I’m a hero!

Sort of.

That what my blood donor card says anyway. In the top corner, it says “Type O Hero”.

There was a blood drive here at the University Monday, in the Mehling lounge. I went over after class, about 3:30. The procedure is diffent from any time I’ve donated before (once), volunteered (three times), or went with a parent (lots). You read the information, got the other form, and were instructed NOT to fill it out until you had talked to the nurse, who took your blood pressure, iron level, and temperature. Then you filled it out, and went back to the nurse, who reviewed it, and then you went to the cots to donate. Of course, there was a wait between each of these steps.

I don’t donate well, I guess. I ended up getting light headed, and had to lay down and use the paper bag trick. And when the nurse put me down, he accidentally pulled the needle out of the vein. He had only filled three of the five test tubes so far. I had the option of him drawing the last two tubes from the other vein, or not, but they can’t use the blood without the tubes, as they use the stuff in the tubes for testing. I went ahead and did it. I think part of the problem was that I didn’t have Intro to EGR on Mon, and had agreed to meet with Martin and Peter during class time. That threw off my schedule, and I hadn’t eaten lunch that day.

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I noticed that in older posts, Blogger doesn’t show the lines I’ve been putting in to seperate the thoughts-I guess I’ll just revert to dashes, like above.

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This is Homecoming week here, so there’s something going on most nights. Tonight, there was a speaker to talk about how to avoid overusing alcohol, and advocating moderation. They were offering a free ticket to the Homecoming dance for attending, ($10). I was intending to go, just so I’d have a ticket. I’m not sure if I wanted to go to the dance anyway, but if I could get a free ticket, I could make the decision later, and there’ll always be someone who wants a ticket. I forgot to go, however. The time just slipped by. That’s the third not so important thing I’ve forgot to attend, the other being a Wing Meeting, and a Soldering workshop. There’s another workshop on Thurs, though. I really need to remember to set the alarm on my Palm. It’s tied into my Outlook, so if I have my Palm, or am at my computer (or both), I get a reminder about the event. The problem is that the Palm is not set to turn on the alarm by default, and so events I enter on the Palm, I have to remember to manually turn on the alarm. Not a big hassle, just one more step to remember.

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There’s nothing like the college life for doing things at all hours. During the space above this line, I played a game of Chess with James. He’s been bugging me for a while now, and just happened to ask about 12:30 as he passed by. I decided to go ahead, and discovered that not only was I mistaken about my own chess ability, but he understates his. Maybe 10 moves, and checkmate. It boils down to the fact that I’d been concentrating on all the other pieces, and frogotten to protect my king. I had his queen if he didn’t move it, but I didn’t see that he could checkmate me in one more move. He says he’s always up for a game, so I may play more often. Eventually, I’ll get better. I just hate looking stupid like that.

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Now I wish i had learned to touch type correctly. I can get going pretty well sometimes, but I can’t do it without looking at the keyboard. Not that I don’t know where the keys are, just that I nned to look to make sure that my hands dont wander. I type with ten fingers, but he pinkys are reserved for the shift keys. Most of the buttons are pressed by my index and ring finger, with a few o fthe buttons towards the edge pressed by my ring finger. I can get up to 30 or 40 WPM, if I’m lucky, but it’s hard to type something from a source, as i have to look at the item, remember a line, turn back and type it, and repeat for another line. But in keyboarding, i was even slower, doing it the correct way, and there wasn’t really time to work on technique at the expense of speed. I don’t really want to take the effort to change now, so I’m stuck with a backwards method of typing that can only get so fast. And is prone to a lot of errors. I tend to push the space bar one letter too late or early, ending up with sentence sthat look reall uy fummy. (That and I’ll occasionally add or change a few letters, like in the last sentence.):) And recently, I’ve been having a real problem with typing a semicolon intead of an appostrophe. It;s really stange looking when I do it. But enough on that topic.

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Nik has been cleaning up in the poker tournaments, I hear. He came back tonight, and had won $18 in a $3 buy-in tournament. He’s won a fair ammount of money in these tournaments, held several evenings a week, with varying buyins. Earlier in the year, he was playing online poker for real money, and had to put in $50 to join. THe problem with online poker is that the company is in business to make money, and they’re still in business, so they must be making money. If the average person made money, the company would go out of business. That and the fact that there are a lot of very good players meant that in the long run, a dollar or two at a time, he lost his money. I think his winings cover most of his online losses, though.

In a way, I’m glad he did lose it, as now I’m probably never going to join an online gambling society. I wasn’t planing on it, but now it’s definate.

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Long post so far, and more to say, but I think I’ll call it a night.

–Nathan

3 thoughts on “I’m a hero!

  1. My uncle’s in one of those online things. I guess he’s one of those really good players you mentioned, because he usually makes money.

    Why did you skip lunch and then donate blood!?! What are you trying to do to yourself? Be careful.

    I never would have guessed you typed so weird. The stuff I’ve read seems pretty normal looking to me.

  2. Cindy-lou, thanks for visiting over here. I don’t post as frequenly as you do, as you may have noticed over the last few days, but I do try.

    To answer your question, Brionna, I guess I did skip lunch and then donate blood, but the way it happened, I went to donate blood, and then realized that I hadn’t gotten arround to eating lunch. I don’t think I’ll do that again. I figure I’ll donate once more, when prepared, and if I still have trouble, then I won’t try it again for a long while.

    And as to my typing–it may look normal, but usually I have to go back and fix several errors in each post, and several still slip through. Plus I use the backspace key extensively. But speed is the biggest hinderance. I can think at least twice as fast as I can type, and I have a poor short term memory. I have no idea how many thoughts have been lost while waiting to be typed. But I suppose it I typed faster, I’d think even faster…..

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