Monday, August 14, 2006

I had a good weekend. Turns out. Saturday I went up to Spokane in the morning to meet Cortni for lunch at Olive Garden. Good stuff. I had my traditional Chicken con Broccoli (hold your gasps at my eating something green. It happens every now and again.) and Cortni had Cheese Ravioli. Mine was good, but Cortni's disagreed with her stomach, which was too bad. After lunch I went up to Whitworth College to hang out with Shannon, an old friend from highschool. She just moved into a house near her campus, and was having difficulty putting her furniture together. Word to the wise: don't-buy-furniture-online,-it-tends-to-suck-monkey-balls. (I had to hyphenate it to make it one word, and the statement is meant figuratively, for those who might wonder who is going around playing with monkey-balls.) She bought a little table with a drawer in it that was made of wood. It was your typical cheap sort of furniture, comes unassembled with holes drilled in where you're supposed to put screws in. At least, normal furniture has holes where the screws are supposed to go. This particular piece of furniture had holes in the approximate, nay general vicinity of where the screws were supposed to go. The holes in the legs were about a quarter inch further apart than the pilot holes in the cross piece for the legs. Net result, we had to basically thread the fatty wood screw in at an angle, mostly missing the pilot hole in the cross piece. Now here's another piece of poor engineering. Suppose you were to make a screw for a piece of cheap furniture. Foremost in your mind would be to make them as cheap as possible, because clearly using steel screws would cost several hundred pennies more than brass ones. Also, don't bother getting screws that have sharp enough threads to actually cut their way into the wood. Oh yeah, and also don't bother using screws that have flat or Philips heads on them, but go with Allen heads (those hexagonal jobbies). While you're at it, make sure you don't make the heads deep enough to get more than 1/16 of an inch of the wrench head in, because clearly that’s enough to drive a screw through hardwood. Also, make sure you include a tiny little Allen wrench to put them in, so that its impossible to get enough leverage on it to actually assemble the furniture. . . Every last one of the screws stripped out when trying to screw it in. The end result was a piece of furniture that looks pretty, but wobbles more than the underarm of a hundred year old woman.

But, all that aside, it was good to see Shannon again. Her mom took us out to a restaurant called Prospectors, which turned out to be a pretty high class sort of place. Steaks and Shrimp instead of a burger and fries. It was pretty tasty, but after an Olive Garden lunch, I was far from hungry. But I couldn't be rude and not eat with them, so I ordered a chicken Cesar wrap that turned out weigh about 3 lbs, and took up an entire plate. Needless to say, I took most of it home.

So for the last two days I've been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend. Its nice to have her back. She has a new room mate named Nalani (nay-LAH-nee). She's friendly. She also has a movie collection to rival Net Flix, so of course Cortni's gonna steal some for our (read: my) amusement.

I had to go into work today. I had high hopes of getting a couple of wafers masked and doped, and maybe even etched. Instead, I was roped into making PZT (our piezoelectric material) which took about 4 hours. It doesn't actually take four hours to add ingredients or anything, just to get the hot plate to heat things to the right temperature. Now, I like watching thermometers move as much as the next guy, but after about two hours of it, one gets a little tired of staring at the thing. A lot like watching paint dry. . .

My dad's going to be flying up to Alaska tomorrow to fly a Cessna 210 back with John Pallister. It should be an adventure. The flight should only take 2 days assuming perfect weather the whole way, but apparently that never happens.

I managed to strike a deal with Cortni involving my laundry. Her apartment complex has a coin-op laundry room, but the washing machines are small, and the dryers don't work very well, so instead, I offered to let her do her laundry in my apartment (since I have my own washer/dryer) just so long as she does my laundry too. :-D Net result: I don't have to do laundry! *happy dances*

Well, I have a pizza on the way for dinner, so I think I'm going to make like a baby and head out.