twitter.com

So I've decided to set up a twitter. We'll see if it's any good. Follow me at twitter.com/the_t_files.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Oh, and: Fish fish fish fish fish.

I got to talk to the secret service yesterday.

That's all. I thought it was cool. I don't know if I can say anything other than that, so I won't.

As you may or may not know...

I didn't die from the illness mentioned in the previous post. I did get over it and don't even remember it now.

In other news, the end of the last semester went relatively well. I did a lot better in most of my classes, however, i didn't do quite well enough. All of my classes ended up well aside from genetics, which I somehow managed to fail after getting A's and B's on nearly all of my quizzes. I apparently managed to miserably fail all of my tests, and after something like that, it takes a lot of quizzes to bring it back up enough. Whatever. But moving on...

Christmas was good. No, make that great. Per usual, we (being me and my family) went up to North Carolina, only this time we had the wonderful addition of Patricia, and that always makes things better. The break from everything was wonderful, the rest of the family loved Patricia, and the presents were awesome. New Year's was pretty cool too. Fast forward through drive back and... home again.

This current semester didn't start out so hot. I had a really hard time concentrating and focusing in class, not to mention trouble sleeping at night. There were a few nights where I didn't sleep at all and even more nights where I was awake until about 5 in the morning. I finally resigned to getting some sleep drugs and that helped the sleeping issue, but the focusing is still a work in progress.

I also decided to switch over to dispatching full time (instead of labor pool), so my days are completely full. Class all morning, work all afternoon/evening, sleep all night. I know it's a bit crazy, but I'm loving the paychecks.

And finally, after much deliberation, I'm back to Plan A. For those of you out of the loop, Plan A, back at the beginning of my college career was: finish school, get married, go to medical school (preferably at Duke), live in the Carolinas. After my grades took a turn or two (or ten) down the crapper, that plan was thrown out the window. Plan B (which was devised before college, not after Plan A failed) was: finish school, get married, work for the police as a forensic investigator, maybe work for the FBI? But now, thanks to some help/ideas from coworkers/professors, Plan A is back in motion. With some modification of course. Now Plan A version 2.0 goes as such: finish school, get married, go to medical school in the Caribbean (preferably, for now, at Saba), move back to the US to practice. For those of you with your doubts about how reasonable and practical this plan is, just keep your pants on for a minute. There are several schools out there that are fully accredited and licensed to function as medical schools. For a school to be accepted as a legitimate medical school by US standards, they must meet certain requirements and be on the official International Medical Education Directory list (which can be found at https://imed.faimer.org). In the Caribbean, there are several real medical schools, however, many of them are still not so great. Out of all of those schools, there are four that are commonly known as the Big 4. They are (in my order of preference): Saba (www.saba.edu), St. George (www.sgu.edu), Ross (www.rossu.edu), and American University of the Caribbean (http://aucmed.edu). As of now, this is just a tentative order, and the order may be changing before I actually do anything (specifically for Ross, I'm staring to like it a little more). Some nice things about this new and improved plan are that the admission requirements are significantly lower than US med schools (some accept as low as a 2.3 GPA!), they cost a LOT less (St. George is the most expensive at 32,000 a year, Saba cheapest at 18,700 a year), not all require the MCAT to get in (although it is strongly recommended and I'll still be taking it), I can actually get into and afford these schools (unlike US schools), and finally, it's in the freaking Caribbean, that's cool no matter who you are!

So there you have it. The update on my life. I hope you enjoy it blogging world.

Bleh...

Being sick is no fun, especially when there's nobody around to help you feel better...

At least there are only 3 weeks left in what has been a pretty decent semester and then I get to spend a month with the one I wish were here to help me feel better.

Maybe later we can have a Texas - Aussie thing-off.

Ben Folds was awesome! Missy Higgins opend and rocked hard, but then Ben Folds came on and played for 2 and a half hours! It was awesome! He played a lot of stuff off his new album and then came back and played a bunch of his old stuff too! It was incredibly rockin and entirely exhausting, but totally worth it!

Created by yours truly

Fun with the internet

Instead of school stuff (which I should probably be doing), I decided to play around on the internet today. Here's the fruits of my labor:

Courtesy of web-cam-stop-motion-thing

Just a warning: the web-cam-stop-motion-thing isn't necessarily child-friendly.

1964

1980

1982

Courtesy of Yearbookyourself.com

(Thanks for the distraction Michelle!)

Only one pencil was harmed in the making of this blog.

Going crazy

After about a week and a half of being nearly angelic, my dog has gone back to being a terror. She has completely reverted back to her old habits of going to the bathroom in the house, which, since she's being crate trained and housebroken (ideally) using the crate, her crap is spread all over the bottom and sides of the crate. And, of course, all over her. Fun. And the worst of it is, she's still completely precious.

General chaos

Today a massive storm blew through Waco while I was at work. We were warned of the storm by the weather service when it started to come into our county. A little after that, a couple of people, including a deputy, called in to report a twin tornado that was about to touch down out in the county. Fortunately, that tornado never came into Waco, but the storm definitely did. The phones went crazy with people calling in to report power lines going down and starting fires, or lightining starting fires, or trees falling onto the road and all sorts of other crazy things that are associated with storms in addition to all the regular calls. At about 9:30 our systems went down. We couldn't do anything at all with the computers down which, unfortunately, our entire operation revolves around. We had to use the manual entry cards in order to dispatch the officers and that was a bit different but still not too terribly bad. Our phones and radios still worked, so we didn't get to use the badass sat phones that we were given once the storm started to move in, but things were definitely still very different since we couldn't use our computers. Once my relief arrived at about 10:30, I got to leave which I had been told wasn't going to happen because the computers were still down. It was absolutely crazy while I was there though!

I'm a proud daddy!

This morning, Patricia and I took Akira downstairs and then went back upstairs to try to tempt her up. We placed some treats on the first few steps and then sat up at the top to try to call her up. After trying to climb up the first few steps very cautiously, she took a few steps backward and took a running start and made it up the first 2-3 steps! Unfortunately for her, the turn in my stairs threw a wrench into her plans of running the whole way up. So after several more failed attempts, she finally figured out how to keep walking up the stairs! The crazy girl still wouldn't come all the way up though. She would walk up a few stairs from the bend and then turn around and go back down. Several times, she would make it far enough so that she only had a couple of stairs left to go to reach the top and then turn around and go all the way back down. Finally, just as we were about to give up on her for the time being, she made it all the way up! We were so proud of her! Since that time, she has made it all the way up the stairs by herself a couple more times, but she's still a little too scared to go all the way down without help. She'll get there eventually though! I'm so proud of her!

An additional note

One thing I forgot to mention (mostly because I didn't have a pic of it yet) is Akira's bitchin' new tag. It's the coolest dang tag anyone anywhere could have ever found.

Bright and Clear

Today I got a new dog. I have been so excited about getting myself a pet and now I finally have one! Yesterday, Patricia and I went out to get some ice cream, but ColdStone was colsed. Instead we decided to go and look at the cats at the Waco Humane Society. We looked around and found a few cute kittens, but there was this one dog that was just too incredibly beautiful to pass up. We then made several mad dashes back and forth to the Humane Society and my apartment complex to get everything squared away. After a night to get everything squared away and then for Akira (which means bright or clear in Japanese) to get spayed in the morning, we finally got to pick her up! So here's some pictures of my new best friend Akira!

My baby the day we found her. She's a heeler mix, btw.

The camera woke her up.

My inquisitive little girl.

A couple pictures of my girl's hanging out on the couch.

Me and my new puppy.

She was a little groggy after the surgery.

Here's a few pictures of my apartment too:

My bedroom.

Akira's bed in the book nook.

Patricia showing off the stove.

The other half of my kitchen.

The dining area.

My living room. Some of you may recognize the couch.

And the other half of my living room.

1089

In cop land, 10-89 is the code for a bomb threat. Yesterday evening, I received a call from a lady claiming to have found a bomb. Police were sent out to try to determine whether or not it legitimately was a bomb. After a while, the officers that were out there called for more back up as well as the ATF bomb squad. After that the Secret Service and Fort Hood (the local army reservation) were notified of the bomb and their bomb squads were sent out as well. Turns out, they had a pretty serious bomb and maybe even more than one. Also, the guy that lived in the house (who fortunately wasn't there) is violent towards cops and keeps loaded assault rifles and shotguns in his house. So thankfully this ended up being much less worse than it very easily could have been. And I was the one that got to put all of this information into the system!

Here's a link to the news story:

http://www.kxxv.com/Global/story.asp?S=8708157&nav=menu509_3_1

On an entirely different note, I started to work out today! My current goal is to meet the FBI admission requirements. For those of you that don't know, that would include 45-50 sit-ups in one minute, 45-50 sec for a 300-meter sprint, 40-50 untimed push-ups, and a 1.5 mile run in 10:00 - 11:30 minutes. We'll see how long, if ever, it takes me to get there.

And Tracy, just so you know, I'll put pictures of my apartment in my next post.

Wolf spiders eat wolves

This massive spider decided to show up on my bookshelf today. Just for the record, the broom is pulled forward so that the edge of the plastic part is about even with the edge of the bookshelf. Even after being chopped in half by my spectacular aim with a shoe, the thing was still larger than a quarter. Needless to say, i was frightened for the safety of my fingers. Fortunately though, the crisis has been averted and i probably don't have another one in my apartment... yet.

I learned it the hard way...

July 4th and Waco just don't mix well. Half the people in the city were setting off fireworks last night (which is illegal within city limits, btw) and the other half decided to call and report them. Props to you for trying to be a good citizen and reporting illegal activity, but please, don't call back every 15-20 minutes and bitch to me about how slow the police are at responding to your oh so special and unique call about fireworks on the 4th of July. 

Just about every single call last night was about fireworks or something related to that. There were several fires (all started by fireworks), several accidents ("This guy threw a firecracker at my car and made me swerve into a telephone pole!"), and several other people just wanting to know when the fireworks started (9:45). Fortunately, there were still a few non-fireworks related calls to keep it interesting: a suicide threat, a guy stealing steel, and a 70 year old guy who "stole" a lawnmower and required 4-5 officers to stop and cuff him (he actually owned the lawnmower and had for 5 years). And once all the fireworks were over, there was (more or less) a riot in the streets. People that are drunk/excited/teenagers should never be given things that explode. Traffic was awful, people were fighting everywhere, fireworks were still going off everywhere (including under a few cars), etc... downtown Waco was a mess.

And I still didn't get to see any real fireworks.

Hello blogging world!

Today is my first real foray into the glamorous world of blogging. When will I post? What will I post? Will I even post at all? You'll just have to keep checking back to find out...