, so we had dinner at this bistro called Barrio. It was pretty trendy, and I felt underdressed around all those stylish latino girls who worked there. I would have much rather gone to a place like that with Kelly, and I bet she would have liked it. The food was good though it was a little overpriced.

My brother's film was awesome! It was really cool on the big screen. People applauded when it was over, and a few people actually came up to my brother to say how much they liked it. But then everything went downhill, because the film after his was utterly awful. People always joke about how they just saw the worst movie ever made, but I'm being completely serious. That was, without a doubt, the worst film ever made. The acting was terrible. The plot was absolutely vapid. The characters were one-dimensional, completely unrealistic, and didn't even feel like they belonged in the same movie. The weirdest thing were the expensive special effects (involving a stopwatch moving backwards, a magical oven, and a "meteorite" flying across the sky <>). There was a subplot involving the ghost of a cuban baseball player from the 1930's, which turned out to be the main character's grandfather. By the way, the ghost gave the main character some good advice about being true to yourself, which she promptly ignored, basically telling the audience there was no reason for the ghost to even be in the story. Seriously, I wanted to pull a Britney Spears. I wanted to commit suicide. That was 90 minutes of my life I will never get back.

Then it got worse. My brother's friends showed up. I knew one of them from high school. Think of a female version of Adam Jew, but twice as ugly, and wearing cat ears. Then multiply that by three. I know it sounds mean, but my brother actually wanted to hang out with three fat, ugly girls, with nasty hear, and nasty clothes (one was even wearing a beat up Twister shirt!), all wearing those GODDAMN CAT EARS!!! They are all sisters, and their mom showed up two. I haven't seen anyone with feathered hair in a really long time. When the mom found out I was a geologist, she preceded to ask me if I knew anything about the recent space shuttle disaster. I am a goddamn geologists...what the fuck do I know about the space shuttle!!! Then, of course, things had to get worse. My brother and mom wanted to go get desert, but it was after 10PM, so the only thing open was Denny's. GODDAMN DENNYS!!! I am sure as hell not eating anything at Denny's. I ordered a Dr. Pepper, but they served me a nasty Mr. Pibb. So I just sat there sipping my nasty drink, trying not to watch with disgusted fascination the three fat, ugly girls wearing GODDAMN CAT EARS shoveling large amounts of chocolate fudge brownies and chocolate peanut butter pie in those garbage disposals in their faces they call mouths. I would have gladly watched that shitty movie again.

So we got back after 1AM, and surprise surprise, the puppy had pissed and shit all over, so I just said fuck it and went to sleep.

I spent most of last evening installing cable and ethernet lines in my house with my dad. We used the cool Motorola TalkAbouts I just got to communicate in different parts of the house. I got the two-way radios on ebay for really cheap. I guess the market was saturated...a lot of people were selling them. I got mine for 55% off the normal price. They're really cool radios too. They have a digital compass, barometer, and altimeter. Basically, they are top of the line for the 2-mile family radios. I planned to use them out in the field, but they came in real handy last night, trying to feed cable from upstairs to downstairs.

I got a neck cramp today. Seriously! I was yawning after tai chi and all of a sudden the muscle under my jaw cramped up. It felt like my chin was stuck to my neck. I sat down and stretched for a minute, and it was better. But it was still weird as hell.

I caught a glimpse of the ever elusive Tim yesterday (AKA Beth's Boy Toy). He seemed pretty cool. We all had dinner at Plaid, and then some of us went to Kelly's house to play Children's Bible Trivia (the link is only good for five days). Beth is taking a Bible as literature class, so this was like studying for her. It was fun. Then Kelly and I did some major sinning after everybody left.

Oh we got a new month on our hands now! I thought it might rain yesterday, but it didn't. No April showers mean no May flowers, but we'll have plenty of beautiful desert wildflowers anyway. I guess I'm in a better mood, even though I'm really busy now. My parents decided to cancel their phone service (read "not pay their phone bill") and go completely wireless, so anyone who wants to call me has to use (480) 215-2918. Now they want to get cable internet (without the cable) so that my mom can surf the web and decide what cabinets she wants. I talked to the cable america guy and got them a great deal, and the cable guy is coming to install everything next Saturday. However, my parents have to get their act in gear before then and buy the router and ethernet cables, not to mention move the cable jack into the study and drill a hole for the ethernet cable down into my room directly below. Plus, all this is going on while I am moving things from my room into my brother's old room (all by myself, I might add). I can only do a little bit each time I go home, but it's coming along.

But the hardest part of all it figuring out what to get Kelly for our anniversary...