Woe is me

It's been a crummy couple of weeks up here. It hasn't been the constant homework, I'm pretty much used to that by now. It started out pretty well...
*In late January I got my hard drive back from Seagate. I hooked it up and everything worked well. SWEET! I made a mirrored (redundant, great for data security!) array with my original Seagate and my repaired one, and this required me to reinstall XP. So I did. It seems, however, that there is a little fluke with XP installation: if it doesn't think one of your drives is formatted (enough) it will format it for you. It didn't think my 200 gig Maxtor was formatted, even though EVERYTHING I own in digital form was backed up on it and I used it not half an hour ago. So *zing* it formatted every drive I had lickety split and I was left with nothing.
Added to this is a little catch-22 that the nice people at ASUS built into their wireless motherboards: in order to use the wireless card, you need to install service pack one because it has the drivers on there. SERIOUSLY, when you insert the CD that came with the motherboard and click on install chipset drivers a text file just pops up and says "just install service pack one, dummy." That's just lazy. So, anyway, I was left with less than nothing.
I picked up my computer and moved it to my roommate's room so I could plug it directly into the modem and eventually got things sorted out. I also downloaded a data recovery program to try to salvage some data from my formatted drive. I had a little practice at this, since XP did this to me once before.
Long story short (too late!) I lost about 1 out of every 10 MP3s, programs, pictures, and videos. Lame.
*Ok, phew, got that sorted out--wait, what? My hard drive is failing again? Oh, no, this is just my SECOND FUCKING SEAGATE HARD DRIVE GOING OUT. So, it's now toast and I mailed it into the folks at Seagate to repair. What are the chances? I've never actually seen a hard drive fail before, and now BOTH of mine have gone out. Hmm.
*Let's face it, my wardrobe is just big enough to fit in one load of wash. Convenient and environmentally friendly! Not so convenient is when I washed a pen with my clothes the other day and ruined every piece of clothing I own. My plan at the moment is to work into every conversation how I dabble in art and that's why I have spots all over my clothes. It beats my other plan, which is just tie-dying everything.
I'm working on replacing my music collection at the moment, and it's slow going. One upside: I'll replace an album and listen to it, and I'll think "Damn, this sounds really good!" As it turns out, I really CAN tell the difference between 128 kbps and 256/FLAC, even on my little Boston Acoustics. All this time...

The cutting edge in environmentalism

I hope y'all can read this little bit of harmless--but hilarious--vandalism at the construction site of a new WWU facility.

Hands of blue

Sorry, this is all I've been up to for the past couple weeks, and it's what I'm going to be doing for the rest of the quarter. I spend my time working in 3 different labs, and the time between I try to get some writing in because I'm taking two writing-intensive courses. At least I'm pretty sure I don't want to do research when I grow up.
Also featured in the picture is my iPod, and now that I listen to it hour after hour each day silence has become kind of a novelty.

* I'm not sure why it looks like this is a mirror image. It must be a fluke of the phonetography.