Chris' Updates

Here I am, Thursday night, and still wishing I was a little closer to spring break. As of this morning I've finished this round of midterms, including a fairly bad Calculus test, and oral and written tests in Arabic. Yesterday afternoon I got a crack at daytime WillVill, and it wasn't half bad. I'm really starting to get the hang of this job, I think. The new buses are nice, and it's nice to get the trainer out of the bus. I don't have to make 8 mirror checks on turns when I'm out on my own. Tonight I have another late night from 10pm to 4am, and I'm fully expecting to go home and crash into bed and sleep through Arabic. I think oustad will understand that it's the day before spring break.

Friday was of course the day before St. Patrick's day, and I had a little surprise in store. I was still getting some initial runs ironed out for the bus, and my boss asked if I could be a bus buddy for Saturday night. I said that was fine. Later on in the day, though, she asked me if I could actually drive one of the two buses. I was taken aback at first. I hadn't been trained up on any of the buses except our one conventional. All of the rest are transit-style with the engine in the back and the front wheels behind the driver, so they're quite a bit different. I reminded her of my lack of training, and she suggested I could take the conventional. I agreed, but I was still apprehensive. My first run ever is going to be late night WillVill on St. Patrick's day? For those who don't know, WillVill is our regular route that shuttles students between campus and the William's Village apartment complex, about a mile from the main area of campus. During the day it can ...

W00t! Passed my Commercial Driver's License test this afternoon, with flying colors! The pre-trip portion was fine, I aced maneuvers, and there were no major problems on the drive test. I guess Jordan and Dine had some problems on their first tries, but Jordan's already re-taken and passed. And I have faith in Dine, she's a pro! In no time at all, we'll be driving the Buff Bus baby! In other news, our good friend Kristen is... pregnant! She hasn't had a doctor confirm it yet, but apparently the home tests are more prone to false negatives than false positives. Meaning, it's very likely. As a consequence, Jackie and I have temporarily adopted Alastor the cat. There's some specific bacterial infection that feral or previously feral cats carry, and the infection can cause birth defects and miscarriages. Kristen would very much like to avoid all of that. Also, my confidence is renewed in my chances of actually getting into the Computer Science major instead of h...

Yesterday was quite the long day for me. It started out just fine; I got out of the house at a decent time and made it to Arabic early. I stayed for my two early classes, then headed home in eager anticipation. I sent my MP3 player in to Best Buy recently for a warranty replacement, since the left audio channel had stopped working. I though perhaps the replacement voucher would be in the mail, so I came home and immediately check the mail. Nothing important, just the usual junk. To make it even better, Jackie was in a huff about something. I learned that she and Ashley had had a tiff about cleaning Alcott. Long story short, everyone was in a bad mood. I defused the situation somewhat, but there's no way to fix it entirely at this point. No one will talk about the 800 pound gorilla in the living room and kitchen, that being Cameron's mess. Now, calling it Cameron's mess is a bit of a misnomer, because everyone has contributed to it by now. I still think of it as Cameron'...

The week was fairly quiet. Tuesday between classes I decided to do a little geocaching around home, and went for a walk around Tom Frost Reservoir, which is near my house. Wednesday it decided to snow, and while it wasn't torrential, it was very slushy and made the roads very slick, so after my first class I drove back home and curled up with a book on C# (C-Sharp), a fairly new programming language. This weekend consisted of more bus training. Saturday we had Dine, Jordan and myself back with Dien the trainer. He took us around some very tight roundabouts to start off, and those were fun. Just as we were about to start some WillVill loops, we were called off of training to cover for a driver that had not shown up for her run. We drove down to Aurora, almost to the airport, to pick up a busload of middle schoolers for the basketball game at the Coors Event Center. The run is called Ralphie's Roundup, in which we pick up grade school kids from the Denver area and take them to se...