No News Is Good News

I realized that I haven't posted in a whole week, which is kind of a long time for me. It's not that I've been busy or had anything weird going on, just that I haven't had too much to say. Things have been quiet, I'm happy, and I'm learning to slow down and not be in emergency mode all the time. That's not to say I've been doing nothing at all, but I have a few projects going that are maturing at a merely leisurely pace, and I've been doing a lot of reading and watching a lot of movies. In a word, relaxing! That thing I vaguely remember doing back before returning to school.

Besides a lot of reading (mostly fiction, for once) and watching movies, my main project currently is rigging up something to improve the wireless Internet reception for my mom. You see, my folks live in this sort of summer camp/retirement community owned by their church and are allowed to use the wireless broadband being transmitted out of the business office there. However, it so happens that the computer is in a lousy spot for that and not easily moved, so I've been considering some options to try to improve reception. We already tried a high-gain antenna mounted to the wall in a slightly better position than the computer itself, but it didn't work well enough. The next solution we're going to try is rigging up a homemade wireless antenna following the instruction on this website. The plan is to mount it under the eaves on my folks' garage and run a very long wire through the attic and down to the computer on the opposite side of the house as unobtrusively as possible. This will be a group project since I don't know how to solder (yeah, I know... what kind of geek am I??), but one of brothers-in-law does that for a living all day. If it works, my mom will be happy and so will I, since I will probably spend a fair amount of time at her place whenever I come home from school from now on. Right now, the weak signal and consequent low connection speed make me extremely frustrated whenever I have to work on my mom's computer.

I'm also occupied currently with getting serious about my impending move. Next weekend looks good for heading down to the area to look at rentals, and I've also been working on getting all my documents in order, opening new bank accounts, and all that boring stuff. I still need to apply for my passport, now that my name has changed officially, so I had to go on a scavenger hunt to find my birth certificate. That actually didn't take as long as I thought it might, so now I just need to get photos, take all my crap to the post office, and shell out the hefty fee. Yay. So, things are momentarily peaceful here in my world, and I'm just trying to enjoy it while it lasts!