Alright, I’ve finally completed something that I came across last year and thought was quite interesting. It’s called the “Photographic Interview” and was a project that was posted on sh1ft.org.

Anyway, here it is! Enjoy. 🙂

Question 1: Who am I?
Question 2: Who knows Me Best? (My sister)

Question 3: How old am I?

Question4: The most important thing in my life. (My Family)

Question 5: I always carry…

Question 6: Something I always do…

Question 7: I’m happiest when (I’m with my friends and making others laugh)

Question 8: On a Monday morning, you can find me…

Question 9: My favorite mode of transport.

Question 10: My eyes are…

Question 11: My favorite material posession

Question 12: To relax, I like to…

Question 13: The town I live in is…

Question 14: My worst habit

Question 15: My guilty pleasure

Question 16: When I look at someone, the first thing I see is…

Question 17: I think _____ is beautiful. (Sierra Nevada Mountains)

Question 18: One thing I can live without.

Question 19: One thing people don’t know about me. (Punched through a window in 7th grade and have a small scar on my wrist. Ouch!)

Question 20: My life is… (About taking the road less travelled)

I went out on Wednesday night to meet up with an old roommate and some of her friends to a place in Nob Hill. I haven’t seen her in AGES, so that was great. Hanging out with her definitely puts me in such a good mood. It’s crazy. It was good to see her though… we’ll have to throw more cooking parties together.

Anyway, the most interesting part of the night happened on the way home:

I managed to catch the last possible outbound train and I got off the subway at Forest Hill Station. From there it’s roughly a 1.5 mile walk to my house (since the buses were no longer running). About half of that is on a two-lane road that has a sidewalk on only one side. Next to the side walk is a 20 foot tall concrete wall. On the other side of the street is a small lake (but no sidewalk).

I walk out of the subway station and immediately smell a rancid smell that I haven’t smelled in years! It’s a damn skunk! I laugh and feel sorry for the poor soul who was nailed. I start to walk home and hit the beginning of the concrete wall. Up ahead I see a little furball scurring along the sidewalk.

“Hey look! A raccoon! How cute!” I think to myself. But upon closer inspection (and when I got too close, the bastard stood up on his front feet!!!!) I realized that it wasn’t in fact a raccoon. It was a skunk!!!

So I started talking to him and making some noise and he scurried along… towards the FAR end of the wall! Uggghhh! This was going to be a long walk.

Every time a car came, he stopped, since he was scared. And he wouldn’t cross the street (smart move actually), he just stayed on the sidewalk. If I got too close, he would stand on his front legs with his tail in the air… threatening to spray me!

At one point, after a car came, he started running back towards me! I panicked and started yelling at him, clapping my hands and making all sorts of noise. Finally he turned around and continued scurring along.

Eventually (thankfully it only took 15 minutes), we got to the end and he scurried into some bushes, never to be seen again. I was able to continue the last half of the journey home.

Crazy!

David and I decided to go as the video game characters, Mario and Luigi of the Super Mario Brothers! We got quite a few kudos for our costumes. That was awesome. 🙂

Things are starting to get in motion in regards to my 6-week long excursion to New Zealand during winter break for geology field camp. I thought I would go ahead and put together a list of links and just what the heck I am supposed to be doing for my friends and family who aren’t entirely familiar with my plans come Christmas.

Field camp runs from December 28th to February 7th, though it literally takes 2 days to fly there (~18 hours in the air, plus crossing the international date line). So I will end up leaving in the afternoon / evening on Christmas day (not sure if I’m flying out of San Francisco or LAX just yet). I’ll arrive in Auckland (North Island) on the morning of the 27th and take a small commuter flight to Nelson (South Island) where we will begin our trip!

We start our trip off on the South Island and end it 6 weeks later on the North Island in the city of Auckland. The schedule sounds intense… 6 days a week of working, with 1 day off (but all field camps are like this). 3 meals a day are provided for us as well!

We’ll be checking out things such as the Franz Josef Glacier too:

Anyway, I’m getting more excited as December approaches. My passport application has also been sent off and I should receive that the first week of December! This will be my first ever trip abroad and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

I decided to update the list of In N Outs that I’ve been to. Added a few in just 3 months! People seem to be sympathetic to my cause.

My sister and I decided to drive home this past weekend on a whim, to visit our parents and see how our mom was doing after having surgery on her wrist. It was a nice weekend to relax for a bit and get away from the hectic school life. The drive wasn’t all that bad either, at just over 6 and a half hours each way (I must have been speeding!) and the car performed flawlessly. To that I say, “Up yours Saturn of Colma!”

Anyway, some highlights from this weekend:

*Went to a bar with Dan, my sister and some of her friends. Here I am, nearly 500 miles from San Francisco and I ran into a girl I met *in* San Francisco, who used to be a roommate of one of my geology friends.

*Dan is getting rid of some of his musical gear, so I was able to pick up two of his electric basses. Sweet! On the way back home, I dropped one off at David’s since we were both talking about getting a bass recently. Now we both have some to play around on. I decided to break it in by recording a bass track for the last song I wrote, entitled “Out of Life.” Check out the new version here! The old version is here for comparison. 🙂 Thanks a lot Dan.

So it was nice to relax (in terms of no school work), even though we were only able to stay for two full days (which caused me to be quite exhausted and flake out on a few people as well).

Walking Home

Changing up subjects… I decided to walk the 3 miles home from school tonight after I got out of a class at 10PM and there was just something completely spooky about tonight. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a full moon. But all sorts of various things combined to make it feel weird tonight.

Walking down some of the side streets to my house, there wasn’t a single person around or even any cars driving. Most of the lights in the houses were off too. It’s a clear night with a full moon and a light wind blowing. The only thing I heard as I walked down the street were the rustle of leaves and some window shutters rattle (scary).

Of course there are a few houses around under construction and have some large tarps over their roofs. Whenever I walked by them, the wind would convienently pick up and catch the tarps, causing them to make loud snapping sounds as they flapped in the wind.

It’s weird to try and explain it. Just an odd night I guess. Maybe it also has to do with the fact that Halloween is just around the corner?

This is completely awesome news I just found out today. My Geology News blog (warning: tons of nerdiness) is gaining recognition and has been posted on the front page of About.com’s geology section!

I read this funny story a few weeks ago about someone’s experience on the SF Muni. After last night, I believe I have my own interesting “Muni Street Theater” experience.

My sister and I left late last night from a friend’s party in the lower Haight area and hopped on a bus to take us home. The bus stops at a fairly busy cross street (Fillmore I believe) and a rather wasted guy gets up from the back and tries to get to the door in time.

The bus begins to leave and he shouts “Back door!” The driver stops and waits for the man to exit. However, in his drunken state, he doesn’t remember to step down to open the back door of the bus. The bus driver figures no one is going to get off, so he leaves again.

This time the drunken man shouts “Hey!!! I said back door! Stop!” and the driver ignores him. Drunken guy stumbles to the front of the bus to yell at the driver. The driver pulls over at the next stop (only 2 blocks away) and asks him to get off the bus. The guy leans over to roll down his sock and pull up his leg, evidently showing the driver his knife and saying, “you see this?”

The driver unbuckles his seat belt, stands up and gets right in the guy’s face to say “I don’t care about that! Get off my damn bus!” The guy admits defeat and steps off without another word, which causes the whole bus to breakout in cheers and clapping.

It was definitely an awesome sight.

I received a HORRIBLE grade on my recent Chem II midterm. To sum it up… I never knew the grade scale went that low! I thought I did alright too right after I took it. I was WAY wrong.

So to make up for it, I’m now spending quite a bit of extra time doing my chemistry homework and studying. Almost finished with an assignment. It’s kinda crazy to admit… I’m having fun balancing random equations such as:

And many more (which explains why I’ve been at this since 8PM). Anyway, time for bed.

At our bonfire on Saturday night, I got a call from a friend in Southern California who was driving by our old house in Redlands that night. She said that there were something like 15 police cars around and the front yard was taped off in police tape with a forensics unit on site as well.

This was somewhat scary because my mom had sold the house to my sister’s friend a few years ago (after we both moved to San Francisco). I told my sister about the incident on Sunday and she called her friend to find out what happened.

Apparently her parents were vacationing in Mexico and her brother decided to throw a party… which turned into a massive event. They started trying to kick some people out and somehow some people got into a fight. A 19 year old was sent to the hospital with a punctured lung and one other person was stabbed in the hand! Ugh!

A local paper has a small blurb about it.

Officers who were called to break up a house party Saturday night in the 1400 block of Cambridge Avenue arrived on scene to blood in the street and reports of a stabbing. Four people were taken into custody following the incident, including one man believed to be a gang member, but none is a primary suspect in the stabbing, police said.

At 11 p.m. police arrived at the intersection of Cambridge Avenue and Lincoln Street where dozens of people were filtering out of a house party that had 50 to 75 people, said police spokesman Carl Baker.