So far, this week is looking a little better than last week. It doesn’t take much, though, to beat last week. I just found a twenty-dollar-bill in a Christmas card from Aunt Shirley and Uncle Grover, that happened to fall out of a stack of magazines on my counter as I was straightening up.

Twenty bucks is a huge deal for me right now. I haven’t had twenty bucks in.. well, probably not since the end of last semester. Of course, the fact of the matter is, I still don’t have twenty bucks. I just went from negative-thirty-five-bucks to negative-fifteen. Yeah, that’s right. I owe Amy everything.

Anyway, paying off debt is good too. I’ve got a tank full of gas and work starts in two weeks. I can hang in there until then. So, even though today is only Sunday, things are looking much better than last week.

Last week was just.. well.. a bad week. It’s not one of those weeks where I can pinpoint exactly what went wrong; it’s just that there weren’t many opportunities in which I could say that things were going well. I couldn’t drag myself out of bed before nine, and I had these terrible dreams all week. I don’t dream very often, and usually my dreams don’t have real plots or cohesiveness to them. These, however, had these intricate, dark plots to them, and I caused a lot of deaths / murders (indirectly, and without meaning to). I’d wake up feeling really guilty, even though (1.) it was just a dream and (2.) I usually was trying to help out a friend.

Perhaps tonight, and every night this week, I can keep my dreams aimed at happier things, such as finding twenty dollars that I didn’t know I had, and coffee in the winter, and penguins, and Linux, and finding the perfect ink pen. Any more of these death-dreams, and I’ll be forced to start taking whatever drug people used to take in the seventies that made them dream about fuzzy elephants and tree-people. LSD? Maybe, although I seem to recall that eating gummy worms at two in the morning will produce essentially the same effect.

I can’t promise anything, but I’m trying to get through the 26things project this month. I’ve never done it before, but I’ve always been kind of interested. I’m also keeping an eye on the Blogathon. Putting this off is probably a terrible idea, but I can’t convince myself to dedicate the time to it. I’ve got so much to do.

For instance, if I don’t start getting to bed at a reasonable hour, I’ll never be able to wake up at 6:00 every morning, like I used to. I’ve gotten into the worst alarm-clock habit this summer: hitting the snooze button. Actually, I don’t technically hit the snooze button, I’ve never trusted snooze buttons a lot. I just reset the alarm for ten or fifteen minutes later. And I’ll do that four or five times. So when I go to bed at night, I set my alarm for a good hour or so before I actually have to wake up.. just to give myself that snooze-button time. Of course, there are those few occasions in which I forget to reset the clock, and I fall asleep again anyway. While this is a practice that is okay for the occasional summer day, it absolutely cannot be tolerated after classes begin.

I think they only way to break this habit is to start getting a whole lot of sleep every night so that I’ll want to wake up when my alarm goes off. Then, after I’ve broken the habit, I can push my bedtime back a little, and my wake time up a little, and I’ll be back on my 4-hours-of-sleep-a-night schedule just in time for classes.

Yeah. I’ve always got a system worked out. I’m totally on top of things. :)

Tota called me Monday afternoon and informed me that I would be taking her to OfficeMax to buy a new computer. I’d just returned from work, and I was pretty tired, but I hadn’t made any other plans yet, and I hadn’t seen Tota in a long time, and I’d instituted a personal policy sometime last year that I would never pass up an opportunity to spend time with office supplies. Also, she was baking pizza to make up for all the pizza I’ve bought her. Therefore (all these things considered), Tota, Amy, and I went computer-shopping.

Fortunately, computer-shopping with Tota is a breeze. She already knew the one she wanted (and it was all boxed up in the store), so we took it, along with a few cute office supplies, paid for them all, and left.

Since she had a brand new computer. and had given her old computer to her brother, his old computer was up for grabs. So, naturally, I grabbed it. It’s an old one, a Compaq Presario, with a 700 AMD processor, a terribly huge and loud 10-gig hard drive, and a stick of 128-meg Ram. It’s the perfect computer for running Linux.

It’s been almost a full year since I’ve run Linux very seriously. Since we got the Dell, we’ve had to run Windows exclusively on it. Dell’s chips are so proprietary that they won’t dual-boot. Since it was a decision between Windows and Linux, and Corey had been saying for years that he wanted a decent system to run his Windows-based computer games on, Windows won. Everyone else lost, until now.

Granted, it’s nothing super-fast, but it’s Linux! Novell SuSE 9.3 (SuSE being my all-time favorite distro), running KDE, is one of my favorite things in the world. It’s almost nostalgic. It’s like when you hear a song that you used to listen to all the time during a certain point in your life, but that you haven’t listened to again since then. When you do hear it, it’s so much more beautiful, in a really sad and bittersweet kind of way. That’s what this is like; looking at my Linux desktop running Konsole and Kopete and Kmail, I can almost see myself back on Faulkner Street, in that tiny bedroom on that Pentium 200 with the 13-inch fuzzy monitor, designing some ridiculous webpage in the Gimp. It does kind of make me sad.. that wasn’t a half-bad time in my life, and I really don’t see how good things used to be until now.

Does that sound like I’m getting off-topic? It’s because I am, and I’m going to stop here, and just say that I desperately wish that I’d never left Linux in the first place. I think it’s such a shame that a person majoring in Computer Information Systems at Lander has virtually no opportunities to work in any operating system other than Windows. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m not majoring in Computer Information Systems. I could give you the other reason, but I think I’ll probably wind up in one of Mr. Shaffer’s classes again before I’m finished.

Anyway, I just had to let you all know of my newfound open-source freedom. You’ll find me online in Linux quite a bit from now on, but I’ll be playing SuperTux, and probably won’t get your messages.

1. How much money is in your wallet right now? – A dime, two pennies, and an Aladdin’s Castle token (priceless).

2. How much money would you need in the bank to feel secure? Rich? – As for secure, I don’t really need money. Well, maybe a few dollars for coffee every now and again. And considering my recent lack of any funds, it probably wouldn’t take too much to make me feel Rich right now. Twenty bucks would probably do it.

3. If someone gave you $100, no strings attached, what would you do with it? – Buy a latte and stick the rest in savings.

4. If someone gave you $1 Million, no strings attached, what would you do with it? – I would morph into Wall Street Mandy. Then I’d buy a latte and invest the rest.

5. How much does something have to cost before it starts counting as “real” money, as a purchase to be considered and evaluated, but below which you’ll buy without really thinking about it? – It really depends. I’m never really at the same level, financially. There have been points in my life when I had enough money in the bank to spend fifty bucks on something I wanted, and not think about it. Right now, I “consider and evaluate” before spending 79 cents on a candy bar.

Alright. I was going to post these Friday, but I imagined they’d be better off waiting a little while after my “water-testing” blog. F5.

Obviously, this is my first blog in a very long time. I spent all of my money on Diet Coca-Cola last semester, I didn’t pay my bill, my website went under suspension. I was too proud to take offers from very generous friends to loan me enough money for the bills, and therefore you all were left alone much longer than I meant for you to be.

That said, I don’t know where to begin. I certainly don’t want to sum up the past month and a half with one massive summing-up blog, but then, I don’t want to leave anything out, and then feel like I’ve shorted you all, adding insult to injury. Therefore, as a meager compromise, you’re going to get my top five* of the past month and a half.

5. Amy just made me a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. My grandparents grow tomatoes (tomatos?) every year, and offer us some of their supply. Being proper southerners, we can’t turn down such a wonderful offer, but those of you who know my family know that we don’t typically cook. Now, we all absolutely love cooking, but none of us have the time. So typically we’re left making sandwiches out of these fresh delicious tomatoes (tomatos?!). They’re exquisite, really.

4. I went on a few trips this month. Salkehatchie, as per the last three years, was a great experience for me. There’s nothing like a solid week of very hard work to make someone feel good. And then, Grand Assembly, my yearly statewide service group meeting. Along with these trips, I had a visit from a friend from far away. It gives me a renewed hope in blogging as an art form, now that I see how much can be learned about people through blogging.

3. I finally made the time to learn that parallel parking that everyone makes a big deal about. I then stood in line, filled out the forms, stood in line again, filled out some more forms, stood in line yet again, and took my driver’s test. I passed with.. well, I passed. Aside from a slight mis-judgement on the parallel parking and a left turn that took a little longer than it should have, I did well. Yay for newfound freedom. I then stood in line again, turned in some forms, stood in line again, had my picture taken, stood in line again, received the official proof of my legality, and drove home.

Gas prices jumped twenty cents since yesterday. Not even the karma bush can save me from this unfortunate turn of events.

2. Hopewood Academy has been a huge part of me for the past couple of years, and it continues to be a priority in my life. I’ve been working there this summer, and I will be teaching English there next year. While I taught a few English classes last semester, I was mostly guiding writing assignments, and of course the post-Spring-Break term is always the hardest to teach. I’m terribly excited about teaching next year, and I’m also a little bit nervous. I’ve never had an entire class to myself before, and it’s a lot of responsibility. I also know that, in a way, I’m sealing my fate with this decision. The last year or so I’ve been going through the decision of what to study at Lander, and what to do with myself after Lander. I have this suspicious inkling that after this, there’s no going back for me. It’s English all the way.

1. The Springdales are playing at the Black Cow coffee shop on July 22 (that’s a Friday night). You’d better be there. Two bucks to get in; but lack of the cover charge is absolutely no excuse for not being there. Actually, there is absolutely no excuse for not being there. The coffee is great, the location** is great, the music is fantastic. If I don’t see your face at that coffee shop, my disappointment will know no bounds.

There you have it. Five things. I’m trying, I really am, and I’m very sorry for the delay. I’m working on a photography project and the summer blogathon. More on both of those later.

*If you haven’t already, read High Fidelity. Well worth a read.

** In Honea Path. Here is the Google Map. For those of you unfamiliar, you may hover over the marker in the middle for driving directions.