Well, okay, before I start into the weekend, I should recount everything in the past two weeks, since I haven't updated ye olde journal for that long.

The 13th was my last day of regular classes before finals came down. And came down they did. I took my CS final on Thursday, my Astro final on Friday (taking super-long to finish THEN making up a lab immediately after because we found that I was really close to getting a B and making up that lab would get me into that range), and my Art History final on Monday (which, like most History exams, sucked). Spread more than a few days at work here and there, and you have what I did for that week. That, and continuing to bitch at Chevy Chase Bank for not giving me back the $80 stolen from my account due to an ATM error.

With finals wrapped up after the 20th, I was free for more work hours... in a big way. It started when I was asked to work extra hours on Sunday, which I accepted because I need as much income as possible right now. This somehow started a trend of being asked to work extra during five consecutive days, being offered hours on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and the following Tuesday.
(I was already scheduled to work on Thursday.) I declined for Monday since that was the day of my last exam, but every other offer I took. In exchange for all these extra hours, I got the schedule change for Thursday that I wanted (swapping my closing shift for an opening shift so I could get out earlier), and an open to close shift on New Year's Day (which is paid 1.5x overtime).

On Wednesday, after receiving the call asking me to come to work in the early afternoon (yes, most of the calls gave me about an hour or two of notice), I made it over to campus to see an advisor about what classes I should be taking to transfer to UMBC. I showed him my crude roadmap to meeting the transfer program's requirements, just to find out that in the past year UMBC had completely overhauled the Information Systems program and that all the resources I was working off of weren't valid anymore. Joy. I'll somehow have to sort it all out in the near future, but I was hoping to have my class schedule for next semester nailed down.

I also visited the bank in the mall before going to work, to bitch at them in person about the missing $80 (since obviously bitching at them on the phone twice over didn't work). I pretty much got the same runaround responses I got over the phone and mail though, but I had them investigate the matter for a third time. Maybe if I launch enough investigations, they'll give me back my money just to shut me up.

Getting my schedule changed for Thursday freed up more time to go to the "Shin" Pak residence for the big Christmas party they were having. After getting home from work on Wednesday, I discovered that there would be a LAN gaming component to the party, and a bunch of people were bringing their PCs. Somehow, I manage to convince myself to bring my PC too, so off it went to the trunk at 3am, when I had to be at work at 6:45am. Yeah, I didn't get much sleep that night. Work went surprisingly well considering how little sleep I had, though. I ended up not eating anything during my break and taking a 20 minute nap in the back room instead.

After getting off work, I went to the bank to deposit the last month's worth of paychecks. Considering all the problems I was having with them, I didn't really want them to get more of my business, but having no money in my account was starting to get too inconvenient. The people I had been bitching at on my last visit remembered me too (though that wasn't hard since I had visited them only two days prior), but of course the latest investigation into that was still going. So I simply deposited my checks, getting $20 back in cash for lunch and just to get money in my wallet for the first time in several weeks. Upon getting lunch, I get a call from Chris saying that Kevin had picked him up and I no longer had to, so I headed over to Bristow, VA directly from the mall.

Why is I-66 always crawling with state troopers? I didn't get pulled over, but there were one or two close calls. I wasn't going significantly faster than anyone else, so hopefully I didn't stand out too much. (Of course, since I'm a Maryland driver, getting a ticket in Virginia wouldn't cost me any points, but it's still something I'd rather avoid.)

Mapquest also sucks. I guess the route it gave me is technically the shortest, but there was so much traffic that I would have been much better off with directions from Pakman or Kevin. Taking the route I did added a good 10 or 15 minutes to the trip.

But when I got there, it was good. And fun. And my PC is riced out more than Kevin's. =p

The party consisted of much fooding, much playing of Half-Life 2/CS:Source/UT2004/Starcraft, and much playing with the new Samsung DLP that Pakman had bought and placed in the basement. Nasty 480i video processing delay or not, it's a damn nice TV. Alison (who I probably spent a little too much time cuddling with ^^;) also watched all 20 eps of Futatsu no Spica on my PC. ^^;;

The craziest part of the party was probably the exchange of gifts, which was utter chaos. Some of the gifts were hilarious, such as a copy of the You Got Served DVD (which we ended up watching for some reason). Me and my goldfish memory can't remember all the gifts that were given out, though. But Chris probably got the best gift out of the guys (I don't know about the girls), as Alison gave him the EVO2k4 DVDs. Yeah, we watched that first, just to see Justin Wong get pwned by Daigo again. Yeahhh...

I suck at Starcraft. Totally. I'd use the "I haven't played for five years" excuse (which is true), but I was never any good in the first place. =p

Stayed overnight into Christmas Day, which was more of the same. At some point, we moved my PC over to the TV and hooked it up via VGA. Using my PC as a video input device helped somewhat, making pop'n music and IIDX somewhat playable with a much-reduced video delay. We also ended up watching a whole bunch of videos from the PC. We also got a good look at Kp's pores.

Yeah.

At 11:30pm, I left a lively game of Monopoly to pack up and go, since I needed to take Alison and Chris home. This was a lot later than I planned, since I also had another 6:45am shift the next day. After dodging more state troopers on I-66, we dropped Alison off at home, then I dropped Chris off before heading home myself and setting my PC back up before crashing for the night. I was shit tired for work, but oh well...

Work suckiness notwithstanding, the party was pretty fun. It would be nice to do it again sometime soon. ^^

As for the present time, I don't have much to do this week other than work every other day. There is an ilovebees meetup thing going on during Sunday afternoon, where Durga/Melissa's voice actor will be present. It'll be fun to meet up with some of the beekeepers again. ^^

Spam report: MT-Blacklist gave me this prompt when I told it to despam:

"Out of the last 300 comments, there are 284 comments on entries for which you have editing privileges that match your search criteria."

Having the offending sites added to the master blacklist helped despamming immensely, as this despam run caught all but one of the spam comments I received in the past two weeks. I really should upgrade to MT3.x so I can make use of MT-Blacklist v2's extensive and improved anti-spam functionality. That's an endeavor for another day, though...