Snow? In APRIL?

April 11, 2003

You know, I thought about posting another update earlier this week, but I figured since I’d done one only a day or two earlier, I thought I’d wait…and I kept waiting, although I didn’t realize it. So here I am…uhh…finishing waiting, not remembering. Right, that’s it. It’s been a pretty bizarre week, but it’s ending pretty well. Let me summarize what I saw through my window: pure white. That’s right, it snowed on Monday and Tuesday, dropping about two inches or so. It’s all gone now, and with the 65 degree weather we had yesterday, you’d never know that a few days ago it got frigid again. I had some hopes that it would snow on graduation to make it especially memorable, but I doubt that will happen.

Speaking of graduation, it’s getting closer. In fact, it’s just a month from today. Thankfully, I can now count every single piece of schoolwork left to do on one hand. I got both my presentation and my second exam out of the way for my senior seminar class this week, plus I turned in the second draft of my independent project. That means that before the end of the year, I have: a 6-8 page paper on Angola, topic of my choice, a 10 page research paper for my Africa class, topic of my choice, final draft of my senior seminar paper, final draft of my independent project paper, and my Quant client project and presentation. The presentation is the last real thorn in my side. I’m not too worried about the first two papers since they’re both pretty short and on topics of my choice, but the client project will represent a significant portion of my time once I get rolling. I summarize it more when I have some more information about what I’m actually supposed to do.

I also got my taxes done this week, which took me far less time than I imagined. The IRS has really gone out of its way to make tax preparation much easier in the last ten years or so. Granted, I’ve only been doing taxes for about six or seven now, but I remember seeing jokes about how bad taxes were fairly recently. I used an online tax preparation site by Intuit (makers of Quicken) that’s free if you have an income below a certain level (I do). You just fill in the blanks, and you’re done. They calculated a refund of $27 for me between my state and federal taxes, which is about the same as I’ve gotten for the last few years. I just haven’t earned enough to get a substantial refund. Maybe next year I’ll get some back, of course, that depends on finding a job.

Which brings me to my next topi: job hunting. I’ve been pretty darn busy over the last few weeks, and I haven’t even found time to play any games. That should tell you how little time I’ve had on my hands, since the games are never the first thing to go. I may have mentioned this already (stop me if you’ve heard this one–oh wait, you can’t, so just sit back and listen, then!), but I posted my resume on Monster.com, and that’s all I’ve had time for. I haven’t even been able to get out any applications. I’ve gotten a couple of calls about jobs, two emails, but I haven’t done anything about them. OK, let me rephrase that. I got a couple of generic calls and two pieces of job spam. The first call was a couple of weeks ago, right in the middle of “West Wing.” I happened to be back in my room grabbing another beer, and the phone rang. The woman who called me was letting me know about an informational session for a job in Madison, but it was clear that she hadn’t even read my resume and had just pulled people from Monster.com with a 608 area code. First of all, I say on my resume I’m not looking for jobs in Wisconsin. Secondly, I say that I’m graduating, so I won’t even be around in a month, and the training sessions start BEFORE then. Thirdly, I have no transportation to get to any training sessions in Madison. That really kind of bugged me. I let her get through the entire spiel before I crushed her hopes of a new recruit. The job sounded pretty crappy, anyway. Something about phone and email support for a company that sells meditation and personal growth products…. I kid, O Sister of Mine, I kid! No, it was some sort of collection agency, is what it sounded like. She assured me without my asking that it WASN’T a collection agency, but that’s what it boiled down to. The second call…well, I’m not sure I could call it a call, even. The phone rang at 9:15 in the morning, my caller ID said “Unknown Caller”, and when I picked it up, I heard the first half-second of a greeting, and then the line went dead. No one called back, so I can only assume that it was some sort of telemarketing–either a job, or Columbia House begging me to come back. The two emails I got were spam. They linked to a “company” site with positions supposedly available, but the positions were so generic and no specific location that the company was probably bumpkus and just a scam to get personal information such as your email address (especially since the application form you had to fill out to “apply” for the jobs just said you were subscribing to a job newsletter). I did a lookup of the details behind who owned the domain name, and it was someone in France. Right. There’s a “job” for me. So no real responses yet.

The rest of this week has been spent doing one or another thing. We didn’t have any classes yesterday, which was very nice and meant I could sleep in, but since I had to write a paper all day, I couldn’t go outside and enjoy the 65 degree weather with my pints of Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Pale Ale that I picked up earlier in the week. Damn. Maybe this afternoon. I have a meeting at 2 with Ann to talk about the second draft of my paper, and then I’m going with my friend Ali to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things, so maybe I’ll have some time to sit out in the quad after that. It’s in the 40’s here right now, but I’m hoping it will get up into the 60’s. We didn’t have any class yesterday because it was Student Symposium day, where students who have been working on projects can get nominated by a faculty member to present their data to anyone who wants to sit in on the presentation. I didn’t get nominated, although there may be a requirement that your project has to be DONE by presentation time. I’m somewhat insulted that I didn’t get nominated anyway, although I’m mostly relieved that I didn’t, because there is NO WAY I could have gotten a presentation done in time with all my other work. Dan did one for his computer science class, and he hadn’t even started his presentation materials by Wednesday afternoon. I thought about going and supporting him, but it was at 8:40 in the morning, and you know…sleep and all. I was up until 3 AM the night before, so getting up for a pre-9 AM presentation wouldn’t have been the best of ideas. I’ve been staying up later and later, for some reason, and most weekends I’m in bed around 4 AM, at least for the past few weekends. I went to be “early” last night at 12:30, even though I didn’t have class until noon today. I did have to get up and turn in my paper by 9 AM this morning, hence why I’m writing now. I’m here, and I have nothing better to do. No offense.

So my plans for this weekend include beginning my Angola paper…and that’s it. Nothing else. That’s all the work that I *have* to do this weekend. I’ll probably start collecting data for my client project in Quant, but that’s not my number one priority. I guess that’s about all I have for now, so this is Andrew, signing off. Have a good weekend.

Very nice out today after all.