Anyway, that was during “maymester”, which went for 4 weeks from May 17 to June 11.  My grading job started today, but nobody here at Purdue assigns homework the first week, so it really doesn’t start until next week.  It seems like it’s going to be a pretty awesome gig and I’ll have a lot of free time over the summer to do my own thing.  So, what is my “own thing” that I’m going to be doing?  It’s pretty much going to be a mix of things.  Here’s what I have so far, and I’ll expand on them all below the list.

• Write a complete novel
• Write a complete handbell piece
• Read/finish at least 10 books
• Figure out what I would be interested in archaeology-wise if I decide to pursue that as more than a fleeting interest
• Make $1 online from internet marketing shenanigans

If you know me or you’ve read some of the random posts on this blog, then you know that I’ve done NaNoWriMo for the past two years.  Each time I mean to continue on writing after it’s over, but each time I never do.  This summer I’m going to do it.  I had an archaeology/mystery type novel started at the end of NaNo ‘09 that I’m probably going to use as the project.  I’m not sure if I want to make the goal just to finish the first draft of it, or if I want to make the goal to write the rough draft and then rewrite it to the point where I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show it to people.  So, more of that to come.

As some of you know, my brother is a composer.  He mostly does handbell stuff, but recently he’s branched off into small ensemble and choral/organ type things.  Anyway, in the past he’s told me that I should give it a try as well because it’s fun and he thinks I’d like it.  So, I have a demo of Sibelius downloaded to mess around with this summer.  The only downside of it is that I can’t save files with the demo, but I’m hoping to find a magical way to work around that (I’m hoping I can print it to pdf and just enter it in manually each time I work on it… or never close Sibelius so it’s not a problem…. yeah… great plan, I know).

I always have problems reading.  It’s not that I’m slow or anything, I just don’t take the time to sit down and read a story, even if it’s something that really interests me.  So, I’m determined to read and finish 10 books this summer.  The reason I say finish is because when I came up with this goal I was about 450 pages into George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones, which is an 800 page book.  So, I figured that I could technically count finishing that as one of the 10 books since it will be 350 pages and some of the other books I read will be shorter than that.  Although I’ll probably read the other 3 books in A Song of Ice and Fire as well, so more 800 page books are in my near future.

I liked the archaeology class a lot.  A whole lot.  I talked to the teacher after class one day and asked what I should do if I really liked the class and was interested in pointing my career in this direction.  He basically said I should take more classes and figure out what I would be interested in studying.  So, I already have a long list of websites and articles bookmarked to go through this summer in the quest for finding the piece of the archaeology world that interests me more than all others.  There aren’t any classes I really want to take right now over the rest of the summer, so figuring out what direction I’d point a thesis in is what I plan on doing at this point.

This last one is sort of interesting.  A lot of you know that I’ve been interested in internet marketing for about two years now.  Some of you didn’t, and that’s ok too.  About a month ago I interviewed with a company who is responsible for optimizing companies webpages and getting them to rank highly in the search engines.  They wanted somebody to statistically analyze the difference between what they do and what their competitors do.  I never heard back from them, so no idea what happened there.  Still, it reminded me that I actually like sitting and futzing around with wordpress themes and changing the sidebars and tweaking them.  I don’t know a lot of code, but enough to be dangerous.  Sometime you should check out how this theme is supposed to look.  Here’s a link to it: http://www.dynamicguru.com/freebies/the-last-fall-a-dark-wordpress-theme/

So, that’s what it used to look like until I messed around with the theme.  Now some of the images are gone and the sidebar is on the other side.  I really enjoy this stuff and trying to optimize a blog.  It’s like a game.  So, recently I pulled out some of my stuff from other times I’ve gotten heavily into the internet marketing world, and I’m in the process of messing with some stuff and toying with the ideas.  I have a few things up, but haven’t done nearly enough work on them for anything to happen yet.

Also, I plan on doing the new and improved thirty day challenge this year.  I’ve looked at it for the past two years, but never participated really.  In the past right around this time pre-season stuff would start off.  This included videos showing how to get some of the browsers and plugins that were required and any programs that we’d need.  Basically everything that you needed set up before August 1st was covered in preseason.  Then, during August there would be a video a day showing you how to build a blog and what to optimize and how to get backlinks and how to submit your articles to directories and all that sort of cool stuff.  The thing is that 30 days was too cramped of a time frame to do this.  People got too behind too fast and gave up.

This year Ed Dale (the ringleader/puppet master) is going to do it in 7 day shifts starting on July 1st.  Basically the premise here is that people can do anything and work on it for a little each day for 7 days.  Then you get a 7 day rest before the next week of training.  The new thirty day challenge site isn’t up yet, but I’ll put a link up here when it is.  I strongly encourage anybody who is slightly interested to try it with me this year.  It’s all free training.  You’ll need to pay for a domain and hosting pretty much, but that should be it.  So, it’s not a big monetary commitment and I think it’s actually pretty cool stuff to know.  Even if you’re not really a technically-savvy person, Ed and the crew are awesome at explaining these things.  For those of you that are interested that know me personally, I can do my best to help you with the technical things that you’re not so good with.  With this and my other things that I’ve been working on, I’m pretty sure I should make at least a dollar online this summer.

So, there are my goals.  Some of it might shock you.  Some of it might have been a given for those of you that know me.  Now you know what my summer plans are though.  Somewhere in there I’ll be grading some papers or something, but really I don’t see that as being a time-consuming activity.  That’s about it for now.  Since I’ll be busy doing a lot of random online-type things during the summer I’ll try to work on also keeping this blog up to date.  The posts will probably have to get way shorter for that to happen.  If this were part of a NaNo novel, I’d be almost done with my day’s writing by now.

In my last post I talked about NaNoWriMo and grad school mostly.  Nothing much has really happened with the NaNoWriMo stuff.  I need to re-read some of what I did and rewrite some things and start other things.  Hopefully at some point I’ll do that.  My brother and I are on a brief hiatus from writing on our joint novel, but I need to read over that again too so that I’ll actually remember what was going on when we start it up again.  I would be upset that we took a break from it, but he entered the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, which I think is really cool and a worthy reason to not play novel with me.

I did end up applying to North Carolina State University, and I got accepted.  I ended up deciding to go to Purdue though.  I just finished week 6 of classes, and so far I’m having a blast (I know… I’m a nerd).  I’m taking Basic Probability and Applications, Design of Experiments and Intermediate Statistical Methodology.  They’re challenging, but fun.  Most of what I’m learning is review for me, but since it’s been roughly 4 years since I’ve learned most of this stuff I’m really rusty on it.  Still, even though it’s challenging, and I’m not making any money whatsoever (which is scary), I know that I’m much better off here than I was in Huntsville.  There have been several nights that I’ve been working on homework until 10 or 11 at night that isn’t even due the next day, so I must be enjoying something, right?

First of all, last month was NaNoWriMo, which is always fun but also eats up a lot of my time.  My goal originally was to write half of a collaborative novel with my brother (which would be about 25k words) and to finish my own novel (which I estimated to be around 75k-100k words).  My finished novel ended up being around 50k words, so not as long as I had anticipated.  Then again, I was annoyed with the novel from the get go and so when the novel hit 50k I decided it would just be better for all involved if I killed off all of my main characters.  The collaborative novel was a blast though, so I’m really glad that I decided to try that.  All in all at the end of November I had 77,490 words, so not too shabby.

In early November (6th-8th) I met my brother and sister-in-law out in Raleigh, NC.  It was the annual Capital Area Handbell Festival, and for the third year in a row they were playing one of my brother’s handbell arrangements.  We played Friday night from 7:00 until 10:00.  Saturday was the festival itself from 9:00am to 5:00pm with a lunch break and a Raleigh Ringer’s concert.  Sunday was an advanced ring on the Raleigh Ringer’s bells and with some very talented bell ringers that went from 1:00pm to 5:00pm.  So, that was a fun weekend of bell playing.

That trip to Raleigh made me want to apply to North Carolina State University, which brings me to the subject of grad school.  A week before Thanksgiving I found out that I was accepted to Purdue and the University of New Mexico for their master’s of statistics programs.  So, I’m still making the decision on that, but nonetheless it’s exciting.

Also, the last post I made, I think I mentioned something about starting to run or wanting to do a mini marathon.  I have run not at all since I wrote that.  So, if I do the mini marathon still then it will be a walking thing and even then it’s not very likely.  It’s more likely that I’ll sign up for the 5k, and then only if I end up at Purdue where it would actually be possible to get to the race for the weekend.  I guess what I’m saying is that running so far is a big “No”.

That’s been my last month and a half really.  The past two weeks have been worrying about grad school, which will go on for another few weeks until I figure out where I’m going and get myself and my stuff there.  Last month was worrying about NaNoWriMo and attempting to write things filled with novelly goodness.  I do have a second novel that I only got 1000 words into during November that I plan to write and finish over the next few months.  My brother and I are still going to work on our collaborative thing too, I think.  So hopefully this time I will actually keep writing now that NaNoWriMo is over.

We ended up going to Yarn Expressions twice, and we got some neat stuff to make socks and fingerless gloves.  I also ended up getting some artful yarns vineyard in the Bordeaux color.  I have no idea what I’m going to do with it.  I originally picked it up to make more fingerless gloves, but with all the yarn I got to make gloves I’ll have a different pair for each day of the week.  So, I decided I would do something else with it, and since I didn’t know that “something else” was, I got two skeins (take two, they’re small?).  I’m sure I’ll think of something cool to do with it.  I just need to ponder on it for a while.

As far as grad school things go, I mailed off my application to the University of New Mexico a week ago.  I knew that I wouldn’t have as much time to work on it with my mom visiting, so I made sure I got it done before she got here.  I still need to check with the department to make sure that they have all of my materials, but provided I didn’t do anything stupid they should have everything that they need from me.  I think my recommendation writers have it all under control too.

Still no word back from Purdue, but according to the FAQ on their website, I should be hearing back late October or early November, so I should know something *soon*, and it’s really starting to make me nervous.  It’s not really that I want to go to Purdue more or less than UNM, it’s more that I’d like to go somewhere.  At this point I’m far less concerned with *where* I’m going to grad school than *if* I’m going to grad school.  I don’t know when I’ll hear from UNM, but that application isn’t due until Nov 1st, so I’m guessing I’ll hear from Purdue first.  I’ll let you know as soon as I find out something one way or the other.

NaNoWriMo is right around the corner.  Two weeks from today thousands of people will commit to 30 days of being glued to their computers attempting to type 1667 words a day in a mad dash to complete a 50k word novel.  Actually, it’s not that hard of an attempt.  I actually found the 50k words to be a very achievable goal.  That’s why this year I’m teaming with my brother to write a novel as well as writing my own.  And this time I want to actually finish the story in my novel, which I’m guessing will take me past the 50k mark and more into the 75k-100k range.  I like a challenge though, so it’ll at least make November interesting.

I still have no plot or character ideas for either novel.  I think I worried too much about little details last year and not enough about the big picture.  This year before I start with my novel I’d like to have a good idea of a few characters, where the story starts, and where it’s going to end.  It turns out that the little twists and turns that you send your characters on are pretty easy to come up with, but you need a pretty good main problem to (a) get your characters going, and (b) have an interesting main plot/ending for your story.  My fallback is usually “random fantasy involving some prophecy about main good character(s) that main evil character(s) would like to exploit somehow”.  I’d like to try something different though.  Maybe a murder mystery or some sort of fantasy/horror thing with werewolves and witches.  I’ll figure it out as I go along if I need to, but I still have two weeks to come up with something.

NaNoWriMo, knitting, and worrying about grad school will take up the majority of my next month and a half, but there’s something else that I’ve been thinking about doing.  Next year my birthday is on a Saturday.  Not just any Saturday, but the Saturday that the Indy 500 Mini Marathon and 5k are being run.  I’ve always wanted to be a runner.  I hate going out in the heat and puffing and feeling like I’m about two steps away from death, but I want to like running.  So, I’ve decided that I’m going to run something next year.

I’m currently undecided between the 5k and the half marathon.  I ran (walked) the 5k a few years ago, and that was really fun.  The half marathon would be really cool to do though because part of the race takes you around the Indy 500 track, which I think would be really neat to do anyway, but especially cool to do on my birthday.  I know that preparing for the half would be pretty intense, but I have 4 hours to make it from start to finish.  I’m not looking to set any world records or anything.  Just finish it.  So, I’m pretty sure it’s doable by most people.  I’m just not sure if it’s doable by me.  My current idea is to start doing a run/walk plan next week, and see how far I get by a week before Christmas.  The half usually sells out around Christmas, so I figure that will give me enough time to determine if there’s any way I’ll be able to do it before they close registration.  If I can’t even run 3 miles at Christmas, then I’ll just sign up for the 5k instead.  Either way, I’ll keep you posted on whatever I decide to do.

This time I’m not going to promise to write more frequently.  With NaNoWriMo coming up, I know the chances of me posting more often are slim to none.  So, I’ll leave you with this little bit of motivation that I hope will help get me through at least the next month and a half (I’m doomed): “Try not.  Do… or do not.  There is no try.”

Until next time.

I just recently (like, 10 minutes ago) started my application to the University of New Mexico’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics for a masters in stats. All I’ve really done at this point is write to some of my college professors asking them if they’ll write letters of recommendation for me.  Tomorrow I plan to take care of getting my transcripts and GRE scores sent.  At that point all I should have left is the application and the letter of intent.  The letter of intent always scares me a little because it’s easily the most important part of the application, but sometimes my intentions don’t really make sense to anybody but me.

My mom is coming to visit me Oct 9 to Oct 18.  That should be fun.  She stayed with me for a week back in December of 2007 when I first moved to Alabama.  It helped to have somebody around and we ended up doing some pretty cool things.  Hopefully we can find some neat things to do this time too.

NaNoWriMo is just around the horizon.  The signup page went up just a few days ago (www.nanowrimo.org), so go sign up to write your novel now!  I’m still not sure what I’ll write about this year.  More than likely it won’t be a continuation of my 2008 story since I won’t have it finished by the time November starts.  I don’t think I want to recycle any of the characters either in case I somehow manage to salvage my 2008 novel.  This year my goal isn’t just to get the 50k words, but to actually finish the novel.  Ideally I’d like to aim for writing 100k words.

On top of that, I’m writing a joint-novel with my brother.  We haven’t discussed the terms yet of how we’re trading or how often.  I don’t think we’re going to discuss any story or character aspects before we start either.  My brother said he’s ok with fantasy and that he makes no promises that things won’t get silly.  I think for the most part he plans on giving me challenges to see how I get the character(s) out of things, and I’ll probably do the same.  So, that’s very vague but will be a ton of fun.

As you can see, my free time is pretty busy with applying for school, my mom visiting, and some minimal planning for November.  I may get around to reading my 2008 novel, but I doubt I’ll be able to write enough to finish it before NaNoWriMo 2009 starts.  Despite being busy, I’ll also try to post more.  I had a few posts planned out for the last couple of weeks, but never got around to writing them.  At some point I may write those and sneak them in to make the last few weeks look less lonely.  I’m not sure that I have enough readers that check often enough to actually notice their suspicious appearance.

That’s really about it.  I know this was a short post, but there’s not much to update on the novel writing front.

I’ve always enjoyed reading about running.  Every once in a while when I’m out shopping I’ll buy the latest Runner’s World magazine.  I should probably say right now that I don’t run.  I’ve tried to get into it before and am trying to get into it now, but I can go maybe 0.2 miles before I have to stop and gasp for air while my legs throb.  Still, reading about running always makes me think that there must be something more to it than just pain.  The “greatest race the world will never see” that the Born to Run subtitle mentions was a 47 mile ultramarathon that took place in the Copper Canyons pitting the best of the Tarahumara against the best of the North American elite ultra runners.  Kind of makes my 0.2 miles seem weak, doesn’t it?

My favorite chapter in the book though is one that has nothing to do with the rest of the book at all.  Near the end of the book is a chapter completely devoted to human evolution.  It attempts to answer the question of how we managed to win the evolutionary war when our stronger and bigger-brained neanderthal brethren died out.  The theory that Born to Run puts forward is that we evolved to run.  Our bodies have certain parts that are only linked with species that run (like the achilles tendon) and because we are bipedal we have the advantage of breathing that most running species don’t have (most running species get extra lung power by their organs sloshing back and forth helping to push air out and suck air in, but this limits them to only one breath per stride).  The problem is that when most people hear that we evolved to run they automatically link running with speed.  But we didn’t evolved for speed… we evolved for endurance running.  We survived where neanderthals didn’t because we could run for long periods of time over great distances.  How did this help us survive?  Well, through persistance hunting of course.  Animals don’t sweat, so they rely on their breathing to cool them off.  The result is that when a group of hunters chases down an animal for long enough, it drops over dead from overheating.  We had the endurance, so we got the food.  This is Born to Run’s theory anyway, and I think it sounds about as plausible as any.

Mainly though, Born to Run is the story of a guy (Christopher McDougall) who got hurt running and wanted to know why he was in pain when some old Tarahumara guy in sandals was pain-free.  Rambly at times, but always interesting; I highly recommend it.

I knew that the economy was bad, but I assumed that Huntsville was immune to it. Or at least that the government contracted jobs were immune from it. The most alarmnig part of all of it is that the person from my company that lost his job was on the same contract that I’m on. For now things are ok, but I’m still a little shaken. They gave him no warning at all – in the morning everything was ok and around 10 am he went back to his cubicle, quietly packed up his things, and left out the back door. An hour later the owner of the company sent out an email about him leaving the company. It all happened so fast that nobody even knew he had resigned until the email came.

I have a feeling that things are going to get a lot worse with the economy before they get any better.

Saturday night she was sitting on the futon next to me talking about knitting socks, when she pulled out a book that one of her friends had gotten her.  It was Knitting More Circles Around Socks, the sequel to Knitting Circles Around Socks (which I currently own), by Antje Gillingham.  I enjoy knitting socks in part because I think that they’re really easy to knit despite popular belief that you need to use two magic wands instead of needles for it to come out looking anything like a sock.

I’ve always been intrigued by the Circles Around Socks method of using two circular needles to knit both socks at the same time.  It seemed to me to be a very efficient way of getting your socks done with the same number of rows, the same size, and at the same time.  As I was looking through my mom’s book I saw a pair of slip-stitch socks that I really wanted to try, and so my mom challenged me to a sock war.

The way that sock wars normally work in the knitting world is that everybody involved in the war gets an address, shoe size, and sock pattern.  It’s a race to get your pair of socks knit and mailed off to your target before another knitter does the same thing to you.  If you get a pair of socks in the mail, then you’re dead and out of the game.  At that point you wrap up the socks you were knitting and send them to your killer, who has to complete them and mail them off before getting killed themselves.  It’s a silly little game, but sounds like a ton of fun.

The sock war with my mom is a little different.  Next time I see my mom, if one of us doesn’t have her socks done, then she’ll have to take 2 skeins of the winner’s sock yarn.  So, it’s not really a war by any stretch of the imagination and more like yet another attempt for my mom to dish off some of her yarn.  Still, at the end of it at least I’ll either have more sock yarn or a pair of socks.  So really I win either way.

Last year was my first experience with novel writing, and I hit my 50k words in the first 16 days.  The issue is that although I’d won NaNoWriMo by my word count, I didn’t actually finish my novel.  So, I’m going to attempt to take September and part of October and make it SeptNoFinMo (September Novel Writing Month – I know it only has September in it, but SeptThruOctNoFinMo sounded too complicated), and I’ll see if I can’t finish up my story from last year before it’s time to start on a story this year because whether it’s another 25k or a whole new 50k to finish off my story, I want to have it done before NaNo ‘09.

As much as I’d like for this to be solely a September project, I’m 99.9% sure it will overflow into October, mostly because it will take me some time to re-read my story from last year and decide where I want to go from where I left off.  Plus I have a lot of grad school applications to fill out, a few books I want to read, and a play-by-post game of Exalted I’m participating in that should be starting up sometime soon (more on this in a later post).