Daylight Saving

Today we went onto daylight saving time, for the first time in Indiana's history! Now we'll be on the same time as all the eastern states year-round, not just during winter. (That is, except for those counties in the north-west that have been subsumed by Chicago's urban sprawl, they've always been on central time, as though they were part of Illinois.)

I don't know why but the days are already seeming very long, much longer than what I'm used to. This makes daylight saving a good thing, becaause I don't like being woken up early by sunlight (my bedroom window faces east) but I can't help wondering just how much of it is my imagination. Apparently we're at 39˙ 9' 44" here in Bloomington and Leonay is 33˙ 45' 54". Doesn't sound like a big difference but already, just a few days after the equinox, I'm finding the sun stays up til about 7pm and with the time change that will be 8pm. It's going to be the land of the midnight sun come July!

Vernal equinox

Today's the Spring Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere. So I was a little surprised to see a thick blanket of snow covering the town when I woke up this morning!

It's very strange because we've just returned to classes from Spring Break and the last few weeks have been quite warm. Even Punxsutawney Phil couldn't have predicted this!

Back online

Well I got my computer back and now that I'm online am not feeling so naked anymore. (Actually I still have a bit of fiddling to do before I can get back onto my wireless network. Now I wish I hadn't secured it so well!)

Unfortunately they couldn't recover any of the data so I'm currently going through setting up everything. Most of the old emails were on the server. On my iPod I had all the good music, my address book, calendar and a backup from a couple of months ago but I've still lost all my photos and a lot of movies.

Sigh!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Tomorrow's my birthday; my first away from home. At least I won't have any classes with Spring Break just started.

I'm going to cook myself a birthday cake. I thought about making a birthday pavlova but the weather's not warm enough for that yet and it will be a while before the summer fruit comes into season. I have invited a few friends around to help me eat it so I won't be spending the day alone.

Spring Break

Well I managed to get my paper in yesterday. On top of having to retype it, I couldn't get the uni webmail to attach the doc and had to fiddle around for ages before I submitted it just minutes before the deadline! Then I took the computer to the other side of town (through the rain) where they told me that they might be able to recover my data but not under warranty. That was a really bad day!

But now I'm on vacation for a week. This was meant to mean that I'd be blogging and chatting a lot more than I could before with so much work to do. But now my major artery to the outside world is cut. I feel quite naked in my apartment with a telephone my only means of communication! I guess this means I'll get some reading done.

But the good news is the weather is getting much better. It's warming up enough to go outside without a coat! Soon it will be hot and humid like it was when I first arrived.

Murphy's Law

I had a mid-semester paper due for my ethics class this afternoon so my computer decided to break down this morning!!

The hard drive is just refusing to spin up, instead it taunts me by going "click, click click". Not only did this mean I had to retype it (I had it all in a mixture of typed and handwritten pages) but I also wasted an hour booting off DVDs and trying to coax the machine back to life.

Luckily it's still under waranty; I'm taking it to the Apple service centre this evening. If you don't see me online for a few days, you know why. (I'll try to check my email once a day on campus but don't expect any long-winded responses.)