It's Not Disgusting If It's Yours

One morning Chris and I were leaving the apartment for the day. As we were coming down the stairs we saw a pair of underwear lying on the landing below us. One of us made a remark about how we do not like to see disgusting underwear lying around in our apartment complex. As we got closer, however, we realized that it was Chris' underwear. Apparently it had fallen out of the laundry basket the night before while we were doing laundry. It fell out on the way back to the apartment from the laundry room, meaning it was clean and not really disgusting at all. We are not the type of people who leave disgusting underwear lying around.

What's In a Name?

Sias is a name that no one can spell or pronounce correctly. As a Sullivan, I never had problems. As a Sias, I've learned that when giving my name over the phone, I should say, "First name is ..., last name is spelled S-I-A-S," with a snake-like emphasis on the S's so as to distinguish them from F's. When sitting in class, I know what common mispronunciations to listen for.

People often comment that they have never heard the last name Sias before meeting me. So, for those of you who mistakenly believe that Sias is an uncommon name, I present to you the following:

First, Sias is not just a hispanic name. According to the Sias Family Genealogy Forum, we are brown, black, and white.

Sias' are known academics. Excluding the obvious example (the author of this blog), Sias International University is the first solely American owned University in Central China. And don't forget SIAS Summer Institutes, designed to support the development of scholarly networks and collaborative projects among young scholars from the United States and Europe.

But we're not just geeky; we're also very athletic. Haven't you heard of the Ed Sias Invitational, a cross country running event?

The winning combination of brains and brawn make the typical Sias a very resourceful and innovative person. Take for example Sias, a leading developer and supplier of innovative multi-tipped robotic XYZ liquid handling systems and robot friendly functional modules for Laboratory Automation. That's right, we make things that the average reader can't even comprehend.

With all the great things that Sias's do, why doesn't anyone recognize our name?

Labor Day Weekend

Relaxing


Cousins


Cousins


Sias Family

Just a Quick Trip

Thursday Morning: I have to be on a plane in an hour, but I am frantically trying to retieve a document from my deceased computer's hard drive. I give up with 45 minutes until departure. I make it to the terminal in time for boarding.

I flew from Lubbock to Austin, via Dallas. Once in Austin, the plan was to take a taxi to the capitol building, but a friend on the same flight offered to let me ride downtown with him and his dad. Once in the parking garage, my friend's dad revealed that his 13 year-old daughter was very ill, quite possibly with swine flu. He confirms that he could be a carrier. On the upside, I didn't have to pay for a taxi ride downtown. On the downside, I may have been exposed to the swine flu.

Four hours later I was back on an airplane, this time headed to El Paso. On the upside, it was a direct flight. On the downside, the 89 year-old man sitting next me was the inspiration for the saying "say it, don't spray it." He was actually a very interesting man - thumb was sewed backed-on after cutting it off with a laso, spent a night wondering the wilderness on his 85th birthday, broke his hip sky-diving at 86.

Once in El Paso, I rent a car. The guy behind the counter scares me into buying extra insurance for hail damage based on bad weather the night before. Does it storm while I have the car? Yes. Does it hail? Of course not.

I stop at Wal-Mart before heading for my resting place for the night. I realized that although I have a B.A., and will soon have a J.D., I couldn't get a job at the Wal-Mart in El Paso because I don't speak Spanish fluently. A few years ago I went to America in Mexico (Cancun); now I've been to Mexico in America.

Fast forward to 9 p.m. I'm asleep on Grandma Cuca's couch, exhausted from my day of traveling and re-learning Spanish. It's raining cats and dogs, but the rain is not what wakes me up. Instead, I wake up to a lady banging on the screen door. Due to my groggy state, I was unable to comprehend the Spanish explanations for why a car was parked in the front yard or why a man with a plastic sack on his foot was escorted to the back room of the house. I decided to go to bed and accept this string of events as normal.

Friday monring: The lady who was banging on the screen door last night slept on the couch. I offer to give her a ride to the hospital, only neither of us knows the way. Like me, she is only visiting El Paso. Unlike me, she is from Chihuahua and does not speak any English. I sucessfully ask her for the address for the hospital and put into my Garmin. The next 15 minutes are a combination of akward silence and me forcing myself to strike up converstaion in Spanish. I discover that her name is Pilar and she is the primo-hermano (cousin-brother) of Chris, whatever that means.

The day goes by quickly and before I know, it's time to head home. Grandma Cuca feeds me a late lunch and tells me that if I ate her food everyday, I would get fat. I thank her for the fattening food, say my good-bye's, and head back to lubbock, via a connecting flight in Dallas.

Three interviews, five flights, possible exposure to swine flu, showered by an old man's spittle, and a refresher course in Spanish: Way too much for just two days.

Subleasing

During my ten-week stay in Seattle, I subleased an apartment that was basically 400 square feet of nothing. Well, I shouldn't say nothing. There was a lot of pink toule, a collection of cheap horror movies, a skull shaped candle, and dinnerware made by cavemen. My "landlord" was an opera singer, and judging by her apartment, she was a starving artist: No TV, no microwave, no real bed, no real couch, no real anything for that matter. A pile of charred remains lived in the oven, as if something spilled and then fused to the bottom. The basement smelled like the dumpters that lined the hall. The maintenance man needed a lot of maintenance himself. My neighbors were covered in tatoos, visible only because they wore very little clothing. Parking was a nightmare.

I had a great time in Seattle, and I even felt at home in my apartment after I hid all the creepy objects in a cubbard, rearranged the "furniture," and made-up the bed (my landlord slept on a nap mat in the closet). I loved that I could walk to work and downtown shopping (Macy's, Sephora, Loft, Anthropologie).

Do I miss Seattle? Yes. Do I miss my apartment in Seattle? Not so much.

Oh Motherboard

The saga surrounding my HP dv2000 notebook continues, or maybe I should say it's coming to an end. Today, during what I thought would be another routine day at the law library, my laptop refused to power on. I swiflty carried my computer to the tech support office, where I received nothing but grim looks and sad news. A few quick tests produced an initial diagnosis: the mother board needs to replaced. The mother board is the brain of the computer, and brains are not cheap. To make matters worse, preliminary research has revealed that my particular model number is excluded from an extended warranty program created to respond to the overwhelming number of defective mother boards in HP laptops.

I casually asked the tech support personnel if another laptop surgery was a viable option, explaining how my husband had brillantly replaced the screen only months earlier. They advised that replacing a mother board is much more difficult and knowledge intensive.

Tomorrow tech support will "slave" my hard drive, which is geek for save what's stored on my hard drive but currently unaccessible.

Oh, HP, why do you do this to me?