(Note: A lot of drivel, not a lot of real content.)

* Woke up at 4am, couldn't get back to sleep, shuffled in to surf the web a bit. CNN's front page screamed BLASTS ROCK LONDON at me. I know all my UK colleagues are safe, as they're 40 miles outside of the city and no one went there today. I hope the same for my friends.

* I still hate packing a whole lot, but at least I feel like we're making some kind of progress. Maybe.

* Very excited about this weekend's trip, for all that it is taking away from valuable packing time. I got my dress last night, it fits perfectly, and looks lovely.

* Good on Tim Brown for wanting to retire a Raider. I'm happy to see that.

* I now think that the NHL and NHLPA are having fun teasing us.

* Last night, I stopped in to get my hair trimmed, because I love this cut, and the hairdresser I got was also at the Journey concert over the weekend. That's the first time I've ever had any sustained conversation with a stylist.

* It is mood swing city around here for me. I've noticed I'm not the only one, either. I feel very strange by saying this, but I sincerely hope that PMS is my problem. What is it about this year? Things were going well for awhile, now it seems that the celestial pie in the sky has decided that we all need faces full of banana cream or something.

* Go Lance. That is all.

* When I open a bug against the 9.3 version, for a client who is running 9.3, and confirm that it's also a problem for 9.4--but *only* in house...why is it okay to create a patch for 9.4 but not 9.3, which the client actually needs?

* Some people are so dumb that it makes me want to cry.

I got much more sleep last night than I did the night before, but even so, my brain has been slow all day long, and the smallest things have given me the giggles.

- "He hasn't even had his day in court yet, but Simon Wynne has been kicked off the ESU basketball team after being arrested and accused of driving a parked car while intoxicated." -- excerpt from a newspaper article. (My daily calendar funny.)

- Random thought: It amuses me far more than it should, and there's something so very wrong with this, but...given that the American Idol winner this year was a girl, am I the only one who thinks there's something just WRONG with the fact that the summer tour is being sponsored by POP TARTS?

Also, fun stuff of the day: CNN has a link to some of the Live 8 performances, and wow, I hadn't realized how many people were involved. Impressive.

Drove all the way up to Clearlake to see Journey on Saturday, and while we weren't really all that impressed with Konocti as a venue, the concert was freaking amazing.

It will never cease to floor me how perfect a fit Steve Augeri's voice is. It sounded like he might be getting over a cold or something, but damn, the man has got some pipes.

Neal Schon's rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner...well, let's just say they need to play that at Sharks games, instead of some of the other people they have come sing--I just wish people'd remember to take their damn hats off! :)

I had no idea that Deen Castronovo could sing, but he does, and wow, he sounds great. And I just love a drummer who plays so hard that he makes the drum kit shake, and drops jaws at some of the fills he hits. It's amazing, I could watch him the entire night.

The show was really fantastic--they have a new CD coming out, which they gave a copy of to everyone who attended...which you can't get anywhere else right now, woo. They played a lot of the new stuff, and some of the *really* old, pre-Steve Perry tunes, which was fantastic.

And then came the intermission. And *then* came the last two hours of the show--some new stuff, but mostly all the old hits, where you could hear the crowd singing every word right along with them, which is always such a cool part of concerts, for me. We only got one song for an encore, but they were running up against a curfew, and they'd already played so much, I can't imagine what else they would've done.

All in all, it was an amazing birthday gift. I don't think we'll go see a concert there again--too much work, the drive is too long, the venue is not very good, the accommodations aren't the best, but for this one night, this one event...there's nowhere else I'd have wanted to be.

I logged into my school website last night to check my grades, but they aren't posted in the nifty, pretty 'check your grades' portion of the site yet--which I wasn't expecting anyway, they only turned grades in on Wednesday. But I still had to check.

But, when I went to check my transcript, because I was curious to see how many units I'd completed...hey look, my spring '05 grades.

And...holy crap.

I got an A in my Geography class--which I was kind of expecting.

But then, I about fell out of my chair.

I got a B in my English class, which I was hoping for but so *not* expecting, considering I got a dismal grade on one of the really important assignments.

WOO!

~20 credits under my belt, and my cumulative GPA is 3.7.

I'm not taking any classes during the summer quarter--we're way too busy, between trips and moving and everything else. Not only that, but I couldn't find anything I wanted to take that wasn't a four day a week thing.

Lots more random nattering about school below, more for my own reference than anything else.