the west is dead and it's burning

For the past two weeks, I've had a personal soundtrack entirely composed of songs by the Books. I hope it keeps up; it's nice having songs in my head that I never get tired of listening to.

Our road trip is going to begin in three days. I don't know what to do with myself. Pack, I suppose, since the trip is on the way to my internship, and I'll be pretty unhappy if I don't pack with foresight and judiciousness.

At work I'm also getting ready to leave, but in a strange way. I think my advisor thinks that leaving on Friday will make me superhuman. She wants a first version of this journal paper before I go, and I have stupidly committed myself to completely rewriting the whole analysis section (formerly three chapters) so that it addresses the three cases in parallel rather than one at a time. There's a good reason to do it this way, but right now I'm regretting what I got myself into.

This week marks a lucky confluence of many events: I had enough money to buy the digital camera I've been wanting right before we leave to go on the road trip. So it's just in time. Then I went to get a memory card for it, and there was a strange technology-price inversion where the really huge one was actually cheaper than either of the two capacities of cards I had originally thought it would be reasonable to buy. Finally, at work they are upgrading the network, so I'm working from home on the very same morning that my camera is supposed to arrive by UPS, and I don't even have to feel bad about it. Matt says he'll let me host pictures in his space, so I'll post some when it arrives. Clearly I can't take pictures of the camera itself, but I'll take example pictures or something.

Oh, and just now my biggest little brother B. told me he was standing around wearing his brand new tae kwon do uniform, which fills me with family pride and brotherhood and shit. I taught him how to tie his belt over IM. Aww.