School starts… erm, today! However, in a twist of amazing luck, my first class isn’t until 12PM. That means I can get some definite sleeping in time! Last week, I didn’t feel as though I was mentally prepared for this semester. After this weekend though, I think I’m ready to take it on. Before I explain, let’s talk about the events leading up to this weekend.

Last Sunday, I wanted to get out of the house, so I decided to go for a run. I haven’t done that in awhile, but it also served as a good chance to gauge my ankle. I ended up running two miles and my ankle didn’t bother me a bit! This is very good news and made me quite happy.

On Wednesday night, I decided to go play volleyball at the YMCA near downtown San Francisco. After not playing for nearly 3 months, it was nice to be on the court again. I think I did pretty well. I even recognized some people from the Berkeley YMCA when I played there. There were a few times when I was hitting the ball and landing that my ankle felt slightly sore, but it held up fine!

Finally, this weekend was the ultimate test. As many know, I’ve been wanting to do something before school starts. It seems like it has become somewhat of a tradition. A good way to clear my head and do some adventurous stuff before focusing on academics again. Initially, I planned a camping trip this weekend. As more and more people decided not to go, or weren’t able to go (and it eventually came down to just a girl I know and me going), we decided to scale it back to a one day trip so it wouldn’t be too ackward. So yesterday rolls around and things don’t work out for us to go. That’s fine! Life gives you lemons and you make lemonade (or something)! So I decide to throw a bunch of gear into my car on a whim and drive! I was dead set on going on an adventure before school starts, so I wasn’t going to let a lack of company stop me.

I drove two and a half hours down to Pinnacles National Monument. I’ve never been there before, but heard quite a bit about it from geology classes and friends. That place is AWESOME. I hiked a total of 15 miles over two days (and have a blister the size of a small country on my right foot to show for it). I definitely want to go back with some friends. The campsite was cool and the park itself was gorgeous.

They even have some caves there that I decided to explore!

I took quite a few pictures and put them up in my photo gallery:
My camping trip to Pinnacles National Monument.

Alright, in school related news, my schedule this semester looks like the following:
Engineering Geology
Petrology
Quaternary Geology
Volcanology

Yes! 4 geology classes. HOWEVER, I think I may try the “no-social life” approach that I almost perfected last semester by adding a fifth geology class on top of it: Geologic Mapping. Yes, I took that damn class at Cal State San Bernardino, but since you can’t be a geologist unless you have an ego, it is recommended I take this class since it supposedly teaches us more than the class I previously took.

Benefits:
1.) Theoretically, I can graduate THIS FALL. Realistically, the only thing left for me to work on in Spring of 2006 would be my senior thesis. Since I will be 24, I won’t be covered under my parent’s health insurance plan anymore, so it doesn’t matter whether I’m a full time student or not.

2.) My potential New Zealand trip in January/Febraury of 2006 may conflict with a class. If I get this out of the way… nothing to worry about conflicting! This means that after my fieldwork in New Zealand is wrapped up, I can spend an extra week or two to hang around and check out the scenery. That would be two whole months in New Zealand. NICE.

Drawbacks:
1.) 5 geology classes that ALL have field trips. That means I will basically have ZERO free weekends. That will also mean I can’t get a real job in order to pay bills (though I will be getting an AWESOME stipend next month for my help with the SF-ROCKS project).

2.) I want to go to grad school at Berkeley bad. Will I be able to focus with 5 classes and be able to pull off at least a 3.5 GPA (or more realistically, at least maintain a 3.0)?

3.) If I want to graduate by fall, that means I’ll have to be working on my senior thesis WHILE completing both Physics III, Chemistry II and one other crappy GE class in the fall. Unless… I can talk to an advisor and start working on my thesis over the summer?

Maybe I’ll go to all the classes this week and see what the work load is.

I’m back up north and ready to start school. Well, I shouldn’t say ready to start school though. However, there is still one week of winter break left before classes start.

My close friends from Southern California departed on Sunday night. It was a blast having them up here. There’s something about having your close friends from far away coming to visit you that is just awesome. We explored some new parts of the city that I haven’t spent much time in since I’ve moved up here. Those were some fun adventures.

I was able to check out some new music this week, courtesy of one of my geology friends, Peter. His uncle was playing a show at a small cafe. Definitely cool! It’s always inspiring to see musicians play in small intimate locations like that. Maybe one day, when I have free time…

In other random news, I applied for a position with the California Geological Survey. I should find out whether I get the job or not this week. I’m crossing my fingers. It sounds like it will be a fun job.

I’m hoping to do something this weekend before school starts. Basically one last hurrah before it’s time to get serious again. I’m thinking of a small little camping or hiking trip. Still some more planning to do. At the moment, Point Lobos or Pinnacles are looking like likely places.

Lastly, I’ve added some random pictures in the friends section of my gallery pages. A group pic from New Year’s Eve at Nic’s, and a few group pics from last weekend, as well as a few more random pics thrown in for good measure.

In 24 hours, I should be on the road and heading back towards home. The original plan was to have Dan and Nic ride with me and we would drive up to San Luis Obispo to meet up with Nate. We’d hang out in town for a bit, grab a bite to eat and then sleep. Then on Thursday, we’d all carpool up to San Francisco. This way would be nice since we’d break the trip up into 2 four hour segments. Thanks to the crazy storms of the past week, we may have to change up our plans. Highway 101 is closed thanks to landslides, so this eliminates a direct route to San Luis Obispo. Unless it’s cleared up by tomorrow, we may just have to push on towards S.F. and meet Nate up there on Thursday or Friday at my place. Ultimately, we’ll just have to see what tomorrow brings. It’s quite possible that they’ll have the 101 opened up by tomorrow evening since the storms are over.

This weekend, I spent some time hanging out with Brandee, a friend from USC that I made this summer during the internship for SCEC. For my birthday, she decided to take me to see a psychic. That was a fun/interesting experience. After driving around for a bit, we selected a psychic who was located about 3 blocks from where I used to live this summer. We walked in, told her what we wanted (a palm reading) and that was it. She went to work!

So what does my future hold? I will live to the ripe age of 82. I will not die from sickness or tragedy, just of old age. I’ll have 2 children, 1 female and 1 male. I’ll be married between the ages of 26 and 27. That was the general fluffy stuff in my opinion. Then she decided to delve into my past:

Lately, I’ve been seeking out too much advice from others and I need to just go with my gut feeling. (Interesting… I have been asking everyone and their mother about how I should plan this next semester after the hell I went through last semester. But then again, this seems like a general line you can feed to anyone)

I am disappointed with how I did in school recently. And I am not focusing on school as much as I should be. ( Okay, this is totally true. But then again, we’re right across the street from UCLA, it’s obvious I’m a college student. Most college students are striving to do better.)

She said that I went through some very difficult times two years ago. (This was downright wacky and scary. Exactly two years ago, I was in a relationship with someone that I thought was one of the most amazing people I had ever met that was is the midst of crashing into the ground. This was particularly difficult for me to deal with). But she says 2004 was better (she was right) and 2005 is going to be fantastic.

And lastly, apparently there is a girl in my life that I care for very much but she doesn’t necessarily feel the same way about me. (Err, I dunno about this. There are a lot of people I care about, so I can’t really think of who it would be). But she said to “give it time and things will change”. Of course she said this right in front of Brandee. By our body language, it’s obvious we aren’t dating, so maybe she was taking a stab in the dark? I’m not sure. Besides, that would violate my strict policy of not dating anyone from USC. 😛

We hung out at the Getty Center for a bit and then went to go to Dave and Buster’s. I started feeling naceous for some reason and had Brandee drive my car. Then I proceeded to spew my brains out all over the sidewalk on a few occassions. Oh yes. That was classy. It was nice of the psychic to tell me that I was going to be sick too! Oh right, she didn’t. 🙁

Evidentially I caught a nice flu bug that both my mom and dad were having at the exact same time. I was eventually able to drive the hour and a half from Brandee’s house back to my parent’s house (thankfully without having to empty the contents of my stomach). The rest of Saturday night/Sunday was a disaster in terms of this flu. Thankfully I am over it now though! I totally owe Brandee for driving us back to her place and putting up with all of that. She is the only person I know who has gotten a cheesy little Saturn to peel out. Hah!

Anyway, the next time I post, I should be back in the Bay Area!

It was exactly a year ago that I made the decision to move to San Francisco. I find it hard to believe how fast the time has flown by. A lot has happened since then. I feel like I’ve grown up quite a bit since I moved away and started living on my own, and have become quite a bit more responsible as well. Awesome changes all around. I think I have an interesting note I wrote down in a journal back in January of 2004 that pondered where I would be a year from now. I’ll have to dig it up when I return to S.F. in two weeks and post it. It’ll be an interesting comparison.

And where will I be in January of 2006? I’m going to New Zealand! (Still not official yet, but I am going to try to do everything in my power to go there). Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

Also, I think that I’ve finally conquered my irrational fear of roller coasters! I went to Magic Mountain yesterday with some friends and we went on nearly all of the rides! I had a blast and definitely wouldn’t mind going back again. Towards the end of the night, we all started feeling queezy though (of course most of that might be attributed to our New Year’s Party the night before). Regardless, it was a good time.

Anyway, changing to a more somber subject, it is amazing to see the amount of support people are showing for victims of the tsunamis. Right now, people have donated nearly 12.5 million to the Red Cross through Amazon.com’s donation system. The Red Cross alone is reporting nearly $48 million dollars in donations, which is incredible. Millions more have been donated to other organizations as well.

Regarding the tsunamis, my website apparently has a high Google ranking for anything relating to tsunamis. However, this is attributed to the fact that I have quite a few posts and photo galleries on this website dedicated to Tsunami Bomb, one of my favorite bands. In the last few days, my website has gotten over 400 hits from people searching Google and other search engines for tsunami related information. As a consequence of this, the search engines take them to my Tsunami Bomb photo galleries!

I know for a fact this isn’t what a lot of these people care to see. So to help facilitate the spreading of information, I coded up an interesting script that runs on all pages of the website. Basically, it uses PHP and it detects if the referring URL contains the words “tsunami” and “bomb.” If so, then the script doesn’t do anything, taking the user directly to the photo galleries, which is most likely what they want to see. However, if it detects the word “tsunami” but WITHOUT the word “bomb”, the script then intercepts the incoming visitor and redirects them to a special page I setup with information on the tsunami. You can view that page here.

I have to say, I absolutely LOVE using PHP for web design stuff. It is quite powerful and you can do some awesome things with it.

Anyway, for those interested (or for future hits from Google that are searching for how to do PHP redirects) I’ll post the code below for your own use.