I spent the Mother’s Day weekend with my sister (Crystal) and my Mother (Diane). My sister had been visiting from California, on a business trip for her company “kixal”. Unlike other occasions that she has visited on, she didn’t spend the entire time working. I printed some work for her while she was here. She had a Groupware meeting, and thankfully the Internet held together during it, because I recently had to change out the router – likely because of a faulty power adapter. I also had issues with the Printer not waking up on one occasion. Changing the router seemed to solve the multiple issues that the network was having.

I felt bad because I was having issues with my Excessive Daytime Sleepiness, or Narcolepsy at the time. They went out and visited Connie and Janet for the first solid day that Crystal was here. On the way back, they got Lobster. Crystal went running with Karen, Jamie, Elaine, Cadence, Mark and Diana.

On Saturday, 5/13/2017, Crystal took Mom and I to the Nubble Light House in York, Maine. We ate at my Mom’s favorite food company, Anthony’s. We also went to Dunnes Ice Cream. I had a flavor called Black Raspberry Explosion – it had little chocolate chunks in black raspberry flavored ice cream. I’d have so say I’d like something without the chocolate chunks inside.

We discovered these ice creams like I had once in a Japanese restaurant, called Mochi’s. They sell them at Market Basket now, although the price has jumped since their introduction. We originally got them at Trader Joes’s. We also devoured Ms. Thinster’s cookies – I prefer the chocolate, while my mom prefers the coconut. They’re very addictive.

Overall, it was a nice break from school, in which I was sure I was going to maintain a 4.0 GPA going into this summer. Since then, I’ve been working on the same project that I worked on in COMP 830 – Object Oriented Software Engineering this past semester, porting a C# database matching engine and a XAMPP (like LAMP) environment over to Ubuntu Linux. I was extremely happy that I figured it out today (5/17/2017), which almost guarantees me an A+ grade in my Independent Study course this summer, added a lot more coding and modifications to the “MeAndYou” Social Media website, which Professor Jonas wants us to launch to UNH students. There’s just two of us working on the entire project now.

I really love my family, even though I can have my moments. I’ve learned just how bad my interpersonal skills can be, by glancing into a textbook about interpersonal relationships. It’s an eye-opening perspective that I’ve never really considered before, as I usually stick to the technical skills. Professor Jonas has been an inspiration. He’s not the type of Professor that will just give me an A+ because I’m smart – he makes me work for the grade, and I learn a lot more in the process. Also, I must admit there is a driving force inside of me to learn everything I can in my M.S. IT degree at the University of New Hampshire.

--Patrick R. McElhiney