The diary's been kinda quiet lately, because I haven't felt very clever or insightful for a few weeks, but I figure I should keep all you regular readers informed of what's going on.

That is, the few whom I haven't told on the phone. To the rest, I should kind of apologize for having been equally tight-lipped in person. It's just that it's hard to talk about what I've been doing, since work on the project is still in the nebulous planning stages where we're meeting once or twice a day and trying to figure out what we're doing for the next ten weeks, and outside of work I've just been putzing around on the computer, and doing crosswords, and watching television.

On with the updating. I found a new apartment early last week, which I'll be moving into in July. It's an efficiency about a half an hour walk from campus, with plentiful free street parking. It's a pretty cute place, well over half the size of the place I'm currently sharing. The kitchen is part of the one room, with a little island separating the two, and the bathroom's got a stand-up shower, and the one big closet is accessible from out in the hall. Which is weird.

I'm looking forward to living alone. Not because I don't like my roommate, but after you've lived with someone for two years, all the little quirks start to pile up, and you just yearn for that day in the near future when you can have some friggin' pre-sliced cheese in your fridge.

And I realized today that I totally forgot to ask if there are laundry machines in the building when I looked at it, but since I'll have a car, that's not really a big deal anymore.

As far as the car situation goes, I've pretty much settled on a Neon, which is a model I've liked ever since I drove one in this stupid "drunk driving simulation" they made us do in high school, whereby they "simulated" you being drunk by turning off the power steering and locking out the brakes, and then when you couldn't stop in time, the instructor in the passenger seat tried to make you feel guilty by saying things like, "You just killed your kid brother. I hope you're happy."

And Dad has agreed (on the car, not the fratricide), which I was pretty sure he would, since the Neon was on his initial list of "you might like to get" cars. It became clear during our conversation today that we don't see completely eye-to-eye on what the important features of a car are - namely gas mileage, which is important to me since I will be paying for gas. But the Neon is both practical enough for me and conservative enough for him.

(And cute enough for her, although that wasn't a major deciding factor. Honest.)