Warning: Long Post Incoming

I was hoping to get a post in before the class started, but I wound up being busy that weekend. Unfortunately, my schedule quickly filled up from there. But no worries, I have returned to make a long (but hopefully not too long) post! Take your time reading it if you don't want to read it all in one sitting. I can fully guarantee you that this will be my only post in July. This class has me too busy to do anything else. I happened to get lucky today because we finished one of the classes today and have a light homework load going into the next class. But I also did things before the class started, so it seems logical to jump in way back there. On the PC pictures, I may get them up here, but it would be next month. I haven't put my backed up files on this computer (because organizing them would take an hour or two and I would absolutely feel compelled to do it as soon as I put the files on (and I don't have a spare hour or two that I care to devote to that at this time)).

PC Completion:
Well it turned out that every problem with my parents' computer was just a slight mistake I made at different parts of setup. All were resolved though and the computer now runs well. I haven't taught them how to run the new SSD/HDD combination they have, but they're in no particular rush to learn since they can use the laptop upstairs for now. In the meantime, nobody really comes downstairs anymore. They have new furniture upstairs and a new TV and with the laptop, nobody really needs to come down here except once a week for laundry. It's kind of nice to have the whole floor to myself, especially in busy times like these.

"Work:"
I did what I could, but my Aunt's backyard is not yet complete. I knew it wouldn't be, but I did less than I had hoped. Her neighbor who was going to help pour concrete had an unexpected death in the family, so we scrapped that plan last minute and will probably be doing it in August. Either way, I'm not too concerned because I'll get all the things done that I need to do. It's just that I may not get them done in time for the outside area to be any good for this summer. Oh well, there's always every summer in the future.

Videogames:
I played (and streamed) some SC with Keir shortly after finishing my PC. That was unfortunately the last I've been able to play with him (it was the first couple of days in July, somewhere in there). Given my schedule, I don't anticipate playing with him until early August and then, we'll have only a few days before he heads off to law school. I'm going to help him shop around for a decent laptop though and he's expressed interest in starting League of Legends, so that will be exciting. I'm going to create a smurf account to level with him. Hopefully someday he'll be added to "Get Carried," our ranked 5s team. In other news in League, Eric and I have decided to become a good duoqueue group. We try to practice bottom lane together (he AD carries which is his strongest role, and I support). We're getting good at predicting each other's play styles, so hopefully we will be able to queue together and increase our elos when I am done with the class. Currently, I average time for two to three games on school nights, so I've been using those to soloqueue to increase my elo or to practice with Eric. It's not as much playing as I would like, but it's enough to make sure I stay in practice. Steven meanwhile is starting to knock on the door of 1900. Congrats to him on his ding.

Because Chris' laptop has been broken, we haven't been able to get our ranked team going as much recently, but that will be soon remedied. Our team cohesion is starting to get better. I'm still a little frazzled, but that's because I have trouble getting settled on one role. Since I'm the greenest player, I came onto the team when everyone else had established their roles. Even though I'm one of the three regulars, I still am a utility that fills in what role we need depending on who's absent. Steven, Eric, and I are the regulars. After that, it's Chris, Albert, and Albert's brother. They all have their roles and depending on who's not playing with us, I take their role. If Chris doesn't play with us, I play support. If Albert doesn't play with us, I play jungle. If Albert's brother doesn't play with us, I play top. Steven always has mid and Eric always has AD because those are their best lanes. I don't mind being utility, it's kind of fun. And I generally play tanky champions, so there's some role consistency between my different lanes.

Oh and on that note, you can sometimes catch me streaming here.

A life? I have one of those?
Yes I do! I don't know if you guys know my friend from school that everyone keeps saying I should ask out (well don't worry that's not going to happen). We like to hang out because we are both big on drinking a lot and we like that we validate each others' alcoholism (that doesn't exist >___>). Anyway, I got to hang out with her at her birthday party back the weekend before graduation. It was really fun and I got to meet some people that went to Shorewood (she was in Shoreline until leaving right before high school). The party was cool and I got to actually meet her ex-boyfriend (the guy she was dating when I met her who she's good friends with still) who I actually knew through the frisbee circle. We had a good time hanging out and it was a cool party. Since that, her and I have tried to hang out more often even if we don't necessarily have anyone else around. Now I know what you're thinking and my God yes I would love to date this girl, however it's not possible. While I was in Korea, she started going out with this girl. I thought it was just one of those not serious things that you post on fb for shits and giggles at first, but it's become apparent that they're in a legit relationship. So that kind of takes that off the table. However, she keeps insisting that I would be an excellent boyfriend and is dead set on setting me up with someone. She even got my preferences out of me (I told her preferably Asian, short, fairly smart, and tolerant of my gaming habits). I know she knows I basically described her right to her face, but I'm glad she knew I was speaking generally and not trying to imply anything (or was I???). Anyway, she's determined to set me up with someone (or some people depending on how many attempts it takes) after my class ends so I'm tentatively looking forward to that.

This last weekend, we had a pretty fun drinking adventure across downtown. She's kind of a lightweight, but is still fun to drink with. I even got to meet her girlfriend who failed to make a good impression on me. She doesn't like my friend drinking (since she does it a lot (which confuses me because you think you would have to be okay with that to be with her, but whatever)) and she was kind of rude to my friend when we met up with her. My friend got mad at her, but I insisted she not be bitchy back at her. Bad first impression of the girlfriend, but I'm sure she's more cordial normally. After that, my friend got really tired (because she's a lightweight and I could probably drink her under about five tables (but that's what you get for being about 5'2" and 100 pounds) so I took her home. We had planned to make a stop to see a couple more friends of hers who I met at the party (and one of the girls is actually the girlfriend of...THE REID!!!) but since my friend was sleeping, I took her back to her house instead.

Oh and on other alcohol adventures, Grandpa and I bought a bottle of bourbon at Fred Meyer. He wanted to check prices of alcohol for fun and one named "Wild Turkey" caught his eye. I thought it would be really shitty and cheap, but it turned out to be really good (and cheap!). After taking a shot with him, I realized I have now done shots with both of my grandparents. I am so....cool?

And now to the important thing!

This class I'm taking:
This class has kept me really busy. They said it would be 3-6 hours of homework a night and I thought they were full of it (my other professors in college often said things like "You will spend 15 hours a week working on this class" which was never true and my grades were fine). They weren't kidding though. I'm not sure if its the intensive nature of the class or the fact that it's a graduate level course, but the homework actually does take up a lot of time. This has been my schedule for the class on weekdays so far:
7:00am - Wake up, eat breakfast, get ready
8:15am - Leave for class, find street parking
8:40am - Enter classroom, wait for class to start
9:00am - Class
3:20pm - Arrive home, since I'm burned out from so much class go ahead and browse Reddit
4:30pm - Start homework, eat dinner within a few hours
9:00pm - Finish homework, play League of Legends for a couple games
11:00pm - Go to bed
And it repeats. I don't get much time to do anything on weekdays, but it's fine. I'm getting a lot done and soon it will be over and I will have earned a cool certificate in just under a month (and I'll have 12 graduate credits). The class itself is really fun actually. Though it's 6 hours, the day just flies by. Despite that though, it still feels like the week drags on (mostly because I can look ahead and see how much class I have left for the week). And we go for the full 6 hours too. We get one bathroom break of about 5 minutes around 10:30am, then for lunch, we have projects to work on during lunch so that's not really an "official" break. The worst part about that going for 6 hours is definitely the fact that I have to hold in a fart for 6 hours. TMI probably...

The homework isn't too bad. It's much simpler than my econ stuff, just more time consuming. I really like the teacher and the school actually seems like their first goal is getting full employment for all their graduating classes. That will be nice for me. They're even doing a big employment seminar on the last Wednesday of class just for us, so that will be helpful. Also, since it's technically a teacher training as well, they're really big on assigning homework and doing tasks in class that we can then turn around and use in our own classes. For example, our weekend project this weekend was to make a 10-12 hour unit plan for a hypothetical class with a specific learning objective in mind. We each brought in enough copies for everyone in the class to have one, so now we all have 16 more or less ready to go unit plans that we can take with us when we go off to teach. Stuff like that is really cool. The people in the class are nice. Two actually dropped. One was a girl after the first day. She had been teaching in Seoul for a year and I wanted to ask her about that, but I never got the chance since she dropped. The second came after the third day. It was this really annoying guy that tried to use fancy words to seem smarter than he actually was. He also liked to talk a lot and it took away from some lessons, so it wasn't so bad he dropped. Everyone in this class is becoming like a big family since we see each other for so much of the day and then hop on our google group at night to talk about homework. Shared pain makes for strong bonds I suppose. Anyway, I'm going insane slowly over the workload they're giving me in this class, but since the end is so near in sight, I can already see how good this will be for me. It turns out it wasn't technically required of me to go teach in Korea, but as an Econ major, I had no idea how to teach students. This can only help. And the certificate I will be earning can significantly up my paygrade, so that's a plus too.

Twice over the course of the four weeks, we have to sit in on an adult ESL class offered there in the building. I actually had a lot of fun my first time there and I might do it an extra time. I met a young man (about 30) from Sichuan Province in China. We were able to use the Easy English times to generate material to talk about if we wanted, but I just talked to him about China and what he thought of it here. The teacher and him liked that because he doesn't get the chance to use relaxed conversational English much since he works as a custodian. Also in that class, I met a couple from Russia (the husband is a Boeing engineer in Moscow and they're here for his training and they figured they would learn English while they were here). They were really funny and cool to talk to. There's a really really cute girl from Colombia in the class and a Tibetan Monk who is funny as hell. I didn't get to meet either of them (I'll get to that in a second), but I will try to meet them next time I go. The reason I didn't meet them is because I wound up spending most of the time with an older gentleman from Korea. He was impressed when he learned I had lived and studied in Seoul. I got to use some Korean with him to help him translate some things and he was really impressed with my pronunciation and penmanship in Korean. He is a children's songwriter who wanted to learn English so he could write children's songs in English. He's been here for a couple years, but he will soon go back to Seoul. He gave me contact info in case we're both in Seoul at the same time. I'm looking forward to that if it comes up, it would be cool. Anyway, he was a really neat guy and it was also interesting to learn we studied at the same university in Korea.

Outside of that class, I've been doing my usual stuff. I help Grandpa with groceries on Wednesday still (which cuts into time, but it needs to get done and somebody else might get it wrong) which works out well since my classes are pretty near his place. Also, I helped my cousin out last weekend. We moved 2 loads to the dump (one 400 pounder and one 800 pounder). We also hauled back about .75 to 1 ton of topsoil (in two loads) from my aunt's house to his house. And to cap it all off, we put the heaviest load ever into my truck. It was a bunch of big cement blocks that all together weighed over half a ton. The truck had some trouble braking on the last hill going towards the blocks' final destination, but luckily I'm a good driver so I was able to keep us from dying.

Me: So we're pretty much an unstoppable object right now. I really hope I can make this turn, otherwise sorry if we die.
Kevin: Oh well, at least we got a record load in the truck.

We didn't die because I'm pro. When I finally got the truck stopped in the driveway, it reeked of burnt brakes. They're fine now though, I just need to wait a while before loading the truck up nearly that heavy again. I probably won't reach that much weight again though because the stuff in the shed takes up a lot of space and is light. These were compact and heavy. Rolling those things down the hill behind my uncle's shed (to prevent landslide by building up the hill!) was extremely fun. After that, I went back to my cousin's house where they were having a BBQ. My cousin (his sister) and her cousin from their other side of the family had been at the military base in Port Angeles and brought back actual shit tons of alcohol (8 half gallons of Smirnoff and then 10 other assorted bottles of things that were equally as large) since it was so cheap there. I had some drinks with them, then went home to my parents having Margaritas, then out to hang out with my friend where I still drank her under the table. I look forward to hanging out with her more in the future and anyone she might set me up with (if they're cool). Also, I need to party with my cousins more, they keep a well stocked liquor cabinet!

Well I've eaten up enough of  your time now. Enjoy your July for me!