If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know that I used an automatic dishwasher for the first time in my life a few days ago.

I only have about ten plates and bowls, two cups, and a handful of eating utensils to wash anyway, which isn’t much and wouldn’t take long to do it by hand, but I decided to test out the dishwasher, both for the experience and because my apartment started charging an extra flat fee of $10.75 for water and sewage this year.

A few things to keep in mind when using the dishwasher:

Don’t put plastic stuff in there. I don’t exactly know what happens inside the dishwasher after I close it, but after the cycle was done, I opened it and all the plastic containers I put in there were all over the place. One of them was hanging off a fork, another flew up to the top compartment, and another fell to the bottom near the spinning blades (of death).

The soap that you use in the dishwasher is different than the one you use to wash your dishes by hand. I fortunately already knew this, but one of my Twitter followers reminded me (even though he was two days late). If you’re curious what happens if you do use regular soap in an automatic dishwasher, have no fear, Jenna Ezarik already did it for you and vlogged about it a little less than a year ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHlDj_KTNGQ

My experience was a tad bit more successful. A few of the plates on which I ate rice came out a little dirty because apparently dried rice doesn’t wash off very easily in automatic dishwashers. But other than that, I’m glad I used this dishwasher and saved ten or so minutes of my life.

Today is Labor Day in the United States of America, which basically means people celebrate working by not working.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to me, because I went to work at the Badger Herald today to get our first issue of the semester published online. But apparently, this does apply to the bus drivers.

When I was done working, I checked the transit tracker to find out when the next bus would arrive. I clicked on my route number, direction, and location, and clicked “Get Departure Times.”

The website responded with “No Schedule Found.”

So today was the second time in the past three days that bus routes were detoured and rerouted for random reasons and I had to do extra walking. In today’s case, I had to walk all the way back home because none of the buses were in service, not even the “SAFEride” buses that are supposed to run past midnight to safely give you a ride back home.

#SafeFail

You can go ahead and criticize me for not being considerate of the bus drivers and not letting them have a day off on Labor Day, but I feel I can safely bet money on the fact that there are plenty of bus drivers who don’t care about Labor Day and would rather work and get some extra income.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog for the past few weeks or so, you might remember a blog post about my last day of tae kwon do training at Chicago Martial Arts until this coming winter when I return home. Unlike the past, I decided to keep on training even away from home, so I joined the tae kwon do club at my university.

The club website showed that today was going to be a tae kwon do open gym from 2 PM until 4 PM. I decided to attend, so I hopped on a bus that took me from near my apartment to right in front of the gymnasium where the club meets.

I managed to find the multi-purpose sports room we were in and waited outside the locked door. About ten minutes after I arrived, a freshman who was new to the university showed up too. We sat, chatted, and waited for over half an hour but nobody showed up.

… So I went back home.

I emailed our head instructor and got a response after I returned to my apartment. Apparently he was traveling and could not attend class today, but regardless, sometimes, during open gyms, instructors don’t show up and the students can work on whatever they feel they need to work on with each other.

And apparently I could have just gone up to the front desk and asked them to unlock the room.

So yeah.

That didn’t turn out very well.

Today I discovered that in Sony Vegas Pro 10, the shortcut key combination to pause is Ctrl+F12.

Ctrl+F12?!

How is that even a shortcut?

In other news, I’m still working on getting as much Badger Herald work done before my classes get difficult. If you read yesterday’s blog post, you know that I had my first day of class yesterday, but we haven’t really gotten into anything that requires much of my attention, so I’m spending this time some extra extraneous work done.

In other other news, today was one of the days of the Taste of Madison where a bunch of people gather around and eat an excess of food unnecessarily. If you know me, you probably know that I’m not the type of person to go to something like this, and you’re right if you guessed that I didn’t go to the Taste of Madison.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that because the Taste of Madison is going on, the bus routes that go near the Herald office (which happens to be very close to the Taste of Madison) are being rerouted to completely different locations.

So what happens then?

I have to walk around for about eight blocks in a zig-zag spiral to find a bus stop that’s actually in service.

In the time it took for me to find a bus stop that’s in service, I probably could’ve just made it back home by walking.

That’s all for today; I’ll see you tomorrow with another (hopefully slightly more positive) story.

Today was my first day of classes for the Fall 2011 semester.

To get ready for such a big day, I had three waffles for breakfast.

Actually, three waffles is what I normally eat for breakfast and isn’t really a special breakfast for a big day. But either way, that’s what I had.

I have three classes on Fridays – sociological theory, zoology, and music.

According to the syllabus and our first day of class, in sociological theory, I’m going to be reading tons of original sociological works written by historic sociologists like Weber and Marx to find out how classical sociological theories can relate to modern-day issues.

My zoology class bears a frightening resemblance to a basic biology course, so I’m not sure how much I’m going to like zoology. Regardless, I have to take it as one of the requirements for one of my majors.

My music class is a music appreciation class – I basically go to class, listen to people playing music, answer five questions related to the performance, and get credit for the course as long as I miss two or fewer performances.

I have a slightly busy Labor Day weekend ahead of me, so I’m going to go to sleep.

… Or at least try to go to sleep.

I noticed something very interesting about my ceiling today.

I discovered a stain, and it’s in the shape of a pig.

In other news, I have a package at my apartment building right now that’s sitting inside a mailbox for which I do not have a key.

In case you don’t know yet, I switched rooms in my apartment building on the day of my move-in because of some issues I had with appliances and because I was fortunate enough to be offered a room that was recently remodeled.

I ordered some stuff to be delivered to my apartment before I got here and before I knew I was going to switch rooms. I was expecting my mailbox number to be the one before I switched rooms, so I set the shipping address to that mailbox number.

Now that I no longer live in the corresponding room, I no longer have the key to that particular mailbox and don’t have access to anything delivered to that mailbox.

I got an email with a delivery confirmation that said my package already arrived, and I’m pretty confident that the package in question is currently sitting inside my old mailbox because a front-desk staff member looked through all of the packages that were too big to fit in mailboxes (mine is small enough to fit in a mailbox, but he checked just in case) and he didn’t find anything with my name on it.

So now I have to wait for a manager to come in tomorrow and open my old mailbox for me.

Until then, my package is being held hostage.