Mind Garten

Rough Weekend Chester's been having a rough weekend. He's been very stressed over settling into a new place. Consequently he's been spending a lot of his free time in the bathroom cupboard. Since he's spent about a month of his life at the animal shelter couped up in a cage, he's become used to that way of living. I suppose having all this open space to move about in has been a little overwhelming. After I left him in the bathroom the first time, I came back in and he'd disappeared. Turned out he had pried open the cupboard door and snuck in with the door closing behind him. I just decided to leave the door open since that seemed to be his new safe spot. I left to go to Portland for Easter Sunday and left Chester locked up in the bathroom. When I came back he was a lot more relaxed and extremely demanding of attention. Right now as I type this he's chilling out on the floor next to me. I've found that I need to deliberately ignor...

New Cat Well, I down to the Heartland Humane Society today with the intention of adopting a cat. I finally took my camera this time. Like I said before, the building is very high quality and well funded. The cattery in particular appears quite comfortable for the cats that live there. On the left is the cages for the cats who don't do too well with other cats. On the right is the communal pens for those cats that get along with others. So one of the first things I did when I got there was go visit my chosen cat Gilbert. Gilbert's a real friendly cat that loves attention and I was sure to get him. However my mom recommended to me that I perform a couple tests on him before I took him home. Those were: putting him on my lap and seeing if he'll stay there, and holding him in my arms and seeing if he'll relax. To my dismay he failed both of these tests. He jumped out of my lap when I put him there, and he tensed up when I held him in my arms. ...

Cat Sitting It's spring break, and I've been spending it at my parents house catsitting. It's not so bad. I've been lying around a lot, watching movies, reading, and doing important stuff that I haven't had the time to do during school like job-searching and filing my taxes. This summer I need to find a job because I'm planning on going right back to school in the Fall. I'll have graduated already, but I want to continue my education and get a Mechanical Engineering degree. It should only take me about 2 years and a lot of work. Problem is, whose going to hire an engineer for only a summer job? The job market is pretty poor right now, and most people want career employees. I'm not ready to go there yet. I'll probably have to find work through a temp agency or something. Hopefully they could help me out. I'm also planning on adopting a cat from the Heartland Humane Society in Corvallis. I went and visited the cats on Thursd...

Scream! Well, finals are finally over. Last night I stayed up until 12:30 studying, but couldn't get to sleep until 2:30am. Then I got up at 6am to go to a final at 7:30am. After that I studied some more for a final at noon. Needless to say it has been an exhausting day. On top of that I did my laundry, did some reading, went to the bank, bought school textbooks, practiced guitar, and am now writing this. One of the side effects of getting up early is that you get to see sunrises: There's also not that many people around at 6:30am on campus. I sat out in the freezing cold in front of the Bagel Sphere waiting to get a breakfast snack. This is a shot of me from a bench trying to keep warm: So now that finals are over, what do I do? Well, I have a whole week that's free, and half of it is going to be spent babysitting the cats at my parents house. You see the whole family but myself is going on vacation to beautiful Palm Desert, California. Not...

Finals Week I haven't updated in a while because I've been busy preparing for finals. This week is finals week and I just got done with my hardest final. Now that its over, I only have easy finals to take, so I thought I'd spend some time to update my website. I haven't been taking as many pictures I've done in the past. I think I'm in a photography drought. Usually in the past, I just took pictures of everyday things I encounter in my life, but now I think I've covered most of it. As a result I've been a bit uninspired to go out looking for new things. Perhaps I'll devote some more time in the future. In the mean time, lets look at a bit of the backlog pictures. This is a small slough or creek that I walk over on my way home. This shot is from the bridge on Kings Blvd. As you can see, its quite nice, and you couldn't possibly tell that this is in the middle of suburbia and next to a very busy road. When it rains heavily or ...

Cat Etiquette I must confess that I haven't put up anything about cats in a while. I have a few cat pictures that have been sitting in the queue for a while, and I think its time that I showed them off. Every cat has its own personal set of rules, its own personal protocol that you have to follow or fit into before a cat will allow you the privilege of gracing your unworthy hands on its magnificent fur coat. And this cat is no exception. When I first saw this cat I called upon him, and in response he called upon me. He seemed friendly enough, but all my calls and invitations to come over to me did not seem to impress this cat. He called to me again repeatedly and gave me the look that said, "I don't care one way or another if you come over here or not, but I sure as hell am not answering your summons like a petty servant." He began walking away and I caved in. I had lost the battle of wills and approached him to stroke his magnficinent-- one could ...

Memories of Snow It was a very exciting day yesterday. It was very very cold. It snowed, hailed, and melted off and on all day. Apparently it snowed earlier in the morning and stuck to the ground, but this is only rumour and hearsay since I slept through all my classes yesterday and cannot confirm this myself. This is around 5pm yesterday, about the time I decided to get out of the house and do something semi-important. It started out hailing as I was driving to the bank, but quickly turned into a lot of hail, and then finally into a flurry of snow. The snow was quite intense, and sadly this picture is only the waning end of that event. Although this morning I woke up to find patches of snow on the cars and trees as I was walking to the bus stop. It was all melting very rapidly and one could hear the sound of dripping all around. It was quite a surreal experience knowing that a fantastic drop of snow had created this sometime between yesterday evening and last night,...

One-Armed Villains A weird idea came into my head today. I was thinking about what I would do if I made an adventure story. I didn't think much about the story, but I knew for certain that the villain would have only one hand. Furthermore, the villain would have in place of the missing hand a weapon of some kind. You see, having a prosthetic in place of the missing hand just isn't evil enough. What's more, its too practical. So the replacement hand has to be a hook, or a retractable sword. Of course, these blade like weapons are a little too mundane for my taste. They have to be something fantastic and completely useless like a flamethrower! Well, a flamethrower does have its uses as an area effect weapon. But can you imagine using your prosthetic flamethrower in a hand-to-hand combat? I think you'd end up burning yourself more than the enemy. Furthermore, you have the problem of finding a place to store all that fuel somewhere on your person. It can...

Maximum Wednesday A lot of interesting things have been happening lately. I haven't had that much homework to do this week, so I've been kind of bored. When I don't have homework to do, I usually end up wasting my time on unimportant things, but when I am loaded with homework I spend more time doing cool things that aren't homework related. Fortunately, I have a couple things due on Friday, so I've been more busy today. I've suddenly become very interested in the subject matter of my CS class. We're talking about very large/hard/unsolvable problems. Its kind of hard to explain what these are. Basically, you have a program that won't finish running before the end of the universe, and you have to cope with that fact and find ways around it. Its very interesting. Its also very very geeky. I haven't taken any new pictures for a while. I haven't been very inspired lately. Mostly I've just been going through the motions of day...

Mexican Food! I went and had Mexican food with my roommate on Saturday. Here is the story: This is Logan eating tortilla chips. This is me eating tortilla chips. This is the almost empty chip basket. And this is Logan having more chips.

Mornings Usually when I wake up in the morning, its not an easy process. I admit that morning's are the worst part of the day for me. I have to argue with myself why I should get out of bed, why I shouldn't skip class, why I shouldn't sleep until noon. I usually win that argument, but sometimes I don't. Regardless if I win or not, I usually set my alarm clock 2 or 3 hours ahead of when I should be getting up on the off chance that I might be willing to get up early. Honestly, I can't remember the last I "felt" like getting up early. So what ends up happening is the alarm wakes me up, I reset the alarm clock an hour later, then sleep until it wakes me up again. This process continues until I absolutely have to wake up. And trust me, I usually push it to the very edge. So I'm usually dragging myself out to the street to meet the bus. I've got into a habit of showing up to the bus stop at least 10 minutes early because the dr...