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.

Tip of the Day: If you’re going to spray a computer with compressed air to get some of the dust out, make sure you’re actually holding compressed air and not insect repellant.

Anyway…

So the whole point of waiting until today to take pictures of my room was to open the blinds and get good lighting. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures this morning because I went straight to the Badger Herald office this morning and stayed there for a majority of the time I was awake. I have a feeling the same thing is going to happen tomorrow as well, so I decided to just turn on all the lights I have and take the pictures now.

This picture is of my bed and the view of the hallway leading to the door. The bed is a retractable bed, so if I were to need more space in my room for any reason, I could fold up my blanket and pillow and lay them flat on the mattress, flip over the mattress securing bar, then lift the entire thing upwards so it fits into the cabinet-like structure.

This is my kitchen area and my abundance of cabinets. I brought tons of stuff to Madison, but all of it easily fit in the cabinets and I have plenty of space left over. I also have a separate eating area (which I did not have in my older studio), and plenty fo outlets for appliances.

Finally, this is my desk and dresser area from the view of the door. It looks a little cramped up because I have a huge dresser and I have storage boxes that I’m not sure where to keep, but there’s plenty of space there to live and move around a bit.

I moved back to Madison today and arrived early this afternoon.

Before we left, my mom packed up a lot of food for me so I can freeze it and take it out little by little to have a supply of homemade food in my apartment. When we arrived at my new studio, we were depressed to find out that the refrigerator in this studio was not as large as the refrigerator in my previous studio (it was more like a third of the size of the old one), and instead of having a completely separate freezer section like my old fridge, it had no freezer at all.

When I went to the front desk to ask for potential solutions to this problem, they said that they didn’t have any spare refrigerators that they could switch with the refrigerator in my new room, but they did have another studio that I could move to that had a slightly larger refrigerator. I agreed to take a look at the other studio (which was the only other studio that was empty), and realized that the refrigerator was slightly larger and had a small freezer box attached to the top of the main refrigerator section. Still not anywhere near as good as my old refrigerator, but better than the studio I was originally scheduled to move in to.

I agreed to switch to the other studio, but the refrigerator only had a small impact in my decision to switch. Instead, the main reason I switched was because the other studio was recently remodeled and had tons of new appliances. Most other studios don’t come with a dishwasher and range, but the one I was offered did. Also, most other rooms have their walls painted a dark, gloomy brown, but the one I was offered was painted in a lighter beige that didn’t absorb all the light. It also had tons of cabinets where I could store dry foods and other stuff – way more cabinets than would be offered in any other studio.

I’m still working on getting everything organized and put away.

As for all the food that was supposed to be frozen, my mom took a lot of it back because without being frozen, it would most likey go bad before I ever got a chance to eat it. She put as much as she could in the medium-sized refrigerator that I have now, and my parents said that would probably just go buy a separate small freezer in which to store food.

I’ll post pictures here of my new room like I did last year, but I’ll wait until tomorrow when there’s better lighting so you can actually see stuff in the photos. Meanwhile, I’m going to finish unpacking and go to sleep early so I can wake up early tomorrow morning and go back to the Badger Herald office to get some work done.

If everything goes as planned, I will be moving back to my university campus in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow night. I’m not very well prepared and haven’t really started packing anything yet, so I should probably get going on that.

In other news, I found out today that someone cited me as a reference when writing a Wikipedia article a few months ago. Does that count as an accomplishment?

Finally, I’m also going to copy and paste my "Quick Update" that I had on my home page all summer long into here for archiving purposes, seeing as the summer is now over and the information contained in the update is no longer relevant.

What have you been up to / Why aren’t you online as much anymore?

Contrary to most other past summers, I’ve been keeping myself extremely busy lately, and the time I have to chat and reply to messages online has become extremely limited (so limited that I decided to throw this up on my website rather than individually respond to emails saying why I’m busy).

• I am taking three three-credit courses over the summer. I have to spend six hours a day, two days a week, attending class on campus, and several hours per week out-of-class doing homework, studying, and attending my online class. (Classes are over as of August 10, 2011.)
• I am working at the family business at least four days a week every day (seven days a week) for anywhere between 3 to 5 hours a day.
• I went back to doing martial arts again. I instruct and train in a group class setting four times a week about 1.5 hours per day. (My last day for the summer was August 25, 2011; I will be returning during winter holidays.)
• I spend a huge chunk of about one day a week doing other miscellaneous family-related work.
• I am doing a handful of website-related projects for the Badger Herald, which is where I work while university is in session.
• I still blog daily, which means a lot of free time I spend online is spent posting content rather than instant messaging or thinking of creative responses to your emails.
• I read and finish a book on average about once every two or three days three to four days, both for my own enjoyment and so I have another thing to blog about.
• I am studying for a standardized exam that I will be taking in the near future.
• I sleep at least 8 hours a day, because I don’t believe in cutting back on sleep and harming your body to make your day feel longer.

This doesn’t mean I’m not going to reply to emails anymore, but it does mean that my responses will not be as elaborate as they might have been before, and it might take longer for you to receive a response.

My hours of availability for instant messaging will usually be between around 10 PM and 11 PM US Central time.