New Apartment

It has been a rough start to the semester and a very busy few weeks, but I am finally getting some pictures up of the apartment. The first batch are from move-in day. Hopefully I will be writing up an post about classes and all that soon. Enjoy!

Here is Scott trying to find internet for me to use. No success...

Me trying to unpack

Messiness

Jessica's room...she didn't move in for a couple weeks

Taking a break

Living room

Hadn't gotten to the kitchen yet

Our itty bitty table in the kitchen (the front door is to the right of it)

Hallway to the bedrooms

Me and my beautiful Mom

My pathetic face as they are leaving

First floor apartment

Front Porch

Outside of Jessica's room. My window is the one all the way to the right.

Here is my room a few weeks later a lot cleaner and all unpacked.

Life Update

Today I started my job at Elbit Systems of America. Technically that is where I work, but I am in the part of the company called KMC Systems which makes medical equipment. My official title is med tech, but I'm an administrative intern as opposed to one of the engineering ones. Two of those were in orientation with me, but they work on the Kollsman side and do work for the military. Today was pretty good as first days go. It was a little tedious since I don't know how to do much, but there were no big mishaps or problems. I spent most of the day reading manuals, filling out paperwork, and getting shown around. I understood more of the manuals than I expected to. In fact, by the end of the day I had a basic understanding of how the machine works and what it does. They even had me changing tubes and stuff. Actually, I kept waiting for the beeping to start so I could jump up before anyone else just to have something to do. It looks like my schedule at least for now is going to be 7:30 to 5:00. I will have every other Friday off beginning next week and a short break the first week in July. The one thing that is going to be somewhat hard getting used to is having so little time after I come home. Having to get up at 6:00 to beat the guys to the shower means early, early to bed for me. Still, I hope to have time for a few fun things during the week. We'll just have to wait and see how it goes.

On other fronts, I was accepted to UNH. It wasn't a huge surprise, but I was relieved to hear it all the same. Not as pleasant news was that I am going to have to drop English as my double major. I was emailing the director of the Medical Laboratory Science department at UNH and she said that to complete a double major with MLS would be a minimum of 5 years. I can't afford, nor do I want to spend a total of 7 years getting my undergrad degree. By then I wouldn't even want to try for a graduate degree. My goal is to finish MLS in three years with summer school if at all possible. I really don't want to start over if I can help it. Unfortunately I was too late to sign up for a summer class this year. Microbiology was the only one I could take and it was full. It's actually good that I didn't because I would never have made it to class on time and I think it would have been too much.

I think that is about it for now. I haven't taken any pictures of break yet which is really sad since this was a great Memorial Day weekend. Mom, Mrs. Fenton, Katrina, and I went to Fort Foster on Saturday and it was spectacularly hot and beautiful. We even went in the water! Yesterday was perfect weather. Everyone was working in the yard (which looks great, I should get some pics). We had the Fentons and the Tavanyars over for a barbeque. Hopefully I can get some pictures up of the rest of the semester soon.

Quote of the Day: Annie Dilliard

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. IT is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god my draw us out to where we can never return.

Will the hypocrisy ever end?

PETA Killed 95 Percent of Adoptable Pets in its Care During 2008

Hypocritical Animal Rights Group’s 2008 Disclosures Bring Pet Death Toll To 21,339

WASHINGTON DC – Today the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) published documents online showing that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) killed 95 percent of the adoptable pets in its care during 2008. Despite years of public outrage over its euthanasia program, the animal rights group kills an average of 5.8 pets every day at its Norfolk, VA headquarters.

According to public records from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, PETA killed 2,124 pets last year and placed only seven in adoptive homes. Since 1998, a total of 21,339 dogs and cats have died at the hands of PETA workers.

Despite having a $32 million budget, PETA does not operate an adoption shelter. PETA employees make no discernible effort to find homes for the thousands of pets they kill every year. Last year, the Center for Consumer Freedom petitioned Virginia’s State Veterinarian to reclassify PETA as a slaughterhouse.

CCF Research Director David Martosko said: “PETA hasn’t slowed down its hypocritical killing machine one bit, but it keeps browbeating the rest of society with a phony ‘animal rights’ message. What about the rights of the thousands of dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens that die in PETA’s headquarters building?”

Martosko added: “Since killing pets is A-OK with PETA, why should anyone listen to their demands about eating meat, using lab rats for medical research, or taking children to the circus?”

CCF obtained PETA’s “Animal Record” filings since 1998 from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Members of the public can see these documents at PetaKillsAnimals.com.

(Skeptical? Click here to see the documents.)

In addition to exposing PETA’s hypocritical record of killing defenseless animals, the Center for Consumer Freedom has publicized the animal rights group’s ties to violent activists, and shed light on its aggressive message-marketing to children.

The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit coalition supported by restaurants, food companies, and consumers, working together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices.

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To read this article off the original site click here.

Quote of the Day: Kathleen Norris

"Dakota is a painful reminder of human limits, just as cities and shopping malls are attempts to deny them."

"Silence is the best response to mystery. 'There is no way of telling people,' Merton reminds us, 'that they are all walking around shining like the sun.'"

- from Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Quotes of the Day: Madeleine L'Engle

From her chapter "Icons of the True" in Walking on Water.

"[W]e do not find [wisdom and grace] in many places where we would naturally expect to find it. This confusion about because much so-called religious art is in fact bad art, and therefore bad religion."

"Christ has always worked in ways which have seemed peculiar to many men, even his closest followers. Frequently the disciples failed to understand him. So we need not feel that we have to understand how he works through artists who do not consciously recognize him. Neither should our lack of understanding cause us to assume that he cannot be present in their work."

"We cannot seem to escape paradox; I do not think I want to."

When speaking of the new book of common prayer and how we confess our sins of commission before those of omission, she writes, "It is the things I have left undone which haunt me far more than the things which I have done."

"There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation."

Quotes of the Day: Mark C. Taylor and Cardinal Suhard

"To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist." - Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard quoted by Madeleine L'Engle in "Icons of the True"

"It is the unsaid in all our saying that undoes all we do." - Mark C. Taylor from Disfiguring:Art, Architecture, Religion