Last year, I was able to take summer classes at my community college to get some really easy transfer credits for my main university. I planned on doing that this year as well; if you read my blog post from two days ago, you know that I recently took my first day of class for this summer semester.

Unfortunately, it’s not going to be quite that easy this semester.

I’m taking nine credits’ worth of class (which is the same as last year), but this year, I have two online classes instead of one. One of the online classes is a literature course, where we have to (literally) read the equivalent of one book a week (I say “equivalent” because sometimes we have to read poems or short stories, but on those weeks, we have several of them to read). Fortunately, the due dates for my second online class are staggered such that one entire unit is due every handful of weeks, rather than having small assignments due every few days.

This literature course is a lot more intensive than I was hoping for, and I ended up having to cram a ton of stuff earlier today because the due date for five different assignments was today at 5 PM, and I found out about all the assignments on Tuesday late afternoon.

This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be spending less time posting stuff on my website, but it does mean that this migration process is going to take a lot longer than I had hoped because I’m going to have a lot less opportunities to sit down and do a lot of time-consuming work related to something that isn’t as urgent as my academic work.

On the bright side, if any of the papers I write for this class end up being interesting, I’ll post them on my website like I used to a long time ago when I wrote interesting papers more frequently in the past.

Today was the first day of summer classes for Ed and me. We’re taking a few courses each at our local community college so we can transfer credits into our regular universities. Last year, we made a video; we did the same this year, but didn’t get as much good footage, so I’m probably going to save it for an unseen footage video.

When we arrived on campus, we noticed that there was a huge panel blocking the entrance that we took into the building last year, so we had to go around through a different entrance. Apparently, they shut down the center intersection of the building so you can’t go from one half of the building to another without having to walk all the way around the outside of the building.

During lunch, Ed and I went to McDonalds, like usual. We each received a free sample of a cherry-flavored slushie, and received two straws. Ed grabbed both straws and unraveled then. Then, he proudly thrust both straws into his sample.

He proudly looked at me with his troll face on and asked, “You thought I was opening this for you?”

After Ed’s second class was over, he came out to the car and texted me telling me that he was done. I made my way out of the computer lab where I was taking my online class to find that Ed had removed his sandals and given my car some eyebrows.

After we returned home, I stopped by Ed’s house for about an hour or so. Meanwhile, three tiny children who live in Ed’s neighborhood decided it would be a great idea to come up to Ed’s door and accuse us of calling them big fat jerks, even though I had never seen them before in my life. I’m not quite sure what they were attempting to accomplish, but I think that Ed’s dad completely missed the point as to why they were at our door. Instead of acknowledging that they were even making an accusation at all, he told them to stop playing on his driveway because it’s dangerous, and if he’s not paying attention, he might run them over with his car when he’s coming back home.

I told them to stop being stupid liars and to go away.

They went away.

This past Wednesday, I took Ed Lam (also known as Grainyrice on the Internet) with me to martial arts to take a taekwondo class. According to Ed, this was the second time he had ever gone to a martial arts class. During his first class, all he did was play leap frog around the gym. So basically, this was his first real martial arts class.

The mass chaos started even before we arrived – on the way there, Ed got an epic foot cramp that inca­pac­i­tated him for over a full minute. According to Ed, the experience brought him enough pain that he felt he was “giving birth to his foot.” Apparently, some of his toes were stuck together, and he was arched over in misery for quite a while.

Upon arriving, Ed sat off to the side while I instructed an intermediate and advanced children’s class that takes place right before the adults’ class that Ed and I were going to take. I’m pretty sure Ed got pretty jealous at the intense skills the kids had.

When the time came for Ed to join in, we started with some warm-ups. A part of the warm-ups included everyone in the class counting off ten jumping jacks. Ed was last in line, and he started counting. He seemed to be doing great: “1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 …”

At this point, I realized what Ed had done and stopped mid-jump to start cracking up in laughter. The remainder of the class started giggling as well, and our master (who is the equivalent of the head instructor) started at him with a “…” expression on his face.

Ed finished counting up, “8, 9, 10,” then acted as if nothing silly had happened. I notified Ed of his error, then realized that Ed most likely had no idea that he had even forgotten the number 5. He stood in confusion for a little bit, did one additional jumping jack, counted it as “5,” then smiled in contentment.

Normally on Wednesdays, we do sparring drills – that means, we put chest guards on and kick each other around to practice combat techniques. Unfortunately, today, we didn’t have enough people who brought their own sparring gear, so we ended up doing cardiovascular exercises instead.

A little over half-way through the 45-minute session (about 15 of which were used for stretching and warm-up drills), I noticed that Ed was missing. I looked around and saw him hunched over in the corner trying to catch his breath. He disappeared for a little while again, most likely to take a bathroom break and get some water, then came back looking as if he just experienced the most terrifying thing in his life. Moral of the story: Ed is weak. If you ever have to fight him one-on-one, just let him run around for five minutes and he’ll get exhausted, then he won’t have any endurance left to keep fighting. Also, we need to keep making fun of Ed so he starts exercising more.

The day following the work-out, Ed let me know that he was barely able to get out of his bed in the morning, and was unable to climb up the stairs without the help of his hands.

Earlier today, we had promotion testing for our taekwondo program. You might remember from last year that there are two promotion tests over the summer; I posted a few pictures from one of them. Our grandmaster brought his camera and took a bunch of photos, but they haven’t been uploaded to the Internet yet; when they do get uploaded, I’ll share some on my website in a future blog post.

Have you ever wondered how gas stations get refills?

A massive truck like the one pictured here comes along and shoves its giant hose into a hole in the ground, pumping gas into the deep abyss.

I dunno, at the time, I thought it would be a great idea to take a picture of this. Then I found it on my iPod Touch and wanted to do something with it so it would stop collecting dust, so I posted it here. The best part is, I wasn’t even able to center the camera on the actual hose that was pumping gas into the ground, and part of it is cut off by the right edge of the photo.