On October 10th, I flew back to Oklahoma to surprise a very special someone with whom I’ve been head-over-heels in love for the last 16 months. Although Caitlin didn’t know I was coming, we had planned to “go shopping” together that evening by going to the same stores in the mall while talking on the phone. When we were supposed to leave, I called her and asked if she could “stop by Cate Center” really fast, because I had heard they were giving out free t-shirts for OU’s football game that day.
Being the wonderfully flexible person she is, Caitlin managed to fight through the game day traffic and even find a place to park. She went into Cate and peeked into the social lounge, but seeing no t-shirts, headed back to her car. I managed to get her back (“check one more time for me?”) long enough for her to see the letter I’d written and three roses, lying on a table in the lounge.
She still had no idea that I was in town, assuming instead that one of my friends had just set things up for her. As she was reading the letter, I hung up on her and walked up from behind.
And then?
Asked her to marry me. And thankfully, she said yes 
I’m in the process of getting ready to move to Urbana-Champaign to start school there… I’ll talk about that soon.
In the meantime, should you need to get ahold of me, I have new phone numbers. If you’re in Joplin, call 553-4907. In Urbana-Champaign, call 689-1055. (The correct area codes are left as an exercise to the reader, in case someone has some sort of evil program that collects phone numbers on the internet and does bad things with them.)
I tried to pick fun numbers within my local areas; 49 is 7 squared, and 10 is the sum of 5 and 5. Easier to remember that way.
I recently took my first MCTS exam (for Configuring Windows Vista) and passed it with relatively little headache. Four hours were allotted and it took me about an hour to plow through scenarios such as “Terry cannot share files on the network. Help Terry fix file sharing.” Today, I got my certification card and Microsoft “diploma”. I’m not sure if this will ever be good for anything other than bragging rights, but it’s useful to have options should I need them in the future. Certification is something that employers in the IT industry look for… but I’m not going to do IT. Hopefully. If Obama’s plan to force everyone into socialized medicine goes through, I may not be practicing medicine as a clinician.
My graduation gift to myself was a Dell 2408WFP monitor. I’ve had my Dell 20″ since 2004, when I came to OU, and it seemed fitting that I upgrade after it saw me through five years of college. The new one… is massive. It really puts a smile on my face just to see how much screen real estate the thing really has. I also convinced my parents to upgrade from their tiny 19″ screen, because they do a lot of video watching on the computer.
Caitlin came to visit me this week before she started summer school. It’s so weird to be apart after seeing her pretty much every single day since we started dating ten and a half months ago. I miss her terribly, but I’m grateful for technology like webcams, Bluetooth headsets, and AIM, so I’m not stuck writing forlorn love letters as my only means of communication 
It’s a hard thing to be apart, but it’s worth it to know you’ve found your soulmate.
Another chapter has closed on my life. I graduated this weekend from OU, packed up my stuff, and moved out today. I’m done being an RA, and I’m done with college.
I’m leaving OU with a dual degree (as opposed to a double major, which is a single degree with two concentrations), which is two wholly separate degrees: a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology, summa cum laude, and a Bachelor of Science, with distinction. I also completed minors in French, Computer Science, and the History of Science. It took two hundred and eleven credit hours and five years to get through it all, but it’s over and done.
…Until I leave in August for Illinois to spend another seven years getting two MORE degrees.
I’ll always have good memories of my time at OU. I met a ton of people, did so many new things, and grew up a lot. I lived in Housing, worked for Housing, and met the girl of my dreams thanks to Housing. I took classes from good professors, bad professors, and sit-in-class-and-play-video-games-they’re-so-bad professors. But mostly, I had fun.
Thanks for all the fun.
