Yes, the curse has returned to haunt my schedule once more - even this early in the semester, I’m already having to spend an inordinate amount in the Talmage building. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the BYU campus, the Talmage houses the Math and Computer Science departments. Which means that there are very few spare power outlets and even fewer windows.

The air in Oklahoma really is a whole lot cleaner. Flying in to Salt Lake, it was startling to see how bad the smoke and smog was. Made me grateful for all of those Oklahoma windstorms.

With the new semester looming on the horizon, my roommates and I have been giving our apartment a thorough cleaning. While our apartment was fairly clean to begin with, there was still a whole lot of junk left over from previous tenants. Once (if) it’s completely clean, we’ll be able to a bit of interior decorating and make the place at least somewhat presentable.

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Solar Window Screens, West

Solar Window Screens, South

Now that summer is almost over, I finally managed to install the solar window screens that our apartment has so badly needed. Besides making the apartment look a whole lot better from the outside (our windows were pretty darn nasty and our landlords wouldn’t do anything about it), having them installed meant that I could finally put away all of the supplies and tools that I’ve used to assemble and install them.

No, my parents aren’t on Facebook, nor do I think they ever will be. So let’s leave them out of this.

I recognize the need for parents to monitor their children’s activities, especially when those children are at a point in their lives when they can be emotionally vulnerable to strangers over the internet. However, when those kids are in college, it’s really weird for parents to want to buddy-up with all of their children’s friend on social networking sites. So how about it? How many friend requests have you gotten from your friends’ parents?