Alright, as many of you may or may not know, I've moved to Texas because I thought - "gee, wouldn't it be interesting to live somewhere without seasons". I was wrong... Houston has seasons - four of them even! They are: wet + hot, dry + hot, wet + slightly cold, dry + slightly cold. Slightly cold means possibly as low as 40 degrees. Although I haven't witnessed it yet, I've heard stories of the great cold front where there was a little bit of snow. This is quite a change from living in the midwest and even more of a change from living in Connecticut!

So why the change of address to LJ? I could give all kinds of reasons, but mostly I thought it was just time for a change. So welcome aboard, hold on for... well really I'm a grad student in psychology - you're going to hear stories of class, work, and living in texas. My most recent enjoyment is watching data process. It wouldn't seem like such a big deal if you didn't know that it used to take 45 minutes to process a file and now it takes 5 minutes. More posts soon in the near future and I'll try to port some LJ posts over as I go. Or maybe just re-tell stories from "back in the day". I'll start with this one, which I promise is absolutely true: How I got the nickname.

Well, I was president of my fraternity, and since my house was founded at a military academy, our ranks have military titles on them. So my title was "Commander". I was elected in May, made it through the summer and August without major incidents. Then... in September, I stayed up really late watching movies with the guys, playing video games, that sort of thing. Well around 3 in the morning I went to bed. And my bed happened to be lofted up in the air, about 6 feet. Apparently the war-like video games had really left an impression because in my dream I was in a WW2 like battle. Then someone threw a grenade into the trench that I was in and I of course dove to get out of the way. So there I was, enjoying my dream, and falling (most common type of dream, btw) and suddenly I knew something was wrong. I woke up to discover I was indeed REALLY falling out of my lofted bed, with the floor coming up very quickly. Well I had learned "how to fall" in a martial arts classes my freshman year so I figured that would work. I however didn't expect the large 24-pack of soda (really, soda) in my path and when I landed on that, I broke my arm!

My good friend Joel heard me hit the ground (not sure why he was still up at 4a.m.) and heard me moaning as I was suddenly in a lot of pain. He took me to the hospital where the nurse proceeded to take my pulse ON my broken arm. I got wrapped up and some wonderful pain killers and went back to the house. Pulled my mattress off the bed, put it on the floor, IM'd some people to tell them I broke my arm, and went back to sleep. The next morning, many people came over, my parents came up to DPU, and oddly the "house dad" or handyman gave me the nickname "Crash" since I had crashed out of bed. Going with my title - I was known throughout the house as "Commander Crash". And I had made it 21 years of my life without breaking a single bone! The other things that really got me points - first, I was the only person in the bed and second, I was completely sober. Picture for your enjoyment. The stuffed animal was a gift from Carrie (girl I dated for most of college, for those of you who are new), her away message read "boyfriends can't fly" for quite a while after that.