Semester Begins

I had my first class by video link with Chapel Hill this afternoon. As far as the quality of the audio-visual experience nobody is going to mistake it for IMAX, but I guess it'll work out OK. Thankfully I don't have many more classes to take. It looks like I finally got things straightened out to take the class at Duke Marine Lab too.

I have a few leads on long-term places to live out here, so it's hard to believe that one of them won't pan out soon. One of them is a two-bedroom place half a block off the beach, but I can't see the inside until Sept 1, when the current residents move out. Frankly I should probably just rent it sight unseen; it's a beach house, it costs $600 a month and I can have a dog. How bad can it be?

I can see already that classes are going to interfere with my scuba diving schedule! I got a bunch of new gear, including a dive computer that just arrived today, and want to try it out, but I think I'll have to wait until next Friday to go out. Even that's not certain, since they need 4 people to run the boat and only 3 are signed up now. It seems like it's a choice between weekends when the boats are overcrowded, assuming you can even get on, and week days, when they may not even run. I need to start putting together a group of friends who want to dive regularly large enough so that the boat operators will take us when and where we want to go.

In world news, as of today Pluto is no longer a planet. Good riddance, I say! I've long been an anti-Plutite and can remember arguing with my best friend in junior high school, Mark Gordon, that it shouldn't be considered a planet. No, as it happens I didn't get many chicks in junior high. Why do you ask?

I finally bought those hair clippers, though not from Amazon, and gave myself my first self-administered buzz cut. There was only one small problem. Normally I get a cut with a "#3 guard," which I know is 3/8 inch. However for some reason I attached the 3/16 inch guard. I pretty much knew right away that I'd screwed up, but there's no turning back on these things.