Tim Peterson's Blog

Ah, yes, it’s that time of year again. Following the two big end-of year holidays comes the twelfth day of Christmas, otherwise known as my birthday. My birthday festivities, such as they are, started with my phone buzzing with a text message of “Happy Birthday!” from Cathy as the clock struck midnight. I then spent the first half hour of my 24th year playing Scrabble online with DJ and two of her friends. (I lost and she won, as usual.) For those who don’t know, I work with Cathy and her family in running the sound system at church. She’s the only one who’s made a big deal out of my birthday this year. She even mentioned it on the music schedule for this month, since it fell on a Sunday (as did my zeroth birthday). When I walked in the door, she burst into song: “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Tim-please-forgive-me-for-putting-your-photo-on-the-service-schedule, happy birthday to you!” Sure enough, when I arrived at the sound table the service schedule was sitting in its customary place, conspicuously displaying my Facebook profile picture and reading, “Happy Birthday, Tim!” Pastor also called for a singing of the customary song: “We should sing, right? He’s the sound guy. He can turn me off any time he wants.”

I know it doesn’t sound very celebratory to have leftover pizza for one’s birthday dinner, but it made the most logistical sense. We traditionally go out to Pizza Hut on New Year’s evening, but this year we were invited to the Fasoldts’ house. We therefore combined that tradition with our Saturday night customs and with my birthday, and went out for pizza last night. Half of it we had for lunch today, followed by cake.

Through a combination of ideas from my sister, my dad, and I, she made a cake in the form of my TJP initial monogram. I directed her as to how to make the shape out of one square and circle cake each. She decorated it in an imitation of an item I once made out of those melting bead things. (I had discovered that it fits perfectly in the heart-shaped templates we had.)

When people ask me what I want for presents, all I can think of to tell them are some assorted gadgets I’d find useful. My parents didn’t want to try to get any of the things I mentioned and risk messing it up, so they gave me $20 bills concealed within the wrappers of big candy bars. That and two cards was all I got gift-wise, so now it’s off to the web to pick out my own presents.

And in other news, my goatee has its 1st birthday today.

The main feature of this year for me is that I made a few more friends and managed to talk to people more than before. Admittedly, most of the talking goes on online, but that’s still progress, isn’t it? Here are a few of the people I appreciate for various reasons.

The people I talk to the most in person are the ones I work with for InterVarsity. Stephen is the brother of Richard, a recently-graduated senior also from IV. (When I first saw him, I thought, “That looks like mini-Richard.”) Richard used to run the IV sound system before I volunteered two years ago. Stephen’s been running the video projector all last year and this year, so I’ve gotten to know him through working together on such things. I was delighted to learn that he actually wrote some programs to help make PowerPoint work better for our purposes. I love people who are geeky like me and write programs to make computers work better rather than lamenting what they do wrong. I also like his childish sense of adventure. He’ll do things just for fun, which is the way I like to be sometimes, as long as my introversion doesn’t override it. Most recently we were plotting how to get free data transfers to and from our pre-paid T-Mobile phones, for example by manipulating the AIM buddy list.

Slippey has been on the IV worship team for several years, and is currently the Large Group coordinator. He’s the one I take orders from when I set up the sound system, and he knows a little about sound himself. He was also one of IV’s pioneers of going barefoot around campus. (I started doing that all the time midway through the summer. Unfortunately, winter tends to put a damper on that.) He’s funny, and a good friend.

The IV worship team has featured Rachel and Becca (off and on), both of whom are infectious in their joyfulness. Rachel makes funny faces, and Becca is a globetrotter (I forget what the latest destination is). Allison is another interesting character. I was in a small group with Allison as a freshman last year, and now I ended up in the small group she’s co-leading this year with Johnny Arkansas… who is himself a character. There are lots of wonderful people at IV.

There are a bunch of other IV people I like, but most of my communication with people is done online through the ToO and YouthFire chat rooms. As an administrator of that chat server, part of my duty is to talk to people that need talking to, but mostly I talk to the gang of perfectionists that have emerged there in the past year. Jackie, Cher, Katie, Levi, and others all share, to my delight, a compulsion to type with impeccable spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. We can often be found correcting each other’s typos. But all pickiness aside, they’re also good friends.

Cher’s great. She first showed up in #aio as yet another lowercase junkie, but returned quite a bit later to YF as a changed person and soon joined the gang of perfect typists. I was intrigued by the fact that I managed to sustain some form of a conversation with her, since when most people try to talk to me it ends in silence after about three lines. Somehow our respective brands of oddity seem to mesh well, and we’ve been insulting… er, edifying each other ever since. I found it interesting that Julia and Kait both mentioned in their year-end notes that Cher was a big help to both of them, since for me it seems to be the other way around. I don’t doubt that she does that; it’s just that I always seem to be trying to help her with things. Perhaps some of what I’m putting in is coming out the other side to help others. That would be excellent, because I already feel quite gratified to be able to do this. Thank you for being receptive to my feeble ministrations, Cher. (See? People appreciate you no matter how you try to dissuade them.)

All Jackie ever does is tease me about Cher. Other than that, she’s a fine human being. And, incidentally, one that’s plotting to move to my neck of the woods, ostensibly because of an aunt of hers. Thankfully, I can see through her plot to torment me in person as well.

Kait and Julia only arrived on the chat scene in the past few months, but they provide me with enjoyment as well, particularly with their craziness. Julia, for instance is always “dying laughing” at anything and everything. It’s a wonder she’s survived this long. She’s also quite a tomboy, which is often amusing, especially when she’s pretending to get knocked up in fights. Unfortunately, Kait’s latest pastime seems to be trying to pair me up with Julia. (Don’t worry, I’m immune to girls.)

Well, that’s it for now. I hope this year will feature even better friends. (Not that I’m knocking the ones I have…)

I now have my own web server, thanks to the folks at BigVPS. Therefore, I can run my own WordPress blog and do all manner of other fun things. And thanks to Croissanga, my posts here will still show up on Xanga. From now on, point your browsers at http://www.timpeterson.org/blog/ to see what I have to say (if, in fact, you want to see what I have to say). It still needs some tweaking, but it works.

On Wednesday I had my next-to-last bit of schoolwork to do for the fall quarter. I just had to finish writing something and submit it, and I’d be done with the class. Of course, writing doesn’t always excite me, even if it does turn out well enough in the end. So I ended up taking all afternoon to finish it, sprinkling other things in between bouts of typing. Eventually I got tired of just sitting around, so I decided to take a walk and see what interesting places I could find where I hadn’t been before in RIT’s academic buildings. I went through buildings 17 and 9, explored the upper floors of 7A and 7B, then crossed to building 1. I tried going higher up in the administration tower than I’d been before, which took a few minutes to figure out. In the lobby area I noticed that inside one of the triangular brick corners there was a little room with its door propped open and a chair inside. I didn’t look inside, but made a mental note to check on it later. Then I headed back through the new part of building 9, which I explored in a previous post. When I got back, I pulled up the building floor plans on the web site. There I pondered the arrangement of building 1, where there are a few single-flight staircases and a couple more that skip a floor, each going through those triangular areas. Sure enough, I also found that little room, though I found no evidence of its purpose. I also looked at the SAU, and noticed that in the basement there’s a long empty hallway that doesn’t go very many places. I checked it out in person on Friday, but alas, it was locked and full of tables.

I’m sure that was a boring paragraph, but it was fun for me, at least.

Cher: You sound so much like a little kid, at times…
Tim: It’s fun to have fun once in a while.
Tim: I refuse to kill off my inner child.

Having finished my last bit of schoolwork on Thursday, I was free of any responsibilities today. I decided to take my old textbooks from this quarter and last spring to the bookstore’s buyback place. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I decided to take a different route to school, namely… one I’d never been on before that I made up as I went along. I tried to avoid roads I’d been on before, to maximize the amusement and rate of information intake. It was fun to see what else was out there in the more country areas. There were plenty of farms and fewer houses than around home or toward the city. At one point I pondered whether to turn or not, but spied a big hill in the distance and decided to keep going. It was indeed a big hill, at least by local standards. It’s always fun when you can’t see what’s on the other side until you get to the top and then go flying down. This reminds me of last winter just after Christmas when we visited a few places on our way back from seeing my Ithaca grandparents. We took the cross-country route, which included lots of hilly roads for my mom’s enjoyment. Anyway, I found my way to Scottsville road, went south until I found the bridge across the river, and then came back north to arrive at RIT from the opposite direction from the usual.