vacation!

Last Friday was my two year anniversary with Taylor, and we went to Uchi to celebrate. It was delicious as expected.

The rest of the weekend was filled with hanging out and sports. The hanging out part was good. The sports part was very, very bad. Both the Longhorns and the Cowboys embarrassed themselves for the umpteenth weekend in a row. Sigh...

[this portion was written Monday night]
I have three presentations tomorrow which will wrap up most of my duties for this charity campaign. I'm less nervous than I was about the leadership presentation, but there will be many more people at these presentations. I'm going to prep for the presentation tonight and tomorrow morning, and we'll just see how it goes. I have a presentation at 9:30, 10:30, and 5:00. What sucks is that usually when you make a presentation, you're relieved and done. In my case, I have to make it again two more times. I'm sure it'll be much easier each subsequent time, though.

[this portion was written Wednesday]
Well I'm done with the presentations and they all went well - except for attendance. Not sure what happened this year, but I only talked to about 60 people total across the three meetings. Oh well, it's still an accomplishment, just not as big as I was hoping.

I need some financial advice from my readers. I am almost done with my car payments, and I have two options for what to do with the extra money: put it toward my student loans, or my savings. The typical financial advice that you would receive is to put it toward your loans because of the interest rates. My savings account has an APY of 3%, whereas my student loans have an average rate of about 4.5%. However, I'm hoping to have a solid enough chunk of money saved up in the next one to two years such that I can make a down payment for a house and afford all the necessities involved. I would like to put the extra money all toward my savings, in order to boost that account. Of course, the smart compromise would be to split it up - maybe half and half? All I know is that if I put it all toward my loans, my savings account won't be able to grow as much and I won't be as financially ready in the future for a commitment such as a house.

I wish I knew some financial experts.

Tomorrow I leave for Seattle with the always-beautiful Taylor Yowell. We're going there in part to celebrate our anniversary, but also to visit a good friend who left us for Seattle a couple months ago — Travis, of course. Should be a fun weekend, and relaxing if nothing else. I need the break.

Two years!

It's our two year anniversary today. We're going to Uchi tonight. It's gonna be a good day.

The love is strong

woo-wee

Today was a fun day for me. As part of my community fund coordinating duties, I had to give a presentation to our leadership today, or at least to those who had time and weren't out on travel.

I was a bit nervous about it this morning, but after a few dry runs I was good to go. The nervousness subsided and I gave a pretty good presentation, and I even got some praise afterwards.

I don't normally like to brag about my accomplishments, but I am particularly proud of this one. It's also an important part of growing as an individual, and trying to take on things outside of your comfort zone.

My duties are not quite over, though. I have two more presentations to give next week (duplicate presentations to different groups of people). These presentations will be for the general masses at work, and while they'll be larger scale in terms of audience size, I think it will be an easier presentation overall.

Once I'm done with that (next Tuesday), I only have another day of work and then I leave for Seattle with Taylor for the weekend!

Gorillaz videos

I went ahead and uploaded my iPhone videos from the Gorillaz concert, if you're interested.

Click the links above the vids to go to the YouTube page, where you can see the HD versions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fB4jRTSBxk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFXcz6Uflyg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZvVjD75awE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avC_0a45_oo

Man oh man oh man

It seems like a lot is going on lately, but really I don't think that's the case. Maybe just a lot going on in my mind.

Last weekend I went to see the Gorillaz, which was one of the best concerts I've seen. I wasn't sure how I felt about their newest album, but it's grown on me quite a bit. As for the concert, it was simply a lot of fun. They had a huge screen behind the stage where they played animations and music videos, and they never had less than 10 people on the stage performing. They had a strings section, the occasional brass section, an Syrian/Arabic music group for a couple songs, a couple drummers — you name it, they probably had it on stage. When they played their singles that had corresponding music videos, they were always timed well. When people were singing live, it was correctly matching up with lip movement in the videos. The animations really raised the fun factor in my opinion. Not to mention that everyone on the stage (including Damon Albarn) was having a blast and was very energetic.

I took a couple videos on my phone, but I have yet to really figure out the best way of uploading videos to YouTube. Strange that I've never done that before. Fear not, though. They have live performances on YouTube already for your viewing pleasure!

For no reason other than to make my blog post longer, here is the setlist for their concert (notice how many guest artists they had):

-Orchestral Intro (Extended)
-Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach (with Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)
-19/2000 (with Rosie Wilson)
-Last Living Souls
-Stylo (with Bobby Womack and Bootie Brown)
-On Melancholy Hill
-Rhinestone Eyes
-Superfast Jellyfish (with De La Soul)
-Tomorrow Comes Today
-Empire Ants (with Yukimi Nagano)
- Broken (Extended)
-Dirty Harry (with Bootie Brown)
-El Mañana
-White Flag (with Kano and Bashy and the American Syrian Orchestra; extended)
-To Binge (with Yukimi Nagano)
-DARE (with Rosie Wilson)
-Glitter Freeze
-Plastic Beach

Encore:
-Cloud of Unknowing (with Bobby Womack)
-Feel Good Inc. (with De La Soul)
-Clint Eastwood (with Bashy and Kano)
-Don't Get Lost In Heaven
-Demon Days (with Bobby Womack)


That's quite the setlist, don't you think? If they ever come back to Austin in the future, I will definitely go again. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that N.E.R.D. was the opener! They were also good, but unfortunately they played 90% new songs of their upcoming album which I didn't know. I wasn't able to get into their songs as much because of that. They performed well, though.

The rest of the weekend was pretty uneventful. The Longhorns lost to a terrible team Iowa State and people are really beginning to question what our coaching staff is doing with our players. Cowboys lost on Monday to the Giants.

I had a midterm in my class on Tuesday and it went well enough. It was a hard test to study for in that there weren't many things to study for. We've only learned a handful of concepts, and the rest of the class has been learning how to apply those concepts. At this point, you either understand it or you don't. Most of the test was easy, but he did design some intentionally hard questions to throw some people off. I'd assume the average on the test was a mid-to-low B, and that I scored somewhere around average. I'd be surprised if I eked out an A, and I'd be equally surprised/upset if I got a C. I'll find out next week, I suppose.

We had our last kickball game last night and we finally won again! It was a really good game. Both teams were into it, but were still having a good time. Both teams respected each other and showed great sportsmanship, too. After a hard fought battle (where I injured myself as usual), we sneaked out a win in the last inning, 6-5. We are likely not in the playoffs, but we still finished out the season with a win, bringing our record to a respectable 4-3.

Today is the last day of my work week, and I'm ready for it. This weekend is Halloween weekend and I don't have any solid plans, but there are a lot of potential things going on. We also have a game against Baylor which we will probably lose. Losing to Baylor, the #1 team in the Big 12 South — what is happening to the world?

Other stuff probably happened in the past week which I forgot to mention, but that's what happens when you don't update in a while.

update forthcoming

Just give me a day!

Hello my blog faithful!

Sorry that my updates have been few and far between lately! I haven't had a whole lot going on that has been noteworthy lately, so I haven't had much to talk about. I do have a few tidbits for you, though, so let's get to it.

As a reminder, I am the site coordinator at work for our site plus 2 others for a United Way-style giving campaign. It turns out that my work will involve more than I originally thought: public speaking. I will be leading the presentation given to anyone on our campus who wants to attend (generally 40%). 40% is probably 200ish employees. I've never talked in front of 200 people before. That's a scary, yet still exciting, prospect. I better make sure I'm prepared lest I make a fool out of myself in front of a lot of people.

My allergies are still going strong, but not quite as strong as a couple weeks back. Andy has recently caught an alleged cold, and I don't think I'd even be able to tell anymore between my continued allergies and a newly-caught cold from him (or whomever).

Also, a bit of sad news today. Recently, Stella, the family pet, has been pretty sick. The vet told my aunt that the best course of action at this point is to euthanize her. My aunt made the hard decision and it's going to happen today. No need for any tearjerkers, but she has been a great pet to me, my dad, and the rest of my family. She loved many and was loved by many, and made a lot of people very happy.

More frequent posts to come in the future! I promise!