The perks of being a pack rat

My old room here has a mind boggling amount of stuff. Since my Mom is planning on moving in the next year, and since this is likely to be the last time I'll be staying at home for over a week, I'm going through the innumerable shoeboxes of trinkets, notes, pictures, and mementos that I have been hoarding since 4th grade, when we moved here.

This picture is what happened when my dad handed me his camera when I was six.

It's strange to look through the "important" boxes of items I deemed valuable. I'm throwing out things I thought I would find important (student council campaign fliers, hundreds of inane notes passed between classes), and I'm discovering things that I previously considered common which I now cherish. This postcard my dad sent me when I went to camp one summer, for example (Chow Fun was his cat, and my dad used two different colored pens):

Dear Caroline
Chow Fun and I really miss you- he asks about you every day just before he eats. I hope you are having a good time. Chow Fun hopes you come back soon to feed him.
MDC + CF

I guess you had to know him.

In other news, post-college life just got a lot scarier. It's sad when things can't work out how you wish they would.

New Year's Eve (posted only 1 week late)

Matt, Justin and I went to Sea of Dreams (www.seaofdreamsnye.com) up in San Francisco. The theme was "7 heavens", and we decided to fully participate and dress up. Luckily, I found something appropriate in the collection of my outrageous figure skating costumes.



Me and my (infamous) sister.






Haha. Bambi eyes.

I made lots of friends! This guy had a fuzzy cape, and a magic stick.

I spent most of the night dancing around and petting all the fuzzy costumes.

Highly memorable. I definitely want to go again next year!

Pittsburgh to Palo Alto Road Trip, in pictures:


The landscape was this exact scenery for two whole days of driving. The midwest is boring.


Matt forgot his sunglasses, so he borrowed a pair of mine.



I wish gas stations in CA had dinosaurs.





Something other than flat plains! Exciting!




Utah was empty. Seriously. I think we may have passed 2 gas stations while driving across the entire state. The plateaus and snow were pretty, though.


We made it to Las Vegas. Matt was excited, as shown by the above picture.


Back in California. Unfortunately, Central California looks a lot like the Midwest.



In conclusion, almost everything between the two coasts is excruciatingly boring. I'd suggest getting rid of all of it, except they probably grow a lot of food, and I like food.

Things between me and graduation:

- Design report
- Design presentation
- Design prototype
- Analysis homework (1 of 4 problems left)
- Solids report (95% done already)

I don't think I've absorbed the fact that I'm done with classes.

ROCKET SHIPS

02/01/07: San Francisco to Sydney, Australia (via Los Angeles)
02/16/07: Sydney, Australia to Auckland, New Zealand
02/23/07: Auckland, New Zealand to Bangkok, Thailand
03/01/07: Bangkok, Thailand to Frankfurt, Germany (via Bahrain)
03/29/07: Paris, France to San Francisco (via Frankfurt)

Total: $2512.00

Currently stressed over the job situation.

I can't believe I'll be done with my degree in one month.

I think I'm buying the ticket outlined above tomorrow morning. Does anyone have any experience/opinions about RangeRoamer cell service (http://www.rangeroamer.com/)?

Watching the O.C. makes me overly emotional. It's such a horrible show, but I can't seem to stop watching.

Halloween 2006!




I thought the costumes were only mildly inappropriate, but we ended up getting a lot of positive and negative responses. Matt isn't a perv. Like any good english teacher, he just wants to help us with oral skills ;)

Just over a month until I'm done at CMU. Life after college, at this point, is terrifying. I'm looking at job offers, trying to figure out what my best option is.