Here I am again, sitting in my little apartment, body baking, spirit shaking, mind making my head hurt...It's been a awhile; I believe a recap is in order.

Prompted by yet another breakdown of the good old '96 Nissan Altima that my brother and I have been sharing (which makes it three within a timespan of 10 days each of which required a tow!) my mom decided to cough up the money for a new car, a nice silver Honda Accord. She definitely put her stamp on it too - no power mirrors, no power locks, just the bare necessities ("zui zhong yao de"). Though, I think for her next car purchase, power locks are propably going to find their way onto her list of necessities (just imagine her in her 5'0" frame inside the rather spacious Accord, and me standing outside the passenger door trying to get in)...The car drives so smoothly though! Too smoothly, in fact - on more than one occasion I've caught myself complaining to myself why everybody else was going so slow, only to look down on the dashboard and realize that I was speeding like crazy...no more built in automatic "speed warning" like in my old car, heh. And no more automatic "curve following" either :P.

My birthday has come and gone...I'm 24, dude! Yesterday I suppose we had the official celebration for it - my aunt invited us to dinner at Morton's Steakhouse where I proved that despite my current slenderer-than-ever frame I can still pack quite a meal, downing almost a whole loaf of that awesome roasted onion bread and a porterhouse steak along with some sides, and this after eating a pack of ramen and a pear and some melon at home right before going to the restaurant.

So birthday blah was fun and good...until I came home and found this email from my credit card company confirming my supposed recent change of mailing address. Which set off a mental alarm because I hadn't done such thing, and sure enough, it turned out that somebody somehow had hijacked my credit card account and changed the address and phone number on file. And charged $200 dollars to it. And forgot to change the email address. And the password reset questions, for that matter. (Though, the criminal in me notes, perhaps he didn't change the password reset questions intentionally, jotting down the answers instead, counting on the victim changing the password upon realizing the hijack, but forgetting the password reset function, thus leaving the culprit a backdoor into the account. In both cases, I've outwitted him.) Arrgggggggh! Nothing quite gets to me like injustice and dishonesty, especially when so blatantly intentional. But I've got a few tricks up my sleeves...

Some things I've done over the past few weeks that I can now take off my ''must do before I die'' list:

• #25178 order a metro card in Russian
• #-175839 get egged in Jersey city on a Friday night (I kid you not)
• #49765 get lost late at night in the middle of nowhere (ok, somewhere near Eagles Mere, PA ), stop at tavern in a town of the same name as a soccer stadium in Austria, chat with locals about history of said town over a beer, be bought another beer by one of the locals ("for the road" - for the record, I didn't drink it, and was under very little influence from the first one while driving home).

Upon reading that last one, you might be asking yourself "WTF is Eagles Mere, PA and WTF would Oliver be driving there?" So, be in the dark no more: it's the home of the Music in the Mountains chamber music camp, of which I am proud alum; and as for driving in the vicinity two Sundays ago, I was paying this year's camp a visit and concurrently taking a short one-day vacation (Eagles Mere boasts an awesome lake with beach as well as nice walking trails around it. Plus, the air beats Philly and NYC air.) Guess who else is an alum and also current camp counselor? None other than Rachel Kane, Swarthmore class of 2002 and my Midnight Quintett and Trio Verde buddy! (We never met as campers there though, my first year participating was the year she stopped going). I hadn't seen her since last year's iteration of the camp so catching up was fun. We also ended up reading some music together - Dvorak's Dumky trio and the Mendelssohn D minor trio, which was awe-summ!!

Actually, playing with Rachel that day left me feeling more fulfilled than I had been in a long time...I didn't notice this during the school year, but thinking back now, I didn't seem to have that much pure fun playing music there as I did in that one plus hour with Rachel. Maybe it's just the fact that Rachel and I just get along so well, but it worries me that there's more behind it...well, I have another year to find out.

Speaking of another year at Mannes...the population of ex-Swatties at Mannes is going be triple that of last year! Julie Gregorio (a soprano, and like me class of '03) is starting a Master's this year, as is Julie Russo (violist, class of '99? 00? 01? She's one of those who hung around for a while.) Well, if in a couple years Mannes ends up being taken over entirely by Swatties, let it be said here that I was the first of this rush :P. And Olivia Gruber (flute, also '03) is starting a PhD at nearby Rutgers, and Lisa Huang '02, my other Trio Verde colleague and long time fellow Midnight Quintetter, is returning from her year in Paris andstarting work in NYC as well. Neat-o!

Alright. Enough talk..errr, write. Time to retreat into my secret war room and plan my next strike against this credit card identity thief...