Summertime

The "random" feature on my car mp3 player is the best thing ever.  This morning it happened upon the Counting Crows’ album "August and Everything After."  That album is so old, and it’s still so supremely good.  Now granted, I’m emotionally attached to it from having listened to it over the last 8 years or so, but still... music changes and styles change, but that album is really really good even today.

In looking over my photos from the AT hike, I realized that I have the same issue that my mom does when it comes to photography.  My photos tell many of the stories and events of my life, but they do it distinctly through my own eyes.  Which may seem quite natural, but as I reflect upon it sometimes it’s strange to realize that these stories of my life contain very few photos of myself.  And even though the objective beauty or "neatness" of a given photo may be its most important quality, it occurs to me that in the long run (i.e. after I’m gone), my photos’ personal value will have been much greater for me than for my friends and family, because of the dearth of photos of myself.  But they are after all my photos, so maybe that’s entirely sensible.

Speaking of photos, Garrett’s photos make me want to cry every time he takes a new set of them.  His latest ones of downtown Savannah are a case in point.  They’re all so remarkably vibrant and interesting.  It’s not that I don’t like my own photos, not at all, but Garrett produces like 2 or 3 beautiful photo sets each week.  He’s just consistently amazing.

On an entirely random note, last Thursday was an awesome day.  (I wanted to post about this before but just didn’t get around to it till now.)  First of all, since I was off work Monday-Wednesday for the hike, Thursday and Friday really had no choice but to be awesome, because they comprised a two-day work week.  But on Thursday, there was a Unisys student employee event in the cafeteria from 2pm-5pm.  There were a couple speakers who talked about what it’s like to work here (hey, this is my 4th year here, so I know by now...), and then there was a scavenger hunt.

My first thought upon learning that there would be a scavenger hunt was, "You have got to be kidding me.  What are we, kindergarteners??"  But it turned out to be a hunt for things like Unisys’ 2002 revenue ($5.6B), the number of raised-dots on the metal techroom doors (it’s 11x17x2 dots), and the FCS date of our ES7000 server to Microsoft (I don’t remember, and I don’t feel like walking down to that end of the building right now... sorry).  So it was pretty fun.  But what really rocked is the fact that me and my man Mark teamed up and conquered it, beating the other ~60 co-ops/interns, and won $20 movie passes.  Then, they brought out ice cream and big bowls of caramel, chocolate syrup, cherries, sprinkles, and nuts, and we all made sundaes.  You just can’t beat that.  And when there was a bunch of ice cream left over, me and Mark decided to take it back to our hallway and hook our group up with it.  We’re going for intern and co-op of the year awards : )

Two guys who I’d never met before were going to see Finding Nemo right after work, and they invited me and Mark.  Well Mark had just popped 2 tires on his car the night before, so he had to get that taken care of.  But I went, and it turns out both these guys are Christians!  Super phatty.  Anyway we went in, and Finding Nemo was playing in 3 theaters.  We were about 10 minutes late, so we walked in and it had already started.  But when it was over in about 45 minutes, we walked out and realized that we had gone into the wrong theater!  So we went into one of the other ones where a new showing was just starting, and watched the first half after having already seen the last half.  It was rather a strange way to watch a movie, let me tell you.

Oh... it’s finally summertime here!  After 2 months of rain nearly every single day (there were something like 4 non-rainy days in 2 months...ugh), we’re finally getting a break this week.  It’s forecast to be sunny and 80° or 90° pretty much all this week, even into the weekend.  Amazing.  So, the song of the week is Summertime by Mae.