jem_ozdraka: Oh Hi.

My wish came true. The rest of my summer vacation basically flew by, and it's already the second week into school. For those of you who haven't been paying attention, I am now at UCLA, living in an apartment with three other dudes. It's quite nice to be living on my own now. Honestly, it feels just like when I was living with my dad, only I don't have to state that I'm living with my dad anymore. So far, UCLA has been nice. I am enjoying my classes for the most part, and am starting to make friends in two of my classes already. I just wish that they didn't give me so much busywork. I'm marginally disappointed that the two computer science classes I'm in are going to be mostly (if not entirely) review, and there will hardly be any challenge at all. Parking here is a bitch. They decided to put a bunch of apartments up but leave enough underground parking under them for about 1/10 of the population that's actually living here. The end result is about twice a week I have to go out and move my car so I don't get ticketed, and that can take upwards of an hour due to the amazing amount of time and effort required to find a spot. Now that I'm up here and settled in, I filed my nails down to claws again. I decided to wait until after I moved up to UCLA so I wouldn't have to hear it from my mother again. Still, she flat out harassed me every time we saw each other over the summer about my "disgustingly long nails." I don't know if she has no pattern recognition, or if she is just insane, but every time she would bring it up, expecting me to have a sudden change of heart and vow to cut them, only to be surprised at my increasing annoyance at her harassment. Up here, I don't think my roommates have even noticed yet, and if they have, I don't think they care. I went back up to Santa Ynez yesterday to another cousin's wedding. I was really looking forward to it because last time I was there for a wedding I had an absolute blast. Maybe I over-hyped it in my mind because this time it was lukewarm at best. I think it boils down to the fact that not as many people were there from my family, and the ones that were there weren't too interested in hanging out or talking. Combine that with my mom's incessant pushing to get up and do things I really didn't want to do, and it made for the day not being that fun. At least the drive was only a few hours, so I left when I felt like it. Work has gotten infinitely more stressful now that I moved up here. As expected, for the week I asked for everyone to review my work, no one could be arsed to even peek at it. As soon as I get up here, however, I get angry emails with urgent as their status, all about some bug or some feature they don't understand, and how it was my responsibility to fix it yesterday. It's funny how my entire job is to code tools for these people and they can come running to me demanding solutions on the spot for anything that they want, but when I ask for something as simple as looking over the programs that were designed for them in order to weed out bugs early so they don't have problems later, I get completely ignored. It doesn't help that the VPN is so unstable that I can't even access the files I'm expected to maintain. I now almost wish I hadn't agreed to the job, as it would remove at least one of the high-stress points in my life right now.