^ That's a good thing, by the way. It feels like I have a ridiculous amount of down time this summer, even though I'm still working full-time. But, I'm not working two jobs, finishing high school until July, or raiding every night this time, and I love it. I can't believe this is what life will be like after school (in 10 1/2 months...).

I've managed to stick with about half of the activities I started last month. The whole cello thing sort of stopped when I got to the end of the "level one" book I had and didn't feel like buying another one. And programming a graphical MMORPG? Eh, not this summer, anyway. I'll likely get involved in some other kind of programming project instead. But at any rate, the chain mail shirt is about 1/2 done, I think.

Michelle is officially done with high school now. She'll be living at Malone in two and a half months. That's a strange concept... she has as much personality as the other four of us combined. It's not like I'll be around much during the school year anyway, between work and school, but the house will be pretty quiet, especially if Sarah ends up going to school or something. (Mom won't have any messes to complain about but her own!)

Well, in that order...

Finals are this week, which means that in two days, I'll be done until the end of August. I plan to study lightly for the one I have to take tomorrow (business stuff - yech) and I have to write a few pages for a take-home final, but otherwise, it's just going to Walsh to take a test for 45 minutes (after driving for 1:30) tomorrow and Wednesday. I remember when I used to get all stressed out about finals. The last time that happened was probably the first semester of my freshman year, actually. I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't have to study for finals. If you've forgotten enough of the material to have to re-read the entire book for most of a week before a test, then you won't remember any of it coming out of the class anyway. I suppose that's fine, actually... but to avoid the studying (takes WAY too much time...) I prefer to just listen every now and then in class, seeing as I have nothing better to do when I'm stuck there.

So now, I'm a little conflicted: How will I fit all my projects in this summer? I want to learn to play my cello, finish my chain mail shirt, and now program a space MMORPG. (Yeah, so I was poking at an old game I used to play a lot - Escape Velocity - a 2D space RPG sort of thing. So now I want to learn sound, graphics, and network programming in either Java or C++.) And I only have 4 months to do it all! Sigh.

Geek warning! AJAX is pretty awesome. I'm using it in a new project at work - I've got it set up so that you can just start typing part of a name, and it'll show all the matches as you type, and you check boxes and it updates without having to submit forms, and all that. I think I'm going to have to use this in pretty much everything I do now.

And, that last thing. My parents went up to Michigan to visit some great-aunts (my dad's aunts) this past weekend. I got to be the adult for a whole day... got home from work, made dinner, drove Sarah all over the place and everything. Michelle was tanning in the backyard while I'm doing all of this, too. She'll tell you she did some dishes, but would you believe that? I didn't think so. Well, ok, maybe she did a little bit. I guess I'm getting so old that I don't really care anymore, though. But making chicken linguine alfredo was pretty fun. I suppose have to start figuring out how to cook dinners if I want to move out in a year and a half.

I've been spending a good bit of time working on my chain mail shirt (technically, it'll be a "haubergeon"). It's got about 400 feet of 16-gauge galvanized steel wire in it so far, but it'll probably end up with at least 2000 feet of wire. I've done about half of either the front or back of it - not sure which yet. I found out that I was about to build the whole thing sideways... I'm just glad I figured that out before it would have resulted in days of work fixing the thing.

There are exactly 4 days of class left when I go back on Tuesday after break. Getting out this early is great, but why can't I be a senior right now?