This trip was fun. I flew down to Las Vegas from Seattle. Leaving home, I was late to the airport because of weather; the plane was also late to the airport so it was all right. I would have missed my connection in Long Beach CA so JetBlue bought me a ticket on Alaska. Their systems aren't integrated, so JetBlue had to cut a paper check to Alaska. (Fun fact: This check ($130) was approximately equal to the total fare I paid ($140).)

When I arrived, I came in several hours earlier than planned, so I was able to meet John Covert at his gate, which was in the same gate complex as I landed in.

Here should be paragraphs and paragraphs about visiting Death Valley, the Las Vegas Strip, and Hoover Dam. If I'm perseverant enough, I'll write them tomorrow on the airplane. In the meantime I'm skipping forward to tonight.

Aw fuck, I'm lonely and screwed.

In which I bitch about not knowing how to do things, and not wanting to spend money.

This afternoon (Wednesday afternoon), after I arrived at the airport and John departed on his way home to Massachusetts, it started to snow. Watching with a mixture of amusement and fascination, I commented on it to my friends over the free intertubes provided by the airport. Of course, when the departure time of my flight rolled around, there was a line of twenty in front of the departure counter, because the flight was cancelled. Sucks.

This was my first time being screwed on my own, I ought to say. I don't really have developed coping strategies, and I've never really done things on my own. Like an adult who doesn't know how to read but copes by coming up with excuses to get others to read for him, I've been getting along by travelling with friends who are more experienced or just more confident than I am. I've got some measure of confidence in my abilities, but not really that much. I just don't like to do things that need to happen. I just have trouble with maintaining myself, such as making appointments with doctors and so forth. So, I don't know, I had trouble with getting a hotel room and finding transportation to same. John was wonderful and threewayed me with an agent who helped me take care of registering the room, but I had to find my own transport.

Vegas has nothing in the way of public transit, and I didn't know any of it anyway. Cabs are a new animal to me, so first I looked for the shuttle bus terminal. This wasn't at all forthcoming. I bit the bullet and took a cab to this place, called “Tuscany Suites & Casino”. Cabs are expensive, damnit. The room's less than $22 after taxes (which is amazing, btw), but they make up for it by charging out the ass for everything else. About the only thing that's not an extra charge is an electrical outlet, and the bed. Room service is a $10 minimum, and everything costs $9 (clever, yes?). Local and toll-free calls are a $1 per call charge, while toll is a whopping $7 connect fee, plus AT&T rates, plus a surcharge of unspecified size. Wow. It's as if phone calls cost money again.

I don't really want to get dinner (this city isn't walkable at all, and the hotel food is expensive), so I'm considering just eating the rest of the package of oreos I have sitting next to me. Not healthy, yeah, whatever. Don't know what I'll do about breakfast tomorrow, maybe I'll skip dinner today and have oreos then. Breakfast is $9 delivered.

I don't know what there is to listen to on the radio, but there doesn't seem to be any dance station; it's all Latino music and christmas carols. This city is so focused on extracting money from people, and it's impossible to navigate in a reasonable amount of time on foot or transit. I don't want to ever live here.

Edit before I got to post this: Andy said he'd pay the $13 for wifi so I wouldn't be so lonely. *hugs* Andy, you're amazing and I love you.

I ought to write about something from my own life, but I'd rather share this anecdote that my father told this evening.

My grandfather was a bank teller to rather rich people during the Great Depression. Banks were collapsing for reasons similar to now; people were taking out more money than they were putting in.

Customers came to his bank in particular, asking for their money back. Typical practice was to give the customer a cashier's check for the full sum if it was over a certain amount, in order that they not be mugged on the street. Al (my grampa) was a perceptive man, and saw that his bank could end badly if every customer closed their account. He asked his boss what to do.

His boss said, "Give them their money. In cash."

So he did. He saw the wisdom of this plan shortly. The customers would take their money, say, $50,000. That's a lot of cash to carry; several pounds worth even in hundred dollar bills. The customer would walk across the lobby and get to the door, where he would see hungry people outside who probably wouldn't mind having a load of cash in their pocket.

At this point they would usually have second thoughts about carrying so much money about in such an economic climate, and re-open their accounts.

I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get my hair colored. My current favorite color is the orange-yellow of Kraft Macaroni & "Cheese".

I got my second paycheck on Friday. By Saturday I couldn't find it. *sigh* I think I'll ask if they can stop payment on it and set up direct deposit.

Working in a gift shop at a major tourist attraction leads to some interesting thoughts. Never mind the people who can't speak English, the drooling toddlers, etc. I'm disgusted by the level of waste in our society. I'm selling things which are completely unnecessary. They're mostly cheap trinkets, useless toys, and so forth. Most of this merchandise is likely to break within a year, if it even makes it that far. It's more likely to end up thrown away. Very little of it is useful in the first place. (How many shot-glasses can you use? Do you need another refrigerator magnet? Is it even possible to put all twenty of those iron-on patches on your clothes without looking like a whore?)

And yet yesterday I sold a thousand dollars worth. On Wednesday. That's a slow day. At one of four registers.

And here's a completely unrelated fact, to round out your day! Every day, the city of Seattle sends a mile-long train full of trash to eastern Oregon.

I ammmmm tired from work. But I have money! I want to go to a movie. Would anyone like to take me to a movie on Monday? I'll pay, all you have to do is plan it.

Checked my credit report today. According to all three credit agencies, I don't exist. TransUnion's website was the worst designed, I think. I was required to create an account and password and agree to a fairly innocuous contract. (For example, how many contracts have a sentence such as this?

This Agreement will take effect at the time you click "Accept" below, and shall terminate on the date your Personal Credit Report is no longer available on the TrueCredit web site (which shall be no less than 30 days from the date that report is provided to you on-line).

I don't know what this means in the case that my report fails to exist, which is what happened. It also didn't seem to make any soul-sucking requirements of me. Most notably:

If you do not accept these terms and conditions, TransUnion shall process your request in the same manner it does when it receives requests through the United States mail.

The agreement is optional!) Then they skirted the edge of not selling me things — they suggested that I sign up for their monthly email newsletter. If I choose to be bombarded with a helpful monthly message from your local Illinois credit agency, they'll send me a reminder to get my credit rating again next year. No thanks.

Today I went to the museum (again). The Audichron time announcement machine is working insofar as it speaks the time. Not hooked up to trunks yet, so you can't dial it. The 3ESS has a grand failure, we discovered; the multifreq receivers aren't working. So incoming calls are left high-and-wet. I installed a small PC as a replacement for the teletype. Now everything the cute little switch says is being recorded. Yes, I just called a computer the size of a pickup truck "cute" and "little". :P

I paid for my lunch using dollar coins, but not the Golden Dollar that the Mint is trying to get everyone to use. The bank only had Susan B Anthony and Sacajawea dollars, so I paid with a combination of those and quarters. The cashier didn't even blink; she recognized the SBA dollars as not quarters. Cool.

Perhaps there will be a #tcpa IRC meetup in Portland this July. (spengo take note; I actually mean it. I tried to arrange a meetup on the ticalc.org boards a long time ago, when I was in middle school. It didn't work but I didn't give up.)

Duncan's College Rejection Status List!

• Universith of Washington: Accepted
• Caltech: Rejected
• M. I. T.: Rejected
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Unknown (pending)
• Carnegie-Mellon University: Unknown (pending)

Today I went to Walgreens after school in order to purchase a box of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils. They didn't have them, so I had to satisfy myself with purchasing some nice blue pens, two Sharpies (Wikipedia, for the insatiably curious), and a set of Gillette razor blades (the Mach 3 Turbo, to be precise). Those razor blades are expensive! The package said "8 cartridges" and was above the sign for "$12.00". Actually, they were in a locked display case (the type usually reserved for cigarettes or guns) and were totally strewn about, so that the cartridges were actually more than $20 for a set of 8, over $2.50 each.

Update: Oh my. The Sharpie web site has a page with the MSDSs (Definition on Wikipedia) for all the Sharpie pens.

Have finally gotten out of my hormone-or-lack-thereof-induced funk. 2 weeks is way too long to be semidepressed and totally lacking energy. Perhaps I have a date. Time will tell.

Today I went on a nice long bicycle ride to the UW. I spent a couple hours at the Engineering Library and then went to University Village. I wanted to go to RadioShack, but the front was busted in. I have pictures; if you want to see I'll mail them to you or something. A car hit it, I think.

Instead I went to Barnes & Noble, where I bought a Naxos copy of Bach's WTK (Book I) and the Winter issue of 2600.

Don't you like hyperlinks? They tie the web together.

I spent most of yesterday and today writing what the National Merit people want of me: all my names, all my parents' names, all of that two more times, and an essay. The essay turned out OK. I've also got a MIT essay and a Caltech essay cooking. I can't do my applications online for Caltech or Stanford because it seems that my IP is blacklisted; UW's online application is impenetrable. Tomorrow I'm attending an information session for MIT in Renton.

At least four stories about what's going on at GHS in three days: (These are summaries of what I have heard. They do not necessarily represent my opinion, or anyone else's.)

Rye: The district is cutting classes blindly. If they tell me to go, I'll go, even though I don't want to.

Rye/Miranda/Woodward: They're out to get us, and have been for three years.

Labi: The district doesn't know what they're doing.

LJ: Howard is an asshole. He better not make me take five classes!

What are your stories?