Home again, home again, jiggety jog.

Last leg of the trip: North Babylon, NY to Manassas, VA, 320mi, 7hrs (1930-0230) with no traffic to speak of.

Had a wonderful couple days with Melody, wish I hadn't had to come back tonight for work at 08, and will post details later.. afternoon, most likely. :)

Will also start catching up on LJ/comics/etc since Saturday night then, with the exception of one very, very nice post that I've already read. :):)

To do:

Catch up on ~320 new journal entries since Saturday evening (~360 by the time I finished, 7pm)

Post about the rest of my weekend

Catch up on Sunday/Monday/Tuesday comics

Properly comment on that very, very nice entry I mentioned earlier. :) :)

Fetch two songs Melody uploaded for me =)

Download the copy of iVista 3 that I uploaded from Mitchell's computer, which will hopefully not memory-leak and crash my computer like 4 does

Find a copy of a song Dave recommended

File my gas receipts (10!) from the trip Yup, pretty consistent 49-51mpg. Unfortunately, I noticed that I was charged a couple dollars extra at one stop because I was charged for 3.338 gallons of regular, when a) I don't put regular in my bike, and b) my tank only holds ~3 gallons and I never added more than ~2. :P


Already done:

Updated my interests, to reflect things of deeper interest to me, which meant removing several bands/artists to make room

Not much email catchup, I mostly kept up with that, and LJ comments didn't get much worse. Still ~150 behind on those, but that's nothing new. ;P

Called Laurie at RDR and learned that my interim clearance has been approved (no surprise), and that I'll be able to start work as soon as the next training sessions starts, early July, don't know if before or after the 4th.

Mentioned to my mom that I'd visited Melody after leaving Cornell, which actually didn't surprise her. Heh. ;) (Can't put much past a veteran mom, y'know. ;) Update: Apparently Shauna's the narc! ;)

The rest of my time in Ithaca!

When we left our intrepid adventurer, it was Saturday at noon, and he was facing a cute goldfish and preparing for the day. Let's find out what happened next!

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After showering/dressing, Bryan and I cast about for food and discovered a jumbo can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Being college men, this was a fine meal, so on the stove it went, and I touched it up with crushed red pepper, black pepper, onion powder, and Montreal Steak seasoning; served over rye bread, it was quite tasty!

The highlight of the afternoon was the alumni reception at Seal, 3-6. Prior to 3, John Cardone and Kevin McCormick were using child labor (Kevin's kids and some other alumni's children that had arrived early) to get the house into shape for the reception--sweeping, taking out trash/recycling, bringing up food/drink, that sort of thing. Around 3, alumni started arriving, and the reception got going. It went quite well--about a dozen alumni showed, which is higher than average for this sort of event--and plenty of interesting conversation was had. Around 6:15 it ended, and a bit later I gave Katia a call.

A while after that I rode over to her and Sasha's and Tony's apartment, greeted Sasha (in full-on Thesis-Writing Mode); Tony was in Boston. Met her new cat Mauss--very playful, all-white, very cute. :) Anything you happened to be holding, moving, or removing (in the case of any clothing or accessories) was apparently a toy. :P Had some tea with honey, as I wasn't faring too well with my cold. Walked up the street to Rosa's apartment, met her roommates/friends Angela and Adam, re-met her parakeet Cornflakes, who quickly added my shoulders and head to his set of perches (along with everyone else's heads/shoulders, and any stray furniture.) The others all had some drinks, I just had water as I was feeling pretty crappy from my cold.

Down the hill and over to Chapter House around 10, where I (legitimately) convinced the bartender that he remembered me--it was the lack of glasses that threw him off, and the fact that I hadn't been there since at least August '02. See, my wallet was in my motorcycle pants, which were still at Katia's apartment, and going to fetch it would've been quite inconvenient. I only had one beer (again, still feeling crappy, and planned to get up early); the others had a few each. Rosa's Navy hat was passed around head to head, including onto some stray alumni's heads who has joined our table temporarily. I was told that I looked like a Russian submarine captain, so I pulled out my excellent Russian accent, until Alex threatened to hurt me because I was scaring him. :)

Around midnight we left Chapter House; I was going to go back to Seal but was convinced to follow them to Stella's--Katia's a friend I don't see very often, that sort of guilting ;P--so I did, but realized there was no way I was getting into Stella's without an ID. Back to Katia's, where I crashed rather than ride back across campus in my tired/sick/one-beer state. Up at 0730 Sunday, back to Seal, showered in the spiffy new bathroom (as Bryan was in the downstairs one), packed the bike, transcribed Ben/Tom/Melody's directions into one good route, dashed off a quick "leaving now!" email to Melody, and headed East around 0840.. :)