Its been an interesting, crazy month so far this January. New Year’s, as I previously mentioned, was spent out at the Cypress Cove Nudist Colony. I had gigs both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, which left me quite exhausted for the balance of that weekend. Then, last weekend, we played again out at the Cove. Evidently, the next few months are kinda slow out there, but they fully intend for us to be out several times a month over the summer. Makes sense, I think.

Then in mid-January, I travelled up to our nation’s capitol for some work-related business, during which I got to visit with CJ & Alfred, Clara & Dick, Keri, and Tony and eat dinner at some awesome restraunts. I have to admit that if I were ever to desire a change in location, the greater Washington D.C./northern Virginia/southern Maryland area is quite appealing.

While up there, I found out that my digital music mentor Jerry Gardner had passed away quite unexpectantly. This left Jon (the other digital music instructor) and I quite shaken, particularly since Jon had just talked to him the night he passed away. But classes had to be covered, so we were both asked to share the effort. This added one extra class to my schedule, in addition to the other extra class we had begged the department to allow us to teach on computer music. So now, I’m up to teaching four classes at UCF in addition to my full-time obligation at NAVAIR. Fun stuff indeed.

At first I was scared I couldn’t handle it, but Patrick’s been supportive and offered to assist me with the outside-of-class obligations. He even met with my two musictech classes when I had to be out of town the first week of the semester. So now, it only seems overwhelming when I stop to think about it, which I subsequently try not to do.

Now for something completely geeky. I have been playing Final Fantasy 1 on the GBA (GameBoy Advance) for the last few weeks (well, since around Christmas), and I have to say that it really sucks. I never started with it but skipped ahead to FF 4 (the first on the SNES) which I absolutely adored. I think what discourages me about it is the incessant random battles throughout the dungeons, all of which contain random dead-end pathways. This was never my favorite component of the Final Fantasy series, at least not with the early battle systems. I think it wasn’t until FF6 that I started to enjoy customizing my characters more, and that certainly got insanely fun around FF10. Nevertheless, I will finish this game just to say that I’ve done it. Then, its on to finish FF5-FF10, none of which I ever completed. Yeah, I might finish before the end of civilization.

Ah, almost out of time. I have absolutely no time to talk about how great Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events is, both the bothersome books and the frightening film. Absolutely no time to talk about the wonders of Lost, the same-ness of Alias and 24, and the intelligence of the new Battlestar Galatica. Oh, and I can’t even begin to speak about Graham Norton, the old poof who I’ve terribly ripped off in this last paragraph.

Tags: books, Patrick, UCF

Categories: Public

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