Below are the 8 most recent journal entries recorded in Kyle's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
10:59 pm	All the news that is fit to print   So I have spent the night catching up on my Facebook page and so I thought I should probably update LJ too (I am really bad at all this social networking stuff).  Plus a recent chat with csg87pointed out just how deficient I have been on the communication front recently.  So all the big news:   For those of you who don’t know I have been dating nateborrsince last April and he just moved to Portland. Yeah!  I also got a promotion at work (technically it hasn’t started yet). Yeah! My sister stopped in Portland for two months at the end of her giant cross country road trip and has ended up staying for the foreseeable future. Yeah! All the small news: For the past couple of months I have been taking the world’s worst metallurgy class (the teacher was quite unorganized and my fellow students were disorderly) and my final was tonight. I am so happy it is done with and I have my Tuesday nights free again! Yeah! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 5th, 2007
2:02 pm	The citizens of Oregon have no respect for the Law I began my celebration of the fourth with a quick visit to a coworker’s family picnic but I had to leave before I got a hamburger (made from fresh ground beef that her son raises himself).  Grr.   Then I ran off to see Transformers with my landlord-roommate, her friend, and brother.  Before the movie we picked up my favorite movie watching food (pints of Ben & Jerry’s) and smuggled them into the show in my giant messenger bag/purse.  Yummy, yummy. :)  The movie was just as expected: big robots crashing into each other in slow-mo, simplistic moral conflict (we should kill all the humans vs. no we shouldn’t), blatant product placement (Nokia had the best), and reasonable attempts at funny dialog mixed with juvenile gross-out humor.  It was a good time in a big dumb blockbuster sort of way. ( Illegal Fireworks! ) Current Mood: Celebratory (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
1:15 am	Sickness and taxes The illness I had all of last week has been bouncing around my office taking down people at random for the past month or so.  The standard progression seems to be sore throat to bad cold to stubborn sinus/lung infection that hangs around for weeks.  I feel really sorry for my pregnant friend who isn’t allowed to take anything except Tylenol; all she can do is wait it out. Friday I started coughing up green junk (pleasant, I know) and, at the urging of the people who waited to long to seek antibiotics, I left work early to go beg for drugs at Urgent Care.  They gave me a Z-Pack, prescription strength decongestant, cough syrup with codeine and a list of over-the-counter stuff to buy (including yogurt; I was so focused on getting the live culture kind I accidentally bought vanilla instead of plain.  It made me very sad).  Big warning on two of my meds: Don’t Drive!    I spent most of the weekend holed up in my apartment sleeping, watching movies, and filling out my taxes.  By Sunday morning, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, the really bad symptoms seem past and I am left with just the tale end of the cold.  I even felt well enough to go to yoga today although I still sniffled whenever my head was upside down.   Unfortunately, my taxes are not yet complete; fortunately, it looks like I will get decent sized refunds from the IRS and from both states.  I had thought I would owe them all money and had set aside what I expected to be due in a savings account.  It will be like a double refund!  The issues holding me up are too small to actually be material but are enough to keep me from filing right away.  I decided to use TurboTax this year for the convenience but I oddly feel less confident now than previous years when I used the paper forms.  I guess I felt more like I understood what was going on when I had to puzzle through it on my own.  TurboTax asks a ton of questions, spits out a number (a happy number!) and I bite my lip and hope it’s right. Current Mood: better (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
8:05 pm	And all I want to do is go to yoga … Monday I had a tickle in the back of my throat, Tuesday I had a sore throat and a slight sniffle, Wednesday I had sinus congestion but mild throat problems, and today I am a sniffling, sneezing, coughing mess with a croak in my voice.  And I couldn’t call off work because it is month end close (and a very difficult month end close at that).   I would almost rather have digestive troubles than have a head cold.  I find the over the counter medicine works better for non-cold illnesses and I become extremely frustrated when my breathing becomes impaired.  I need to work on my taxes but I can’t look down without choking and the sniffing is giving me a headache.  If I blow my nose a lot I irritate the skin around my nose and look like a coke head but if I don’t then I get violent sneezing fits.  I guess I am going to lie upon my couch and watch Lost and try not to think about all the other stuff I want to do instead.  This is a hard week :( Current Mood: aggravated (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
10:15 am	My laptop crashed four times last night A slightly used PC purchase may be in my near future since my laptop is becoming more decrepit and I trust it less every week. Updating my iPod can easily cause it to freeze and it will occasionally run extremely slow; my media player will stutter through frame by frame and switching between applications can take more than a minute. So I need a replacement to last the next year or two. I always find myself at a bit of a loss when it comes to specifying what hardware I want since all I really know is what I need the computer to do. I don’t play games beyond a Super NES emulator or edit media or graphics. I do tend to run many programs at once including a video player & a bittorrent download manager (which can easily max out my cable broadband) and I occasionally need to edit big Excel spreadsheets for work (28K rows). I know I want: - the largest hard drive (200+GB) I can get - a 10/100 Mbps network card - a DVD/CD-RW drive - many USB ports (front and back). - 3GB to 4GB RAM After this I am just confused. Does anyone have any recommendations for processors, a video card, or any other item? A critique of the above want-list? Anything I should avoid? Also, does anyone have a cheap Windows and/or Microsoft Office connection? Current Mood: inquiring Current Music: Regina Spektor - Fidelity (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
11:22 pm	Pictures! Because all my entries need to involve snow, here are the steam-snow pictures promised before Christmas (they are at snapfish, we will see if this works): Snow I got my hair cut the other day. Nothing major but it looks pretty when someone else does the styling. This past weekend a woman at work gave me two couches so I actually have a living room. Before that I had a no place to sit in my apartment beyond my desk (which is depressingly like being at work). I promptly sat around eating ice cream and watching TV all evening. It was glorious. If you fly to Portland, fly during the day: there are mountains. The highly photogenic Oregon Coast. Do you know what this Google Maps symbol means? I found out the other day. And no, you may not cross without exact change. You have to go around. Current Mood: sleepy (12 Comments |Comment on this)
7:32 pm	Respect the precipitation! Note to people: Four-wheel drive helps you go. It does not help you stop. Recognize! Current Mood: Finger wagging (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
11:07 pm	Exquisite Pollution It did not snow at my house or downtown or on the hills outside town. However, for a quarter mile around the mill that I work at, the landscape has been dusted with a delicate coat of white. And apparently the mill made it happen. Absolutely everything in the melt shop and mill that gets hot, which is everything, is water cooled and there are always big plumes of steam rising above the buildings and drifting up from the cooling ponds. When the temperature drops below freezing all that moisture collects on the trees. The condensation is very fine, white like snow, sticks to the trees like hard ice and there is no sun so it isn’t melting away. It is also amazingly beautiful. It has that ice storm quality where each branch is outlined and the details of the plant are preserved in the coating of snow. The aspens around the mill, the fir trees down the road, the boring landscape bushes and the ugly weeds are all stunning ice sculptures. Even the piles of shredded metal look pretty. I would look out my window during the day and admire the fragile beauty. Then a huge dumptruck full of glowing slag would drive past and a grapple crane on treads would make the office quietly shake as it crawled around the corner. It is a bizarre and incongruous sight but the sorta snow is still pretty. I took pictures and I will try to put some up when I come back from the winter holiday. I am visiting my sister in Florida for Christmas and for once it may actually be warm when I visit. Hopefully, I didn’t just jinx myself. Happy Holidays! Current Mood: impressed (3 Comments |Comment on this)