Top 5 Things I'm Going To Change When I Go Back To School

School starts tomorrow, and since I made a blog entitled, "Top Six Reasons Why It's Great To Be Out Of School", in the 05/01/2004 - 05/31/2004 archives, I figure I should make a blog "celebrating" my re-entry to school by listing the top 5 things I'm going to change when I go back to school.

5. I am no longer going to sleep in until 1 PM, 5 days a week. Now I will only sleep in until 1 PM on Friday, the one day I don't have school (excluding weekends). Well, unless my monotonous alarm clock fails to wake me up on a school day for the umpteenth time.

4. I am going to be eating on a more structured schedule. Breakfast when I wake up (as opposed to lunch when I wake up), lunch at school, Top Ramen at 4 PM sharp (this has become somewhat of a tradition for me...I almost always have a bowl of Chicken Top Ramen before work at 4 PM...I think it appeals to me because it only takes 3 minutes to make...plus the endless wait for the water to boil), dinner at Taco Bell, and as many snacks in between as I can get my hands on.

3. I am no longer going to be able to go for 3 weeks without gassing up my car. I just can't hold it in that long anymore.

2. I am no longer going to be able to spend as much time glued to the computer playing Diablo 2. I expect withdrawals to begin within the first couple of weeks, including improved vision, better circulation, and greater boxer shorts ventilation.

1. I am going to have to buy a smaller pillow. It's too hard to fit my current pillow in my backpack when I have all my books and folders in there already. However, I want to be prepared for all the upcoming lectures that this new semester will undoubtedly bring.

Updates, Stories, and Gripes, Oh My!

Updates
Ooooh, new colors...That's right, I've changed the color scheme of my blog from green to blue to better suit my new Blogger Navbar. See Aaron? It's not so hard to mess with your template after all. It took me all of 1 minute to add Meghan and Hannah to my "More Blogs" links.


Stories
This happened a few weeks ago shortly after I made my Taco Bell Awards, Part Deux blog, so I'll have to give it its own place in Taco Bell Blogdom:

Winner of the award for the "Best Slip-up"

An older man came through the drive-thru and placed his order. Towards the end of his order, he interjected that he wanted extra cheese. Since he had ordered several items, Miguel asked, "On everything?" And the old man replied, "Yes Ma'am...*pause*...SIR!!"

Of course I started to convulse with laughter which could be heard throughout the store, and Miguel said over the headset intercom, "Don't laugh Sean." I looked over at him and saw that he was laughing too except he was trying to hold it in at the same time so he could finish taking the order. I guess this gives me even more golden opportunities to jokingly call him Michelle instead of Miguel. At least I hope he knows I'm joking...hmm, why haven't I gotten a raise lately...?


Gripes
I'm not a hateful person. I don't hate many things. I am quite tolerant of most situations. However, there is one thing I have come to despise. Can you guess what it is?

Bills? Taxes? Gas Prices? Squirrel over-population? Hick-inbreeding? The color brown? Stupid people? Reality TV shows?

Why yes, you're right! Well, I don't mind the color brown really, except when it's in a toilet, and Survivor is entertaining to watch, but all the rest of them suck.

But what really gets me as of late are those obnoxious motorized scooters that have become so popular seemingly overnight. And something I've noticed is that about 99% of the people that ride them are guys who either aren't old enough or talented enough to drive a car so they have to ride these mechanical blunderbusses that you can hear from several blocks away because they sound like a motorcycle with a jet engine strapped on the back of it which is running on a pure concentrated formula consisting of mosquitos who were bred in captivity and solely fed beans and trained by the Farting Champion of the World, Windy McAnus.

It's really annoying when these, for lack of a better word, farts come riding past my drive-thru with their jet scooters while I'm trying to take an order.

Customer: "Hi, I'd like a bean burrito with no onions, a nachos supreme with....faaaaarrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrtttt did you get that?"

Me: "What?"


And then when they come around my neighborhood, I can hear them off in the distance before I can even see them on my street. By the time I can actually see them, the noise emitting from their gaseous motors is already ear-splitting, and I can finally cast my eyes on the half-breed, helmet-wearing, hearing-impaired, hyena-like hooligans. Ah, if only America's great technology was put to something useful like a portable-instant-pop-up brick wall or a death ray gun. Then I'd be happy. Yes Ma'am!

Microsoft Exorcist

For a couple weeks now, I have been set free from the drudgery of having to use my old demon possessed computer. This is due to the fact that I bought a brand spanking new Dell computer that is 99% demon free (It's a well known fact that no computer can be 100% demon free...there's always some stealthy little demon that manages to sneak in during the assembly or something).

It's like the difference between day and night. When I was forced to use my old computer, I had to put up with such peculiarities as:

• Not loading completely when I turned it on, forcing me to restart, occasionally I had to restart several times before the computer actually loaded.
• Crashing and locking up when I did such backbrea...err...hard drivebreaking things as running a program, surfing the internet, touching any part of the computer, getting within 10 feet of the computer, or trying to feed it by spreading tuna on a CD and putting it in the CD drive.
• Doing almost any task extremely slow as if to indicate that the acronym of the company who built my computer, HP (Hewlett Packard), really stands for Handicapped Processor.
• Having my firewall disable my internet connection at random for no reason.
• Making Diablo 2 stop working properly. It even tried to eat my CD when I put it in the drive a couple times. I put it in, it started to whir, and all of a sudden, "THUNK...crunch crunch crunch...BURRRRRRPP!!"
• Being demon possessed. Maybe that's one of the long term symptoms of a computer which has had Diablo 2 played on it for too long...

But this new computer is great. It runs fast, it actually loads when it's supposed to, I don't lag while browsing the internet or playing D2, and it came with a firewall that actually works! Although I'm not convinced that a firewall is the best thing to have on a computer. Seems to me that a FIREwall would be mighty attractive for demons to come hang out in...maybe I should get a ExorcismWall or an IglooWall or something.

Like my dad suggested, it's reminiscent of when Strongbad got rid of his old Tandy 400 in favor of his current Compy 386, "A spectacle of graphics and sound". My old computer was like the Tandy 400, with the duct tape keeping it together, and the cracked screen, and the top-left hand corner that looked like someone took a bite out of it. Except my computer monitor had a Walmart Smiley Face sticker on it, a toy figure of Bender the Robot from the show Futurama who was constantly wielding a flimsy piece of rubber at me, and a sticker that said "The beatings will continue until morale improves". But my new computer is like Strongbad's Compy 386, basically because it's new and it works. It doesn't have any stickers on it yet, but it does have a Godzilla figure on the top that my dad put there to continue the legacy of Monitor-Guarding Action Figures, and I have a miniature rubber chicken that sits on my desk and sometimes, when he's ambitious, will stretch out on one of my speakers to get a better angle for his suntan from my desk lamp.

So I am very happy with my new computer, and I'm glad I no longer am forced to use my old one. Now I just have to think of a way to get rid of it. Hmm...does anyone want a new computer? I'm sure it won't be too much of a problem to send the demons a forwarding address.