Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Back to the grind.  Today was my first day of "real" work.  But that doesn't mean very much at all.  Orientation week was officially over, meaning we actually started reporting to our supervisors, but today was more of the same.  Now that I was introduced to the overall company policy, I now needed to know more about my specific department.  None-the-less, it was cool getting situated into my cubicle.  My first real corporate experience. 

It was a day of more meetings and lectures, as last week was so chalk full of.  After setting up our fresh new laptops, we met with the industrial engineers at the plant who went over what they do.  One cool part of the day was discovering what some of the projects I would be working on are.  I wont really explain here because it would probably bore you unless you were an engineer.  I finally got my sweet ID card (my picture didn't turn out half bad after all) and I had a typical corporate lunch (all the interns eating together in the conference room having a very shallow conversation).  A few more lectures and a little bit of work on the computer and I was done for the day.  Headed home, did laundry, and went out to the pool relax a little.  A less than exciting day, but I truly cannot complain.

I am very tired and about to call it an early night so I am not really going to get deep on you tonight.  Apologies.  Plus, I blogged just a few hours ago for yesterday.  I'm exhausted.  And finally, I started the seventh Harry Potter book tonight and I really want to get back to it.  But have no fear, I will leave you with a quote as always.  Just don't expect it to mean anything or be relevant.  I just thought it was funny.


"I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map... so it won't fall down. "
-Mitch Hedberg

Memorial Day (Monday, May 30th, 2011)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I know this is extremely late.  But better late than never.  As you will soon learn from this blog, yesterday was a very busy day and I simply did not have time to blog.  And I just got home from work right now, so unless I was going to get up before work to blog (sorry bout it, not happening) this is my first chance.

But yesterday pretty much rapped up the best weekend in recent memory.  I spent a majority of the weekend down in Blacksburg, but I decided to go up to Washington, DC on the way back to Pennsylvania to hang out with a wonderful Sigma Kappa.  She had better be wonderful though, as I got up at 5:30 AM (I am finding a consistent theme of early mornings this summer).  A solid 4 hour drive later, and I was up in NOVA. Ten AM and it was already blistering, that was only the beginning of it.  Her family sent her and I to go get groceries in order to make a splendid breakfast.  5 pounds of "bananas" later (due to an error in the system, or an error due to us doing the self checkout in spanish, we rung the chicken up as bananas), and we were having breakfast.  I have to say, her family is top 5 favorite families.  Who knew breakfast could be so much fun.  But time was short, we must get to the city.

We drove out and got on the metro to head into downtown.  There was a strange noise when we went through the tunnel that she explained to me were dinosaurs.  Who knew they still existed!? I thought for sure they were all dead.... Arriving in the city, we head straight to National Gallery, which I requested to visit.  The various paintings and sculptures lead me to question not only who I am, but what I am (and maybe what's for dinner).  It amazing to think how old some of these paintings are and how much some of them challenged society at the time.  A couple hours and approximate 62 pictures/sculptures of penises later, it was onto the next exhibit.  We checked out the sculpture garden for a while, but due to the heat we decided to just hang out at a random fountain for a while.  Deep conversations pursued for the next few hours and we developed some serious tan lines.  I introduced her to one of my favorite games, picking out a random person and trying to tell their whole life story.  I was probably extremely off on all mine, but hell, I'm no Sherlock Holmes.  Walking back attempting to find another metro was difficult as even a true Washingtonian like herself does not know her way around.  We finally found our way to Union Station and made our way back home.
I was ready to head back to PA but her family invited me to stay for dinner.  After that incredible breakfast, there was no way I was going to turn down dinner.  As you can imagine, dinner was just as hilarious, if not more, than the aforementioned breakfast.  The family and I broke out into a laughter fiasco as Alex flung coleslaw all around the room in attempt to cut her cauliflower.  She clearly does not know how to compose herself in formal dinner settings.  After signing the wall in her room, I sadly had to depart.  A few hours later I was back in PA.  Exhausted, I passed out.

I was thinking all day of what to write about for my introspective section of the blog, but struggled to find what would go well with a day such as yesterday.  One thing I did discover though, is how much fun doing nothing you can have if you are with the right person/people.  If you think about it, we didn't do a whole lot yesterday, just walking around.  But in something so simple, it was honestly one of the best days I've had in a long time.  It had little to do with the fact I was in a big city like Washington.  I truly believe I could have been anywhere and had that much fun.  The simple things can be the best sometimes, so never rule them out of the equation.  I tried to find a quote, but didn't find anything I liked so I made this one up.  I'll be back in a few hours to write about today haha

"Surround yourself with the people that you love, and you will always be happy."