August 2005

August 31, 2005
Wednesday:

I went to the computer lab of the Wham building at 8:30 this morning. This lab has two rooms of all Mac’s, one of which had been replaced with new machines since last semester. -I found that I had an email about my planned trip with my brother over the weekend; he now wants to go to see some storm damage on the gulf coast. I had to send him a message back saying that I would not be able to go because I had been scheduled to start back at Schnucks this weekend. I had wanted to start back next Monday, but had been unclear about the exact date. I said that I wanted to start the first week of September and they assumed that meant the week that the first of the month landed in.
My classes were mostly routine today. I had to sign up for an assigned seat in Marketing. I choose seat A6, which is right next to where Lou sits. The teacher asked the class the question, “There will soon be a very high percentage of the population over the age of 65, so what products will see an increase in marketing efforts?”. The teacher waited for an answer, but nobody volunteered anything, so I said “diapers”. The teacher got a good laugh out of it, but the 200+ students in the class were mostly silent. I had group work again to do in Chinese. The group assignment directions were written in both Chinese and English, but I couldn’t even understand the English. It wasn’t because of bad English grammar, but because of an unusual and roundabout choice of words. After class, I used the phone in the Faner computer lab to call Schnuck’s and confirm with Kevin that he definitely wanted me to start work on Saturday. He did.
I came home for lunch, stopping at the apartment’s office to talk about my first partial month’s rent and security deposit payment. I had charged the cost to my debit card last week, but had cancelled the improperly-functioning card yesterday before the transaction went through. I just had temporarily forgotten about it, but I can’t imagine why it was taking them so long to charge the card anyway. Tammy and Whitnee were both in the office and told me that a personal check would be fine.
Back in my apartment I ate a cheese-sausage and ham sandwich for lunch and watched TV for a few minutes before heading back to school for my last class. I stopped at the apartment’s office again to drop off a check for $600. In class, the teacher again filled the board up with a bunch of equations full of letters that have lost their meaning since he started this lesson on Monday. Two students complained during the lecture about this fact.
I went into the Faner computer lab after class and found another email from my brother, saying that he really didn’t want me to cancel our trip and that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to go to the Gulf Coast. I felt bad and decided he was right, so I sent an email to Tom saying that I would not be able to start until Monday and apologizing for not being clearer about my start date. I also figured out where to get information online about road closures on the Gulf Coast. All of the hurricane affected state’s Department of Transportation website’s have extensive information about this.
I left the computer lab at 4 and headed to Schnucks to fill out some employment paperwork and buy some things for dinner. I went upstairs to Marsha’s office, but she was already gone. I asked William about the paperwork when I saw him passing by, but he didn’t know anything. I passed the meat department as I was shopping and Paul told me that the papers were on the desk back there. I filled them out, then bought chicken breasts, a pan and bread. I had talked to Carrie and Cheech while I was in the store and I saw Mark Beams as I was walking out. Several employees at Schnuck’s have recently told me that he has been in the store looking for me multiple times during this summer. I talked to him for about 20 minutes and agreed to get some dinner and drinks with him on Tuesday night. He has seemed to like being on film in the past, so I am going to take my camera on Tuesday and try to get some footage of him being himself. His brain injuries often give him a very funny and relaxed perspective on things that I think everyone would enjoy seeing. (The injury is from a deadly traffic accident that happened about 20 years ago).
Back at the apartment, I ended up falling asleep from 5:30 till 7. I made myself dinner of chicken breasts and pasta when I got up, then turned on the TV at 8 to watch a special about the Hurricane. The special actually did not start till 9, so I watched LOST until it started. A commercial came on after the special advertising a movie in which a big pharmaceutical company is testing their new drugs on humans in Africa. Just after the commercial for the movie was a commercial for a drug company.

August 30, 2005
Tuesday:

Hurricane rain was falling this morning, but the hardest of it had apparently been overnight. I went to the Faner computer lab at 10 o’clock and scanned some of my brother’s old pictures that I had found in a box last week. I got lunch from Mcdonalds at 10:30, then went back to use the computers more. I chatted with Johanna until my Chinese class started. In class, the teacher told a long joke in Chinese that I don’t think one student understood. After the joke, he told us that it had something to do with a boss choosing a hot young secretary. He said that the joke was telling of Taiwanese culture, where almost all secretaries are under 30 and pretty. Job advertisement for secretarial positions supposedly will even state that applicants must meet these qualifications. At the end of class we had to split up into pairs of two and read questions to each other about apartments. This week’s chapter is “Renting an Apartment”. My partner was a young lady named Regina, who is from Poland. She is auditing the class and had also audited the class I had last semester. Even though she is not taking the class for a grade, she has always been one of the better students. Today was the first time I had really talked to her.
I went back into the computer lab after class and chatted to Johanna for another hour online. She let me view her webcam while she was wearing her pajamas. The angle of the camera made it look like she wasn’t wearing any clothes. All you could see where her bare knees and shoulders. Her hair covered up the straps on her shirt. I was in a corner of the room, so I don’t think anybody else noticed, but it would have been funny if people had thought I was sitting in the computer lab talking to a naked chick.
After chatting with Johanna, Stefan in Germany chatted with me for a few more minutes. After that, I stayed in the lab to do my Chinese homework. We have to turn in a list of written characters every week. There are usually 20 to 30 each time, and each one must be written 10 times, so it can take more than an hour if the week’s characters happen to be complex ones.
A disturbance broke out in the lab while I was studying and it lasted for an hour. A teacher had tried to kick a large black student out of one of the classrooms that is connected to the lab. I had heard yelling inside the classroom, then 3 university police officers came and escorted the student from class. The student and police then had a long and loud argument right outside the door of the computer lab. I don’t know why they didn’t take it outside because it was obviously disturbing everyone inside. The student was trying to convince the officers that the teacher was out of line and he kept going on and on about it in a very whiny obnoxious voice. They were making such a scene that I went out in the hall and videotaped them as I was leaving the lab. I stood behind a pillar and stuck my camera out from behind it. They did not notice for a few seconds, then the student stopped talking and stared at me. I just kept filming and he just continued whining to the cops after thinking about the camera for just about 5 seconds.
The rain had completely stopped by 4:30. I then rode my bike to Schnucks to buy some dinner. On the way in the store, I stopped at the bank to order a new debit card because mine has lately been very hard for some businesses to scan. Keri(brother’s roommate) was working at the bank and she waited on me. She asked +about my new apartment as we took care of business. The girl working next to her informed me that I would have to pay $7 for a new card, which isn’t cool considering the problem is no fault of mine.
For dinner, I bought some cheese filled sausages and pasta. I also got some ham for lunch during the rest of the week. Back at the apartment, I realized that I could not cook the pasta because I did not have any pans except for one skillet, which was too small. So, I just ate a sausage and a hot dog.
I had taken my laundry to the apartment’s laundromat just before dinner and I noticed a huge pile of Dawn’s clothes were still piled on the same table that I had put them when I was helping her on Saturday. She has been doing loads of smoke damaged laundry for 2 and a half days now. That must suck.
I turned on the TV after dinner and saw a commercial from the drug company GlaxoSmithCline about a condition called “RLS”, or “Restless Leg Syndrome”. The narration of the commercial went something like this, “When you are laying or sitting, do you feel that you just have to move your legs………..then you should contact your doctor because you may have RLS”. Maybe instead of prescribing Glaxo’s drug, the doctor should prescribe a treadmill or something.

August 29, 2005
Monday:

I had been thinking since last week that today was some kind of school holiday, so I didn’t go to classes this morning. I went on campus at noon to use the Internet and it was immediately obvious that today was no holiday. I had thought the school calendar showed there was no class today and I had never realized that it was not any kind of public holiday. So, I had already missed my first 3 classes of the day and my last one did not start until 2 o’clock.
I first went to the Student Center and got two plain double cheeseburgers from Mcdonalds. I saw Keith there buying food too, so we sat outside together and ate. I sure have been running into him a lot lately. He told me today that there had been two shooting near bars in Carbondale on Saturday night. The shootings had happened within blocks and hours of each other, but were not related. There has been a lot of violent crime and deaths in this area this year.
I went to the computer lab after lunch, where I first tried to contact the company that I had ordered a digital camera from last week. I needed to contact them because no record of my order was showing up on the website. I called the number on the website and found that this was a very rude and shady company. First of all, the automated answering service never mentioned the name of the company. I pressed “1” to inquire about Internet orders, and was transferred to a loud man who impatiently said “Can I help you with something?”. I just got to say, “I ordered something from the Internet last week and th…..”. I was hung up on before I could even finish the sentence. I immediately sent an email with the subject “Warning”, bluntly saying that I wanted nothing from the company and that I would be taking action against it and any guilty individuals if any charges were ever made to my card. I gave my name in the letter as Dr. Kiser. The mail was returned just seconds after I sent it, saying that the address did not exist. Not cool.
I went to my economics class at 3 and it was worse than ever. The teacher even kept us a minute over our scheduled time. I came home after class and noticed how dark the sky was becoming because of the hurricane(Katrina). It is a large category 4 storm and you really realize how big that is when you see that it is already coming into Illinois even thought the eye has just reached the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The satellite images from a couple days ago showed it covering most of the entire Gulf.
I was able to finally get my TV working this afternoon. I had not been able to turn it on yet because the circuit board that contains the buttons has been broken in half. The person who owned the TV before me had replaced the button circuit board with one that did not fit inside the TV, so it was just hanging out by a wire. It used to still be working when I used the TV two summers ago, but it had apparently been smashed when I accidentally sat my former entertainment center on it while I was getting my stuff out of storage last week. The part of the TV that receives the remote signals is also hanging out by a wire. I could not get the universal remote working because I don’t own the manual with the codes. I found lots of conflicting directions from different websites last week, but had so far been unsuccessful. When I finally did get it working today, there was then no signal coming from the cable. I tried connecting it to both of the connections in my room, but neither of them work. I temporarily ran a cable from the living room to the TV and that did work.
I started studying Chinese at 5 o’clock, but I fell asleep from 5:30 till 7. I then ate a sandwich and hot dog for dinner before going back to studying for the next two hours. Dawn stopped by around 9 to ask me if I knew where all her CD’s had been packed. She was worried that someone could have stolen them, but I told her that I had put them into a duffel bag when I was helping her remove everything on Saturday. I stopped studying at 10 o’clock, then I ate a brownie and watched the news and other TV shows for another hour before going to bed.

August 28, 2005
Sunday:

I woke up at 8:30 today because Mike had told me yesterday that he would pick me up to play racquetball at 9:30. I walked outside to wait for him at that time, but he was running a few minutes late. While I waited, I went to a free breakfast that was being held on the apartment grounds. I at first did not know what was going on. I just saw all the people eating breakfast outside. Then, I noticed a flyer that advertised free breakfast on Sunday for tenants, which was being hosted by a piano professor. The professor’s wife welcomed me as I was walking up, and she had me put on a name badge and sign a guestbook. The professor then introduced himself and told me to eat all I wanted. Some time had been spent preparing the food setup, and it included bagels from Panera, several kinds of hot drinks, fruits, cereals and juices. There were only about 10 tenants eating when I arrived, and the professor’s wife told me that they had been told to prepare food for 100. I ate a bagel and drank some juice, then Mike and Carolyn showed up.
Carolyn dropped Mike and me off at the Rec Center, then went to walk around Campus Lake. I had brought my camcorder with me to record the games, so I set it up on the second level, where there is a clear view down into the racquetball courts. We played one game with the camera running and that just happened to be the one that I one. We ended the second game early because I still had no points when Mike had 8. Mike also won the third game by quite a few points. I told him I was going to lie in this journal and say I won everything, but I will just get even with the video.
Carolyn was already in the parking lot waiting for us by the time we finished our third game. They dropped me off back at my apartment and gave me a plate of brownies and cake. I spent the next hour editing the video I had just shot. Dawn knocked on my door sometime after noon and asked if I could help her move some of the heavy boxes on the floor of her apartment. A cleaning woman had arrived to clean up the fire mess and the boxes needed to be put in the hallway. Some of them were so heavy that we could only slide them.
I just took about 15 minutes to get everything into the hallway, then I left for the library. I spent a couple hours there, using the Internet and doing a small assignment for International Economics class. I did the homework at the library because I do not have my own book and needed to use the one available there. All textbooks are reserve items, which means they can not be taken out of the library and can only be used for 2 hours at a time. The fee for overdue reserve items is $50 per half hour. There is a sign by the reserve desk that says “Reserve desk closes 15 minutes before library. Fines start immediately.” So, the library is closed for at least 7 hours each night, which means that someone could theoretically have a $700 dollar fine. What if you accidentally walked out with the book and didn’t notice it for 2 days? Would that be a $4800 fine?
I had tried to call Rufus when I first got to the library, but I only got his answering machine. I called again when I was leaving and he answered. We decided to hang out later and I agreed to some to his place at 8. On the way back to the apartment, I stopped at Old Town Liquors to buy some beer to take to Rufus’s later.
I got home at 4:30 and passed by Dawn’s apartment to see how her progress was coming. She said that the cleaning lady had left sick after just about 30 minutes of cleaning, so the work would not be done until tomorrow. So, I invited her to join me for dinner again. I then went shopping at Schnucks, where I bought some tuna steaks, potatoes, salad, butter and a salt and pepper shaker. I came home and had the food ready by 6. I then went to get Dawn at the temporary apartment she is staying in. We sat and talked for an hour and a half and I showed her the box I recently found with old pictures of my brother and his girlfriends.
I left just before 8 o’clock and went to Rufus and Jennifer’s new place, which is in Malibu Village mobile home park. I took the ceramic Mason’s ornament with me that he had asked me to take to China with me last year, and the framed picture I had recently made for him of me holding the thing in front of the Hong Kong skyline. My backpack was really heavy with the combined weight of the beer, ornament and picture. I at first had trouble finding their new place, which Rufus had told me was trailer #1. I had to ride back to Arnold’s market to call them before I found it.
Rufus was walking down the road looking for me as I arrived. Jennifer was inside playing video games and the kids were already asleep. She stayed up with us till sometime after midnight. Around 11 o’clock, police cars began pouring into the dead-end lane that the trailer sits on. They were all following one car, which stopped in front of a trailer at the end of the lane. Rufus and I stood outside watching as they searched the vehicle and arrested some people. Some neighbors walked to Rufus and me and said that the people who lived there had been “cooking”(meth) in the trailer. I videotaped some of the action, but we didn’t see any Rodney King style beatings. I wonder how the guy that taped that felt after the Los Angeles riots started? He was in a way responsible for about 50 deaths and billions of dollars in damage.
After the police left, Rufus and I stayed outside for another hour because the weather was nice. We came in and cooked a pizza sometime between 2 and 3 o’clock. Rufus left the pizza in the oven too long and it came out completely black on top, but we ate it anyway. It was surprisingly not bad considering its horrible appearance. I left the trailer soon after eating and rode my bike home. There, I did the dishes, then went to bed.

August 27, 2005
Saturday:

Mike had agreed to play racquetball with me at 10:30 this morning. Him and Carolyn came to my apartment at that time, but we decided that we would move our game to tomorrow because we had both been up really late last night. He invited me to lunch with his family at 11:30, so we hung at in the apartment till then. We spent most of that time throwing darts into every non-important object. I was really surprised to see the darts sticking into the walls, since I had such a hard time making holes to hang things.
Before lunch, we stopped at a travel agency so Mike and Carolyn could check on something about their wedding plans. We also went to 710 Bookstore because Carolyn wanted to buy a planner for her mother, whom has recently starting taking costume design classes. We then ate at Quatros, which is in the same parking lot that the travel agency and 710 Bookstore is. Mike’s dad and Trina(step-mom) were already there when we arrived, and John, Amy and Dillian showed up a couple minutes later. It took a while to get our food and Dillian spent most of that time standing up in our booth and staring at all the people in the restaurant. He especially seemed to like a pretty young blond girl that was sitting nearby. Everyone else ordered something for themselves, but Mike and me ordered a pizza meal for two, which included a small pizza and a salad. Mike’s dad bought everyone’s meal.
After the meal, we all browsed through a sporting goods store next-door, where there was a black lab dog freely roaming around and licking passers-by. Mike’s dad was with us in Carolyn’s car for the ride to drop me back off at my apartment. I arrived home around 12:30 and was back asleep by 1.
The second part of my day took a very unexpected turn. I woke up at 3 o’clock to female screams. The screams sounded really serious, so I jumped out of bed and turned off the fan so I could try and tell where they were coming from. I then didn’t hear anything else. Nothing unusual could be seen out the windows, so I just figured it must have been nothing. There was then some noise in the hallway and someone knocked on my door. I opened it and saw Tammy covered in sweat and obviously very shaken up about something. There was smoke in the hallway and Tammy said she had just put out a fire in another apartment. She asked me for water, so I gave her some from my fridge, then she left. I got my camera and walked down the hallway. I opened the fire door at the center of the building and the smoke on the other side was too sick to see through. It was not especially thick smoke, though, so I walked on in search of the source. I came to one apartment that was open and filled with even more smoke. I walked back towards my room and firefighters wearing oxygen masks rushed past me. One of them was stopping to knock on all the doors and he asked me if I knew of anyone that was home. I said I didn’t know and he followed me into my apartment for some reason. Inside, he said something to me that I couldn’t understand. I asked him what he said, but he just walked away. I think he probably told me to go outside.
There were two or three fire trucks outside and several more police cars. All of the people who live in the building were standing outside with their pets, which included a fat rabbit and a small snake. Tammy was there and she told me that the girl who lives in the burned apartment had run into the office looking for help after she had been unable to get any attention by screaming in the hallway. The firefighters had a powerful gas fan sat up by the door to suck all the smoke out of the building. I reentered the building as soon as they allowed it, which was within 20 minutes after they had arrived. My apartment had luckily been spared from most of the smoke, thanks to the fire door at the middle of the hallway. The smell of smoke was present, but nothing too serious.
I next decided to go to the library computer lab while things settled down and got to smelling better. A lot of the news on the Internet today was about the hoax on the Daily Egyptian that had been publicized yesterday. It had been mentioned on dozens of major news websites and hundreds of blogs, which I discovered by just doing a Goggle search. The woman behind it all, who is a former student that lives in Marion, has so far not been speaking with reporters.
I went to Schnucks to check my schedule and buy dinner after leaving the computer lab. I will start next Saturday. Mark and Todd were working, so I talked to both of them for a few minutes. I also requested off for the afternoon of September 17th, when I will be going to the Pinch Penny beer festival. For dinner, I bought a kit to make a chicken dish with noodles, which even included the chicken. I also had to buy a small oven pan to cook the stuff in.
Back at the apartment, I passed by the room where the fire had been because I was curious as to what was going on there. Tammy and the girl that lived there were inside starting to clean things up. The floor in front of the door was slippery and I almost fell as I passed. Tammy noticed me slipping by and asked if I had any free time to help. I felt terrible for the girl, who had just moved in on Saturday, so I agreed to help out for a while. I was planning on staying just until some of the girl’s friends got there, but nobody else ever showed up. Tammy also left after about an hour, so it was then just the girl and me. Everything in the apartment was covered in fire extinguisher dust, especially in the front room. The girls name is Dawn and she is a 28-year-old engineering student who knows my brother and sister. I mentioned my sister to her because I had seen environmental engineering books in her living room. She said that she had been in classes with both my brother and sister. I ended up staying to help her for about 2 or 3 hours. A cleaning service will be coming to work on the place tomorrow, but Dawn was responsible for getting all of her stuff into boxes. That must have been terrible for her since she had just unpacked everything a few days ago, but she said she was just glad that things were not any worse. I was surprised how calm and friendly she was after such an ordeal.
At 8 o’clock, I invited her over to share the food I had bought at Schnuck’s earlier. I knew that her stove had been destroyed in the fire and that she must be starved after all the work. She accepted the offer, so I went back to my apartment to get things ready. The food was ready by 9, so I went to get her at that time. She stayed for about 45 minutes and we finished off most of the food and drank a little bit of wine before she went back to work. She told me that she runs 6 days a week, so I invited her to play racquetball sometime in the near future.

August 26, 2005
Friday:

I had a really weird and funny dream this morning, but it was actually more of a nightmare at the time. In it, I was with Johanna’s friend Mari and we were waiting in line inside of a huge banquet room. All of the sudden, the lights went dark and everybody but Mari knew somehow that Freddie Krueger would be coming any second. Everybody ran to the walls of the room because we all though that was the safest place. Sure enough, Freddie walked into the room just a couple seconds later. He walked right up to where I was standing with Mari and told me to step forward. From a distance, all I could see was his trademark red-stripped sweater and metal claws, but when I stepped closer, I saw that he had the face of Michael Jackson! It was the same face I have seen on those paparazzi pictures where Jackson is not wearing any makeup and it looks like his face is going to just slide off. OK, now things get even weirder; I walk up to this half-Jackson/half-Krueger creature and it points at me and says “dance”. So, I tried to not act scared at all and just dance because I thought that was our only hope of survival. After a couple seconds, Michael Kruger smiled, gave me a thumbs up and walked back into the darkness. Is that a screwed up dream, or what?
I felt some kind of a bug crawling on my head while I was riding my bike to school today. I tried to brush it off a couple times, but it just wouldn’t seem to leave. Because of the way it walked, I suspected it was some kind of little spider, but I didn’t stop and make a big effort to get it off because I thought it was just one of the little harmless kinds. I sat down in the Faner computer lab at 8:30 and I could again feel the thing crawling on me. I was able to brush it off this time and it landed on the floor next to me. It was a little brown recluse. It must have been in one of the boxes I brought into the apartment yesterday afternoon, which I had stored on the shelf in my closet. It had probably crawled out of the box overnight and into the shirt I put on this morning. Now it is loose somewhere in the computer lab because it got away before I could kill it.
I went to all my normal Friday classes today, which are the same as my Wednesday schedule. The southern-accented statistics teacher was not here today so we had a substitute. He made us watch a video called “Against all Odds”, which is about the real-world use of statistics. I am glad he is not our real teacher. I really like regular one. She reminds me of a nice version of Rosanne.
I had a small test in management class. Instead of a few big tests, we are just going to have like 12 small ones. The old professor that taught the class on Monday was back in class today, and he was blowing a manual air-horn for no apparent reason. The real teacher was there to and I don’t think that I am going to like her because she is always talking down to the class. And, based on today’s test, I also don’t think I am going to like the content of the class. It really just seemed like worthless crap, but maybe things will change.
Class was over after the test and it only took a few minutes, so I had about 30 minutes before Chinese class started. I went into the computer lab and saw Keith C. there. I had been telling him I would buy him lunch since he helped me move on Monday, so we agreed to go today after I got out of Chinese. I went back to the computer lab at that time and he met me a few minutes later. He wanted to go to Mcdonalds. I also had Mcdonalds for breakfast today. Keith ordered two plain double cheeseburgers and I ordered a plain double cheeseburger and a McChicken. The cashier accidentally charged me for 4 double cheeseburgers, but I had already scanned my debit card before she realized it, so I just asked her to throw another plain double cheeseburger in the bag. We sat down and discovered that she had messed up a second time; the extra burger was not plain.
Keith and I went to play some pool after the meal. He ended up winning two games; once because I scratched on the 8 and once because I knocked the 8 in. He does not really know all the pool rules, so we made sure and played by them today so he could learn more.
I went to economics class at 2 and fell asleep several times. A student woke me up once when the attendance sheet came around. It was raining when class ended, so I went back into the computer lab and used the Internet for another hour while I waited for the weather to clear up. I next rode my bike to True Value to buy some more things I needed for my apartment. Tables were set up outside of the store that had wide variety of 90%-off junk on them. It was mostly all stuff that had damaged packages or had just never sold because it was useless. I did find a small can of white house paint on the tables for 85 cents. Inside the store, I bought some Sticky Tack, coaxial cables for my TV and VCR, a universal power adapter for my keyboard and a few other small things. The store is setup completely different than the last time I was in it, and it appears that they are now in the final stages of the remodeling. After making my purchases, the next stop was Westroad Liquors, where I bought a six-pack of beer for when I planned on hanging out with Mike and Buckley later tonight.
Back at the apartment, I used the Sticky Tack to put op the 15 foot Chinese scroll that I bought in Shanghai last year. The paper has been weathered to give it the appearance of being old, so getting Sticky Tack to stick is not easy. I hope it doesn’t fall and rip. I used the white paint to paint the spot where a new air-conditioner had been put in the wall last week. The repair crew had just left unpainted boards on that section of the wall. The old air-conditioner that was removed was a lot bigger than the new one, so the unpainted boards were filling in all that extra space. A section of carpet there is also missing, so I moved the living room area rug over the spot after I had painted. It now looks a hundred times better.
I ate a sandwich and a hot dog at 7 o’clock, then rode my bike to Buckley and Jen’s house at 8. Jen was not there because she was working. Mike and Carolyn showed up a few minutes after me, then John and Amy came soon after that. We all went to Mugsy’s after spending a short time at the house. There, we sat at a table for a while before moving to a pool table. Buckley and me played several games against Mike and John. John was playing really well and even made one jump shot. I think Buckley and I won at least a couple times. Mike asked me for a retraction on something I wrote about a pool game that we played last weekend. I had said that we lost a doubles game we played against two unknown fellows, but we actually won. I guess I thought we lost because I didn’t get any balls in. Considering the nationally publicized retraction that the DE(student newspaper) printed today, Mike said it was the perfect time for retractions in my website. He thinks that I should print a retraction of my entire summer; that all of my pictures and video were faked and that Johanna is actually a blow up doll.
And, if you are not from here, what happened today was the revelation that a group of people fooled the newspaper for the past two years by making the reporters believe that a little girl was someone that she was not. This 10-year-old girl was calling in and writing letters saying that she was lonely because her father was a soldier that had gone to Iraq. Her fictional parents had even come into the newsroom to thank the reporters for letting the girl express herself. This girl’s stories had even made the front-page article in the past, and included a picture of the girl standing on the bumper of a car wearing camouflage. The windows of the car had something like “101st airborne” painted onto them, and the picture was supposedly taken when her father left for Iraq. So after two years, these scammers decided it was time to kill off this fictional father. They contacted the newspaper and invited them to a fake memorial service, and had even tricked or paid a local reverend to help them out. It is still unclear or not whether this reverend knew the people were lying, but he had been involved with the family for some time and pictures of him with girl had been printed in the paper before. The apparent death of the father and the history of the story attracted the attention of other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the St. Louis post dispatch, which have millions of readers. Luckily, these bigger newspapers check out their stories before printing them. They contacted the government for more information about this father and discovered that he never existed. News of the hoax made it into both of these larger papers, and was actually on the front page of the St. Louis post dispatch. Weird.
OK, so we are still all playing pool at Mugsy’s……. John and Amy left before everyone else. The rest of us left sometime around 1 o’clock. I rode back to Buckley’s house with him and Tim in Tim’s car. Mike and Carolyn came over too, but they only stayed for a few minutes. Jen was home from work by this time and Tim and I sat there for another hour and hung out with them before both going home.

August 25, 2005
Thursday:

I got up just after 8 o’clock this morning and studied Chinese for an hour, then went to the Faner computer lab. There, I first used the phone to call Clara and see if she could find the paper I left on her desk that had Chris’s social security number on it. She couldn’t find it, but she did have the number written down somewhere else. I also asked her to pick me up at 1 o’clock so I could use her car to get more of my stuff that is stored at home. After talking with Clara, I called the electric company and had no problem getting new service put into my brother’s name. I next spent some time listing all of last year’s textbooks on Half.com, which should bring me about $150 if they all sell. That would at least pay for my statistics book this year.
I went to the student center Mcdonalds for lunch at 11. On the way there I saw Aaron, who is another person I have known from pool halls for almost the past ten years, but we had done little more than just say hello to each other until today. He told me that he now has two kids, is divorced and just sold the house he had shared with his wife. He has been taking care of the kids since the house sold because his wife hasn’t found a permanent place to live yet. He is a few years old than me and is still finishing up a bachelor’s degree. We agreed to play some pool sometime in the near future. Judging from the fact that he is playing pool almost every time I see him, he will probably win.
Mcdonalds was having some kind of promotional day today, which involved a lot of balloons and some games. I arrived just after they had switched over for lunch, so all the activities were still being set up. It’s too bad because I might have won some free cheeseburgers or something. I ordered the $1 double cheeseburger and McChicken and read the paper as I waited for it. An article on the front page said that textbook prices have risen twice as much as inflation over the past two decades.
I went back to the computer lab after eating. I tried to use a website that shows how to write Chinese characters stroke-by-stroke, but it wouldn’t work because I couldn’t get the required software installed. It would have eventually installed, but I stopped the process because it was happening so slowly. In Chinese class, I figured out how my bag had gotten wet on Monday; the air-conditioner is leaking water onto the floor. I had suspected that then, but I hadn’t felt any water on the carpeted floor.
I went straight home after class and Clara arrived to pick me up just a couple minutes later. Once we got to Murphysboro, I spent the next couple hours going through my storage area looking for more things I could use in my new place. I had planned on just spending less than an hour in there, but I ended up spending a lot longer because I felt that it was time that I reorganize things. I am glad I did because a lot of needed things were uncovered by moving things around a little. I also found a smashed up old box of Chris’s stuff behind mine. It did not have top and appeared to have been sitting for years because it was full of dirt and giant brown recluse spiders. I started moving the stuff into a better box for him when I realized how interesting the contents were. I am going to have some fun with this before he gets it back….stay tuned to this website for a special report.
I ended up filling both Clara’s trunk and backseat with stuff by the time I was done going through everything. My finds included a couple things that I am going to try and sell on Ebay, including an old military uniform from the former Soviet Union and a Midi keyboard. I got both of these things dirt-cheap from yard sales in Carbondale over the past several years. I know that the keyboard is worth a couple hundred dollars if it works, but I have no idea about the uniform.
Clara and I came back to Carbondale as soon as I was ready. I drove this time. Collecting my things in the 95-degree heat had exhausted me and the air conditioning felt wonderful. Despite the heat, Clara still helped me carry everything up to my apartment when we arrived there. She then left and I spent at least 2 more hours putting everything away. I found a perfect spot in the living room to put up a dartboard I had found. I brought a Dremel tool to make the hole in the wall for the screw that holds the dartboard. I also wanted to hang my huge Chinese scroll in the bedroom, but the Dremel couldn’t make holes because there is solid metal about an inch behind the concrete. This place is really built tough. Another important find today was a box of dishes, which I washed. Everything is almost set up now.
I drank some wine and studied Chinese later in the evening. I heard someone in what I thought was the apartment above me banging on the walls, so I thought I would go upstairs and offer to let them use my Dremel. I had also heard the same noises last night, so I assumed that they were having the same problems hanging things that I had. I took the tools upstairs, but could no longer hear any banging. I stood in the hallway listening for a moment but could only hear TV’s and

August 24, 2005
Wednesday:

My alarm did not go off at 7:40 this morning like it was supposed to; probably because I failed to turn it on. I did wake up on my own at 8:30, which still gave me enough time to be on time for my 9 o’clock class. I stopped on the way to school to look at a fan that had been thrown into the trash. I asked a man that was cleaning a house by the fan if it worked and he said that he didn’t know. It was the kind of fan that sits on a waist-high stand. Both the stand and the fan itself had partly fallen apart because of what appeared to just be loose screws. I thought there was a good chance the fan worked and that I could fix it by just tightening the screws, but I decided that it wasn’t worth being late for class over. I decided I would pick it up on my lunch break if it was still around.
My marketing teacher threw out little boxes of gum today after talking about the packaging for a while. One of the boxes bounced off the head of a student that is in my Chinese class. My statistics teacher with the southern accent told the class that she has a cousin Betty that is an auto mechanic. My management teacher started the class by asking if anyone had any questions. I raised my hand and asked if she was from the Netherlands, as I had suspected on Monday. She replied that she was from Russia and Bulgaria and is a resident of both of those countries and the US. She said that this gave her options if she ever did anything wrong in one of the countries. During the lecture, she said that Hitler was a great marketer, even though he was an evil one. The new assistant taught Chinese class today. Unlike the old assistant and the professor, this new one rarely calls on individual students to ask questions. She mentioned at the beginning of class how nervous she was. Today we split up into groups and did some dictionary-use exercises, where we all had to made sentences with certain words and write them on the board. I couldn’t even remember how to write the character for “I” without looking at the dictionary.
On the way home during my lunch break, I found that the fan I had seen in the morning was still sitting in the same place. I put both the base and top part in my left hand and steered my bike with my right. As I neared the apartment, I tried to brake with my right hand before remembering that the right brake didn’t work on that side. I thought that I was about to crash on a curb, so I jumped off the bike in a grassy area before getting to the curb. The bike hit the ground and the handlebars spun around and hit my left shin extremely hard, leaving a deep indentation in my leg. The part that hit my leg was just smooth and round metal, but the extreme force of the impact still broke the skin a bit. It was really painful for about 20 minutes. The location I hurt myself today was just feet from the location that I hurt myself on Monday, when I ran into the doorframe of the apartment’s office building.
Back at home, I first plugged the fan on and was happy to see that I had not hurt myself in vain. I made myself lunch before working on it. I had a ham and cheese and a hot dog and cheese sandwich. I put the hot dogs in the microwave and they were still the same temperature when I took them out. I tried it again, but still nothing. The microwave then took a beating on the side and top. This oldest repair method in the book worked for me today, as the hot dogs then heated up perfectly. I think the microwave may soon end up joining the late entertainment center.
On my way back to class I passed a desk that had been thrown out right across the street from where I had found the fan. I first passed it up because I was going to be late for class if I got it, but I turned around and went back for it because I knew I really needed it and that it may not still be there when I returned. It was about a block from my apartment building and I had to carry it by myself. This was not an easy task and it required stopping to rest on multiple occasions. I feel like an animal building a nest.
I was completely exhausted and wet with sweat by the time I got it to the building, up two flights of stairs and into my apartment. I passed Tammy outside the office as I was walking back to my bike. I told her about carrying the desk and she said that I should have asked for help.
I arrived at economics class about 5 minutes late and almost every chair was full. I had to make a tight squeeze by a couple unhappy people to take one of the few remaining seats. The old talkative student was as loud as ever today and spent a few minutes trying to contradict the teacher about the same subject that he had yesterday. He said he even went home and looked it up last night. He later told the teacher to move an extension cord, saying, “I’m just scared you’re going to trip while you write on the board”. The teacher looked really annoyed and just ignored the comment.
I had come to class completely exhausted from carrying the desk and the air-conditioned room almost made me go unconscious be the end of hour. I really felt weak and could barely even grip my hands. Getting up made me feel fine again. I then went into the Faner computer lab and asked if any of the computers there would burn DVD’s because I wanted to use the fast Internet connection to back up my website. The backup process generates a file that will not fit on a regular CD. I was told by a foreign employee that all of the computers at the front of the room would do this, but I already knew that wasn’t true. I used the free phone to try and call my brother and Clara, but neither of them was home. I needed to get Chris’s social security number again to get my electricity hooked up. He had given it to me on Monday, but I left it sitting on Clara’s computer desk. I then saw Keith C. and he asked me how to check SIU email. I showed him how to do this, then started using a computer next to him. I signed up for a Skype.com service that will allow people to use their regular phone to call my computer. Three months of service is just 12 dollars. My new number is 618-912-4404, but it won’t work till next week when I get a cable modem installed. Next, I ordered the cable modem and a digital camera online. I got the cable modem from Amazon and had some trouble with the billing because they tried to use an old debit card that I had on file. I tried to change the billing info but it wouldn’t let me, so I tried to cancel the order, but it also wouldn’t let me do that. So, I sent another order for the product using my correct info. I hope they don’t also use that correct info to charge for the first order. I got a digital camera that I really wanted for just $159. It is one of the $300 kinds that I looked at in the stores yesterday; a Canon Powershot 300, which has all the features of a standard camera but is just about as big as a credit card and is less than an inch thick. It meets all my requirements for an everyday-use camera, including recording video with sound. Watch out shy people, you will all soon find yourselves on the Internet much more often.
Keith sat next to me for an hour and invited me to come to a restaurant with him and his friends later, which was the same one that I had been to with my family last week; Bottoms Up. He said that tonight’s specials included pitchers of beer for $1 and half-chickens for $2. I would have probably gone if I had a car, but I had to say no. I left the computer lab at 4:45 and asked again about burning DVD’s as I was leaving. I asked this second time because I noticed that the man who gave me the wrong answer was gone. They told me that the DVD writing feature had been de-activated on these computers because too many people were trying to copy movies. They did give me the phone number of the Communications building computer lab, which I called and was told that Macs with DVD drives are available to use there.
I next rode to Pinch Penny liquors. There was a Geo in the parking lot that had hydraulics installed on it. There was nobody in it but it was parked with the back passenger’s side wheel high off the ground. I had come to this store to buy two tickets to the annual September 18th beer festival at Pench Penny pub, when 150+ kinds of beer are available to try from 3-6PM. The second ticket was for Ericka, who will be coming into town then and had asked me in an email to get her one. The guy who sold me the ticket asked me if I was 21, then said that I was wasting my money if I wasn’t. He got the tickets from a box from under the counter that was full of tickets and $100 bills.
I next rode back to the apartment and found a place to put the desk I had earlier rescued from the trash. It ended up under the window where the TV had been sitting on two chairs. The TV went to the other side of the room. Now I have a place to study. I then finished filling out the information request sheet that had been placed on my door yesterday by the apartment management, which jokingly asks for a DNA sample at the end. I had already attached some strands of hair yesterday, even though it said that anyone doing so would be ridiculed. I today wrote in parenthesis after that, “I thrive on all types of attention”, and, “please contact me if nail trimmings and/or other is needed”. For the “relationship of emergency contact” question, I wrote, “biological father(I think)”, and wrote, “I wish I had one” by the “licence plate #” question. I then took a shower and wrote everything you just read.
I spent a couple hours later in the evening studying Chinese, and took a break for a few minutes to take another shot at getting the rest of my wall decorations hung properly. This was my 3rd or 4th attempt at this but I was successful this time. I hung one thing by finding a pre-made hole that I had not noticed before and putting a screw into it. I hammered screws into the wall to hang the other things up. Nails had been bending but I was able to force the screws in by striking them really hard with a hammer.
After finishing my studying, I microwaved the rest of my chicken strips for dinner. I was really tired and went to bed before 10.

August 23, 2005
Tuesday:

My dad woke me up at 6:30 and took me to Carbondale on his way to work again. We carried several things with us in the back his work truck, including a 4 X 5 foot original painting that Clara had loaned me. My dad and Clara purchased the painting somewhere a while back and I had seen it sitting in the unfinished room at the front of the house a few times over the past year or so. Clara and me were looking for something in that room the other day and I mentioned that I really liked it. It was sitting with my other things this morning and my dad told me that Clara had put it there for me to borrow.
My dad and I were also carrying several other of my things this morning and we did not want to put them on top of the painting because it could damage the paint or the carvings on the frame. The painting being on top meant that it could easily be blown out, so we weighted one corner down with the box of wine that Mike and Carolyn had given me last week. Going down the road, I noticed that it still looked like the painting could take flight at highway speeds, so we stopped and put a box of jumper cables on another side of it.
My dad listened to a talk radio show about young people drinking on the way to Carbondale. A college sophomore was admitting that she had once drank 6 beers in 20 minutes. She said she was lucky that it ended up being a story that she could tell her parents and not an incident that involved her doing some crazy sex acts. After word gets out about that interview, which was on National Public Radio, every guy on her campus is going to be buying her drinks. The news is full of college drinking statistics this week. It must be some kind of awareness week or something. Everyone should drink in recognition of it.
In Carbondale, my dad helped me set the things in the truck next to my building, then went off to work. I carried everything upstairs, then went to work on the apartment. There was still a big open hole in the wall where the air conditioner was supposed to be, but I just worked around it. The first priority was to get the computer set up so I could have some tunes playing while I worked. I spent the next 4 hours choosing locations for everything and getting it put there. A man came in around 9 o’clock and started jack hammering the edges of the big hole in the wall, then left after about 15 minutes. I next went to Schnucks to buy food and supplies. I spent some time talking to Sara, Dave and Charlie while I was in the building.
Back in the apartment, hanging my paintings on the wall turned out to be a big hassle because the walls are made out of something that is nearly as hard as cement. Another worker came in at 11 and left a bucket of tools. I found a drill there and was able to make a big enough hole in the wall to get an anchored screw in it. I hung the big 4 X 5 foot painting there.
I went to Chinese class at noon and there were only 4 students there, so the teacher made us all talk a lot. He mostly asked us questions about what we did over the summer. I think that everyone had done some kind of international travel, but I had done the most. Of the countries I went to, I only knew the Chinese name of Finland, which is just Finlan. I also couldn’t remember how to write my Chinese name. We were introduced to our new assistant teacher today, who seems shy compared to the one we had last year. The bottom of my backpack was all wet at the end of class and I will probably never know how that happened. There was no water on the floor.
I went to the computer lab after class and looked at the prices of my textbooks and digital cameras. I am hoping to only have to buy my statistics and Chinese book. The statistics book is a new edition that even costs $115 online. How could this have ever been allowed to happen? Students all over the US need to go on textbook strike, but I don’t think there would ever be enough support for such a thing, even though it pisses every non-rich student off. But hey, it could be worth a try. I wonder if anybody has ever tried to organize such a thing. If anybody with some webpage building or marketing skills is interested, then let me know. I’m sure at least a few volunteers could be found at a lot of campuses. We could be heros.
Looking at digital cameras online, I did not like the fact that I could not actually see and hold the products, so I decided to go around to some stores and take a look at cameras. I went into Office Max, Rex, K’s Merchandise and Best Buy. I wrote down the model number of all the ultracompact models that I liked. I want a small camera so I can easily carry it everywhere I go. More pictures will end up getting taken if it is very portable. All of these cameras were $300-$400 dollars in the stores, but I bet I can get one for like $150 online. I noticed that K-Mart’s sign was being taken down as I passed it on the way to Bust Buy. I didn’t even know that it had closed. The Wal-Mart down the street must have run it out of business.
I went in to Lowes after leaving Best Buy. I needed to buy a trash can, 3 outlet power strip and material to hang my paintings and pictures in the apartment. I found a little woven trash can for $5 and bought some anchors to hang the paintings. I also wanted to buy a manual drill to make the holes in the wall, but they didn’t sell those, so I had to get a hammer. An employee spent several minutes helping me unsuccessfully look for the drill. I also didn’t end up getting the power strip because they didn’t have anything cheap and simple. The simplest I could find still had a night-light built into it. On the ride back to the apartment, I stopped to film a crazy black woman who was standing along the road screaming at cars as she ate doughnuts.
My apartment had 3 workers in it when I returned, and I think one of them had been drinking my Dr. Pepper. There was a cup of it on the counter top and I don’t remember pouring it. But, who knows, maybe I had also unknowingly put a cup of it in my backpack earlier. I went into my room and slept in my TV chair as the men worked in my living room for the next two hours. They woke me up once to ask if they could borrow a drill bit from a kit of mine that was laying in the living room. The man who had left his tools in the apartment earlier today was the last to leave, and he woke me up again as he was going. He told me that someone would be back again to do some work with the electricity and put of the curtains. He also told me that he loved my suit-of-armor and that it had scared him twice today. I am hoping that nobody comes to take my bed away, as I had been told would happen when I first signed the lease. Maybe the suit-of-armor will also scare bed-thieves away.
I got the rest of my paintings and pictures put up after everyone had left. I still had a hard time making holes in the walls. I made two holes by hammering drill bits into the wall. One of them bent and the other broke off. I straightened the bent one and put it back in the case. The end of the broken one stayed lodged in the wall, so I conveniently used it to hang one of the paintings. I hung a picture of the World Trade Center in the bathroom. I think that the fact that the frame and glass on the World Trade Center picture is broken makes some kind of artistic statement. I also put up 3 mirrored pictures of lions that my brother game me for Christmas like 10 years ago. I did not have to make holes in the wall for them because they sit perfectly on top of a waist high heater that is attached to the wall across from the front door. I did not have anywhere to put my TV since the death of the entertainment center last night, but I found that sitting two fold up chairs facing each other made a great TV stand. The apartment is now looking much more like home.
I ate sandwiches and frozen chicken strips after all the work was done, then spent some time writing all the above. I went to Schnucks again at 7:30 because I wanted to take a shower and I needed a shower curtain. I found a note taped to the door on my way out of the apartment. It was supposed to be filled out with contact and personal information, then returned to the office. It asked for everything from social security number to birthdate. And, in the spirit of the apartment’s new management, the last question on the list asked for a DNA sample. Following this request in parenthesis was (OK, if you really attach a DNA sample, you will be subject to public humiliation and ridicule). So before leaving, I immediately took the note into my apartment and cut off a small section of hair to tape on the note.
A block away from the apartment, I found a decorative mirror that had been thrown away. It was in good condition so I took it back to the apartment before continuing on. At Schnucks, I looked all over the store and finally found a shower curtain liner, but not an actual shower curtain. It would still work, though. They did not sell the clips to attach it to the shower, so I bought some clothes line to attach it. I bought a few other things and talked to Dan, Pam and Nic before checking out. Nic said that it was his last night because he recently started a job working for Nightlife magazine as a salesperson and is making a lot more money there. He asked me to meet him at Gatsby’s after 9 o’clock tonight..
Back at home, it took me about 20 minutes to wind the clothes line through the holes in the shower curtain liner and around the rod. It worked just fine. I then cleaned the decorative mirror and put it up in my room. I did not have to try and hang it because it fit on a small ledge. I had just bought some small nails at Schnucks and I tried to use them to hang up the lion pictures, but they just bent when I hit them with the hammer.
I went to meet Nic at the time and place that we had arranged. He has started playing league pool this summer and that is what he was there for tonight. He played against the same guy for several games as some other guy sat on a stool making marks on a scorecard. Nic’s girlfriend, Sara, was also playing the same kind of game at another table. Nic told me that he was rated as a 5 and Sara said she was a 2. Nic said that he was supposed to win his games and Sara said she was supposed to lose hers. Sara told me that her coach would be mad because she won one of the games she was supposed to lose. There is something that I am not understanding here.
I went to talk to Sara’s coach because I recognized him as someone I have seen around pool tables for at least ten years. I knew we used to have mutual friends when we hung out at a now-defunct pool hall on the Strip in 1995-96. I walked up to him tonight and asked if his name was Aaron, but he just said “no, Andy”. I then asked if he remembered me and he did. I told him that I remembered him from the defunct place(Power Players) and I asked him if he used to hang out with Dennis Streeter. He nodded when I mentioned Dennis and he said that he knew Stephanie Lewis. I then thought I remembered him dating Stephanie or at least trying to. I see people like this all the time in this area now. I see their face and feel like I have thought of them as a friend sometime long ago. I think it’s sad that this happens, but it is just a fact. I admire people who remember everything about everyone that they have ever called a friend. You can make friends in minutes and you sometimes never see these people again. Some of us remember the experiences vividly and others just make a vain effort to do so. OK, this paragraph must come to an end.
I played a few games of pool against Nic after he played his league games. We went to a table he had already reserved for the evening and I watched him play twice against a guy named Russel. He told me Russel was a master at the game, but Russel was only half good tonight. Maybe Nic just said this in front of Russel because he is setting him up to be sharked. After the Nic vs. Russel games, came the Nic vs. Garth. I think I beat him 4 out of 5 times. Pool has previously been an enigma to me because I sometimes play great and sometimes do the opposite. I think I have solved the puzzle tonight; focus on the ball being hit and not it’s destination. The destination still stays in my eyesight to judge the angle, but I don’t focus on it. Maybe I should try the same thing with baseballs. By now, you must be saying that I have been drinking way too much, but that’s not true; I have not had enough to drink yet. Seriously, I have had less than 1 pitcher, even though they were on sale for $4.50.
After the games with Nic, he set up several trick shots and tried to shark me. I let him take a dollar from me because I wasn’t paying attention that he was using a different version of one of the oldest tricks in the book; that you can’t make every ball on the table without scratching. I realized what he was doing before I finished, but he still didn’t give my dollar back. That’s fine, I think I am ready to play against him in a real game for money next time.
Ohhhhhhh…….school is about to start. I mean real school, where you have to study. It’s now 12:30 and luckily all I have to do so far is review the “ba” composition in Chinese. The teacher refers to this on handouts as the “dreaded ‘ba’ composition”. I won’t hardly remember a thing about it till I open my book. The only thing I do remember is avoiding the use of it completely last semester.

August 22, 2005
Monday:

Wow, what a long day. It started before 7 o’clock because I had my dad drop me off in Carbondale. Today was the first day of classes, but my first one didn’t start till 9. I had my bike in the back of my dad’s truck and he dropped me off a few blocks from the university. I first rode to the student center and ate breakfast at Mcdonald’s. I was disappointed to see that they are no longer offering $1 sausage biscuits. What will I do now? I ordered a Mcmuffin meal with an orange juice and sat outside to eat it. Next, I went to the Faner computer lab. I was planning on staying there just until 8 because I thought that my bank would open at that time, but I called it from a free phone in the computer lab and an answering machine said that it didn’t open till 9. So, I spent the rest of the time before class just using the computers. I tested my website to make sure all my videos were downloading properly and I was amazed at the speed they were downloading; 40 megabytes in under 30 seconds. I wish I had a few thousand extra dollars a month lying around so I could afford that kind of connection.
My first class, in the Lawson building, is some kind of marketing that is being taught by a tall, plump and nervous woman. She seemed to be talking very fast because she was uncomfortable. Her fast-talk included praise for the show Survivor on several occasions. This class has 230 people in it and will have assigned seating and mandatory attendance. The teacher is offering 3 get-out-of-class-free cards, which can be redeemed by writing a short text on something you saw that had to do with marketing while you missed class. Little yield signs on popsicle sticks will be available at the front of the room for any students who think that the teacher speaks too fast. A student who wishes to use the sign must simply hold it in the air when the teacher is speaking too fast. You can also leave notes at the front of the class before it starts and the teacher will read them at the beginning. Hmmmm, I wonder if they can be anonymous…..
My next class on Mondays is Business Data Analysis, which meets in a big lecture hall of the Pulliam building. The teacher is a short, friendly, overweight woman with a fairly strong southern accent. Before class started, I talked to a student sitting in front of me whom I recognized from the last class because I thought he looked a little bit like my friend Chris Leek. This students name is Lou and he is from Morocco. He is a graduate student that wants to move to a US city and start his own Moroccan-cuisine restaurant. He seems like a cool guy and I will probably talk to him more in the future. At the beginning of class I volunteered to help hand out the syllabus to the rest of the class. I forgot to get one for myself and had to go back to the teacher for it. The teacher could not get the screen for the projector to lower because it required a key that she had not been given. She left class to tell someone about it, then returned saying that someone would soon be on their way. Nobody ever came and she had to teach the class without it. She tried to show us the class website even though there was no screen. The top of the image was projected onto curtains above a stage and the bottom part was projected onto a far-away wall behind the stage.
My third class of the day was back in the Lawson building. It is some kind of marketing. The man who did the teaching today will not be the teacher everyday. He is a professor that is in charge of the class, but it will be taught by a grad-student, who stood alongside the professor today as he spoke. This young female grad-student looked annoyed that the professor had taken over her class. Making her even madder, she was being signaled to do little tasks like hold up the textbook as the professor spoke about it. She was allowed to speak for a moment to give her contact information. She sounds like she has an accent from the Netherlands. The professor is a tall, white-haired guy with a big belly. He was really being goofy while he taught, saying that, “You shouldn’t be in college if you can’t pass this class”, and sitting down to play 3 keys on a piano that happened to be sitting in the room, even though he didn’t appear to play at all. After hitting the keys, he asked the class if anyone played. Someone raised their hand and the professor jokingly said that he would like this person to play some relaxing music before class everyday.
This class ended early, at 11:30, then I had 2 and a half hours before my last class of the day. I first went to Old National Bank with my $4000 student loan check. I took $1500 in cash and deposited the rest. I wanted the cash because I knew that I might be signing an apartment lease today and I was worried that the deposit would not show up in my account until tomorrow, which means that I might not be able to get money out of ATM’s till then. My next stop was the Bike Surgeon because I needed a part to fix my breaks and air in my tires. There were two foreign guys working there, one of which I had never seen before. The other one is a long-haired little man that I think owns the store. We know each other because my friend Rodger Hughes always used to bring his bike to be worked on here. Rodger always talked to the guy when I was with him, so I got to know him too. The man I didn’t know sold me the part for the brakes as I talked to the other guy about the summer. I then used a free self-service manual pump to get some more air in my tires.
Now that I had my errands run, it was time to try and find a place to live. I went back to the Faner computer lab and used the free phone there to call some numbers that I had written down when I was using the Internet earlier this morning. This didn’t really get me anywhere, so I walked into the student center and got a paper. One of the numbers on my first list was long distance, so I used my credit card in a pay phone to make the call. This also didn’t get me anywhere, so I went to another free phone and starting calling numbers from the ads in the paper. I made about 15 calls, but everything was either full or nobody answered the phone. I sat down in a corner for a while to think about what to do next, then decided that I would call a new place I had seen advertised called St. German Square. I had not yet called them because I thought I could maybe get something cheaper than the $385 they were advertising, but I now thought I should check them out. I made the call and I immediately recognized the voice on the other end of the phone. It was Tammy, who used to work with me at Schnuck’s. I told her I would like to look at a place as soon as possible and she told me to come right on over.
I was a little disappointed when I realized that St. German Square was just a new name for the Rawling St. Apartments. I had looked at these rooms before and my friend Jeff Raines lived in one once; not all that nice, and funny smelling. Tammy was in the office and she came and gave me a big hug when I walked in the door. It was her first day on the job, as she had recently quit her last job with Lewis Park apartments. We spent a few minutes catching up, then she had a tall blond girl named Whitney show me the apartment. Whitney was making some conversation as we walked towards the apartment and I wasn’t really paying much attention to her at first because I thought she was just making small talk. She asked me if I was a student and I just said, “Yes, I’m a student….at SIU”. She then kindly replied, “Well, OK, your blunt”. I thought it was really funny that she had caught on to the fact that I wasn’t paying any attention to her and had actually said something about it. I still thought she was just being a savvy saleswoman, but I liked her and was paying attention now. I started using the same humorous bluntness that she just had and it turned out to be the funniest apartment-showing I have ever experienced. Things stepped up another notch with each comment and things quickly escalated to very straight, but innocent, flirting. I decided to sign the lease and we went back to the office to fill out the paperwork. Whitney was so distracted that she was having a hard time getting all the paperwork together. I made it worse by saying things like, “That is a really pretty signature”. She was now responding mostly just by giving me extremely provocative looks, and the other people working in the office had picked up on things by now. A guy sitting in a chair behind Whitney mentioned something to the rest of the room about Whitney being “flustered”. The best thing happened after I had filled out all the paperwork, received the key and was leaving the building; I walked right into a wall. I didn’t realize that the double-door had a post in the middle section of it. Whitney and I were giving each other one final look when I slammed the side of my head and my right knee hard into the metal. It really hurt. Everyone else in the room stopped what they were doing and looked at me. I just gave a thumbs up, said “fine” and limped out of the building. (Johanna, don’t worry. My flirting will stay innocent, but I had to tell this story).
So, I had found a place to live during my 2-hour break between classes, and I had a lot of fun doing it, even though I was injured for the rest of the day. I had thought I would miss my 2 o’clock class, but now I could make it after all. I first went back to the bank to deposit most of the $1500 I was carrying around. It had not been needed to rent the apartment because my debit card information was just being faxed to an office in New York for processing later in the week; the money will be available by the time it is processed.
I got back to campus at 1:30, then used a computer till class started. This class is some kind of economics and is being taught in a mini lecture hall right next to the Faner computer lab. The small room is tiered and has no more than 50 fold-out seats mounted to the tiers. Not all students were in class today, but some were already having to sit on the stairs. Typical. This class is being taught by the same man who taught my History and Philosophy of World Economic class last semester; a short and stocky man who appears to be of Middle-Eastern origin. One of the students from that class is also in this class. He is sometimes a terrible class-time waster and I mentioned him in this journal last semester. He is middle aged student who has the same major as I do. He is constantly making very windy comments about China and will often argue with the teacher about the lecture material. He has not changed a bit since last semester, and has maybe even gotten more outspoken.
I went back to the computer lab after class and saw Keith Conrad just as I was about to log onto a computer. He let me use his phone to call my dad and request a ride home later, then we went to play pool in the student center. On the walk there, Keith told me that he was a very good pool player, but that turned out to be anything but the case. He was using the 9 ball as the que in the beginning of the first game. I asked him what he was doing and he looked confused for a second before realizing his mistake. His shots were mostly all out of control and he told me it was because he had just seen his Taiwanese ex-girlfriend that recently broke up with him in a very cold and calculated way. Maybe so, but I also think he was lying about his pool skills. He won two games because I scratched on the 8, but he had lots of balls left on the table during those games. He offered to help me move later in the evening, so I guess he is not a sore looser.
Keith had a class at 4 and I went back to the computer lab. I called the electric company there about getting the electricity turned on, but they said that I would have to pay an old 1998 bill of almost $400 before I could get new service. Hah….I will just sign up in my brothers name. I will never pay. I hate them. They have killed dozens of trees to send me collection notices for the past 10 years.
I met my dad at Schnuck’s at 4:45. I saw Cindy W. while I was waiting and she thanked me for some candies that I had sent her from China; a gift for using my camera to record during Randy’s wedding ceremony in May. Back at my house, I immediately went to work on the moving. I first got all the things I had inside ready to go, then went out and hooked up the trailer to the Suburban. Keith arrived as I was hooking it up and he tried to assist my erratic trailer driving. This trailer is quite long and had to be backed out of its parking place. My skills at this have never been honed. It took multiple attempts to get the rig to my storage area, but there was little backing required after that. Keith helped me load a few filthy pieces of furniture onto the trailer, including part of a sectional couch, the tin soldier, a computer desk, TV, entertainment center and my bike. I already said that this stuff was filthy, but I must say it again.
After setting the things loosly on the trailer, Keith and I took it up to the house and tied ropes across. We also put a bunch of small stuff in the back of the truck, like a microwave, monitor, pictures, etc. I was hoping that I could find a table in an old mobile home that is on the property, but all I found was a couple fold-up chairs, an old military cot, a broom and an retired vacuum cleaner. I hope it works. I might be sleeping on the cot until I get a real bed. I got a couple phone calls as I was finishing the packing, including Nic S., who told me that he had been doing marketing work for the apartment I was living in.
Keith had to go home at 7, so I took all the things to the apartment by myself. I was worried that there would be nowhere out of the way to park the big rig, but I found a good spot on the lawn by my building. The next couple hours were exhausting, as my apartment is on the third floor at the opposite end of the building to where I was parked. Uhhhh. The A guy walked by and offered to help, but he just kept on walking when I accepted the offer. Ass. The TV was probably the hardest thing, as it is 27 inches and weighs about 75 pounds. I hope it works. After at least 25 trips, I had taken all but one thing on the trip to my apartment. The entertainment center still remained and it died on the lawn. I started dragging it towards the building and it gave way. The plan was to get it close to the door, then go to a party across the street and request help in exchange for beer, but the poor entertainment center just wasn’t up for a new life. It was leaning about 30 degrees TV-side and I put it out of its misery by pushing it the rest of the way into the ground. I carried all the pieces around to the side of the building and gave it a proper burial in the dumpster. Some discarded artificial flowers just happed to already be there. RIP.
Something unusual happened on one of my last trips up to the apartment. The power had been off since I started moving and things were getting really dark towards the end. Then, I came up with a new load and all the lights were on. A new lamp was even sitting at the edge of the room. It had not been there just five minutes ago. A member of the management that I had seen earlier in the day then approached me at the dumpster to apologize that the electricity had been shut off. I just expected it to not be on till I had it turned on, but I guess there is a grace period. The woman told me it had been shut off because my air conditioner was being worked on. I already knew that it was being worked on because Tammy had called earlier in the evening while I was loading up things. I had also noticed that there was a big open hole in the wall and a bunch of cardboard and tools were lying around the room.
I arrived back home at 9:30, then unhitched the trailer and put the truck in its place. My dad was eating when I got inside and I joined him for fried chicken, mashed potatoes and Hawaiian bread. I then spent the rest of the evening writing this very long journal entry. They seem to get longer all the time.

August 21, 2005
Sunday:

My dad woke me up at 7 this morning because I told him last night that I would go with him to a car show in Pinckneyville today. He was taking his 1930 Pontiac and he already had it ready to go by the time I was ready to leave. The car show was at the fairgrounds and there was a $4 admission fee per person. We first just parked the truck so my dad could look at car parts that were being sold at a very small swap-meet. After a few minutes of looking at car parts, he pointed out a man whom he said always comes early and buys all the valuable stuff, which I think is also exactly what my dad was trying to do. Every kind of business has competition, but he is usually very successful because there are few people who really know which car parts and other antiques are valuable. On a side note; he found some old medical charts in a dumpster in Marion a few weeks ago and sold them on Ebay for over $1000 dollars.
After looking at car parts, we went back to the truck to unload the old Pontiac. A staff member came up to us just after we started and said that we could not unload there, so we went to the correct area. My dad parked the car in the show area, then we dropped the trailer off in an area that was reserved for trailers. We then interviewed some of the vendors that my dad knew at the swap-meet, which was actually his idea. I had already been filming him browse the vendors earlier. He now went around asking people what their most interesting items for sale were while I was the cameraman. We first interviewed a woman who was selling tools. She showed us some kind of clamp, a hook and an old pedal-car that was rusted and falling apart, which was priced at $150.00. We then interviewed another guy who showed us a little gas engine.
Next, we had to get some paper work filled out about the car that we had entered into the show. Two women and a girl were sitting at a booth, and they filled out the papers as my dad gave the information. My dad knew one of the women and she asked me how Finland had been. The girl asked me if the French fries at Mcdonalds in China tasted the same as they do in the States.
We then started looking for breakfast. We saw some relatives of Clara’s that told us the best breakfast was at a Boy Scout building. The only hot breakfast available there was biscuits and gravy, and a man said that it would be a 10 minute wait, so we decided to walk around for a few minutes. There was also an antique tractor show going on today and there were a couple hundred tractors and other similar pieces of equipment sitting all over the place and being driven in every direction. Some quite young boys were driving some very large tractors. One tractor passed us that looked like the wheels could fall off at any moment. All four wheels were wobbling and the machine looked to be at least 100 years old. Big flywheels and gears were turning at high speeds all over it. It looked like a torture device out of a horror movie. Exhaust was coming off the bottom of it so hard that a cloud of dust was constantly being kicked up.
After waiting 10 minutes, we went back to get our biscuits, but were told that someone had forgotten to put them in the oven, so it would be another 10 minutes. We then looked at a few more things around the tractor area, including an engine piston that was 3 feet(1 meter) long and could have weighed hundreds of pounds. It must have been for a big ship engine or something. Our biscuits finally were done the next time we went to the Boy Scout building, but there was a big line and we had to wait for 5 more minutes. We ordered orange juice with the food and ate it at a shady picnic table, then went to the grandstand so I could film the band that was playing there for a few moments. The music was country and the band seemed to be very religious. There was an announcer that asked between songs for people to put money into a hat that would be passed around. There were about 100 people in the audience, almost all of which were over 50 or under 10 years old.
Next, we went to the car show area and my dad talked to a couple people there. One of them was an old man who was showing a 1923 Cadillac that he had put 18,000 miles on. I felt bad for him because he was really friendly and my dad was talking to him about his son recently being hit and killed by a semi when he was stopped on the shoulder of a highway.
We drove back home about 9 o’clock, leaving the old Pontiac to sit in the car show. Back at the house, my dad asked me to help him move a few large car parts around in the barn. I then went inside and started working on a video for my website, which shows footage that I have shot since coming home.Randy called me early in the afternoon. He knew I was home from reading my weblog. He said that he might soon have a job managing a million and a half dollars worth of property that someone he knows is buying. We agreed to get together and hang out as soon as we get a chance. Johanna called me at 1 o’clock. She can make free phone calls with her work phone until her summer job with Nokia ends next week. I took a phone break to eat a lunch Clara had made and to clean up the kitchen. My dad and her left after the meal to pick up the car from the car show. I called Johanna back as soon as I was done cleaning the kitchen, then we talked for another 30 minutes. We are now considering going to China again together next summer. We would both try and find internships there so I could try and become better at speaking the language.
I spent the next couple hours finishing up the videos I was working on. My dad and Clara arrived back home just as I finished them. I had been planning on using the truck after they got back to take the soldier to Gretchen, but she again never called back, so I stayed home the rest of the night. Clara spent most of the evening listing my dad’s Ebay car parts for this week. I went outside for a while and threw Janie’s shoe around for her. She may be smarter than I originally thought because she will quit going after the shoe when I play keep-away from her. I later went out a second time to play with her again, but I could not find her at first. Then, she snuck up behind me and dove at the shoe I was holding; not too dumb after all. My dad and I played a game of horseshoes when I got bored with Janie. I almost beat him, but he ended up coming back in the end by making me laugh. Final score; 10-11.
My dad and me had a late dinner at 9 o’clock. Clara was still working on the Ebay stuff and did not eat with us. After dinner, I helped my dad edit a video that he made for Johanna’s parents. It mostly shows the gardens because gardening is also a hobby that Johanna’s parents have.
I had been thinking that I would stay with Buckley and Jen tonight, but decided earlier in the day that it would make more since to just stay home and have my dad drop me off at school on his way to work tomorrow

August 20, 2005
Saturday:

Keri(I was spelling her name wrong yesterday) let me have her room last night and it was very comfortable. I got less than 6 hours of sleep, but didn’t really feel very tired. I got up at 10 and John was awake watching TV in the living room. I sat in the living room and watched TV with him till he had to leave for work at 11 o’clock. He delivers pizzas in Murphysboro. Chris got up just as John was leaving. We sat and watched a few more minutes of TV and drank some Kool-aid, then he took me home just after 11.
I had been planning on using my family’s suburban to move some things today. I was going to drop a couple boxes off at Buckley and Jen’s house, then take my 7 foot(2 meter) tall tin soldier to Gretchen’s house. I was going to leave the boxes with Buckley and Jen because I will be staying there for a couple days while I look for a place. I was taking the soldier to Gretchen because I have agreed to let her borrow it for 5 years. I bought and paid for the soldier before we got married, but she was also interested in buying it before I had. We first saw it in the window of Cargo, which used to be a store in the Carbondale mall. At that time, it was priced at $300, so we could not afford it. At least a year later, I happened to pass by the store when it was getting ready to go out of business. I saw that the soldier had been marked down to $99 and I knew it was going to be mine. The rest is history. Gretchen was upset when I took it after we separated, but it was technically mine. She has now recently moved into a new house in the town of West Frankfort, where she is about to start her first real teaching job. She asked me if she could have the soldier, which we call Pierre, to decorate the new house. I compromised and told her that we could start taking turns keeping it for 5 years at a time. So, a few days ago, we had agreed that I would take it to her today, but I was never able to get ahold of her. I will try again tomorrow.
After spending some time using Clara’s computer, I spent much of the rest of the day casually rounding up the things that I would need to be taking with me to my new place. I went into my storage area and took out some boxes and a computer monitor. In one of boxes was a picture that I wanted to put in a frame to give to Rufus the next time I see him. It is a picture of me in Hong Kong holding an object that he had asked me to take to China last year. Clara happened to have an old frame lying around, which she gave me to put the picture in.
I took my computer out of my suitcase and set it up on a table in the family room because my dad had said that he would like to see how to edit video tonight. The computer case got even more crushed on the ride back from Finland. The ride there had already been rough on it, but it really looks like crap now. The top has a big dent in it and it does not sit up straight. The boards I packed around it at least protected all the circuitry inside. I will never take a desktop computer on an airplane again. I must get a laptop. I was telling Clara that and she said that she would buy my computer from me because her’s has been having some serious problems. That would be nice because I could use that money to help me buy a laptop.
Another thing I did today was get my bike ready to ride again. I had two bikes here and one of them was missing a front tire. I switched the front tires so I could use the better of the two bikes. I am going to have to buy a small part to fix the rear brakes. I took some breaks from my work to follow my dad around with the camcorder and take some pictures. I recorded him getting his 1930 Pontiac, named Blackie, ready for a car show tomorrow. I also took some random still pictures around the property. My dad let me read a journal that he had kept in 1982, when I was 4. The first page says that I had been playing with a chain in the yard for 2 days and that my brother is more normal than me. A guy that helps my dad with home construction projects, Ryan, came over in the afternoon and the two of them worked on hooking up a new toilet in the under-construction bathroom.
I borrowed Clara’s car at 5:30 because Brian Easton had called to say that he and some others were playing wiffle ball. I thought that he meant they were playing at my brother’s house, but there was no wiffle ball being played when I arrived. My brother and Keri were just inside watching TV. They said that Brian had called and left like 6 messages on their answering machine about playing wiffle ball. The game was actually being played at Jacob Weber’s house, so my brother and Keri rode with me there to play. There was also no wiffle ball going on at Jacob’s house when we arrived. Inside, was Jacob, Brian, Ryan Folley, Ryan’s girlfriend Leslie and another guy that I don’t know. They said that they had tried to start playing wiffle ball, but that the ball had been lost somewhere in the weeds. My brother, Keri and I sat there for about an hour and talked to everyone. I then dropped them off back at their house and we agreed to maybe meet back up later and go to a party in Carbondale.
My dad and Ryan were finishing up their work when I arrived back at home. Ryan stayed for dinner. Clara made grilled ham and cheese sandwiches along with several other dishes and we had bread pudding for dessert. Ryan was very friendly and talkative during dinner. He just started making violins and said that he may be able to sell a single instrument for as much as $17000, but he hasn’t sold anything yet. Chris called after the meal and invited me over, but I didn’t go because he was not going to come pick me up. He said he would call back later if he left the house, but he didn’t. I really didn’t mind because I was very tired. I spent some time later in the evening showing my dad how to use the video editing software that I use. We also watched a video that he had Clara shoot a couple summers ago, where he is using a rope and a shoe to play with Janie.

August 19, 2005
Friday:

I heard Elliot leaving really early this morning to go to work. I got up at 9 o’clock and went outside because Carolyn had last night said that she would meet me with my luggage at that time. She showed up after I had waited just a few minutes. The original plan had been for her to take my stuff and I to my Dad and Clara’s home in Murphysboro, but I had made a new deal with Jen last night; she would now be taking me home. I put my luggage in Jen’s car, then went back in and tried to go to sleep for a while longer, but never did. Steph’s phone alarm started going off and 10 o’clock and went off for about 10 minutes. It was in her bedroom, but it could be loudly heard in the living room. I joked to Jen that I thought she might have died in her sleep or something. It turned out that Steph was alive and well. She even offered Jen and I some toast for breakfast, but we decided that we would stop for something on the way to Murphysboro. We ordered two value meals from the Murdale Mcdonalds. The woman who gave us our food acted confused and angry, then we pulled away and realized that one of our fries was missing. Jen said that she wasn’t hungry enough to go back and get it.
Clara was home when I arrived. Jen helped me get my things out of the car, then left to go home because she had to be at work at 3. I then spent some time going through all my mail and getting my dirty laundry done. The dryer was broken so I had to hang all my clothes on the line outside. The temperature was forecast for 97(36C) degrees, so it was good weather for outdoor clothes drying.
My sister came to the house at 1:30 and Clara gave us both some homemade ice cream. I then spent a while using the computer. Chris came to the house later in the afternoon and my dad arrived home from work shortly after that. My dad had brought home the camcorder from his office, which is a 1.7 megapixel model made by Cannon. He shortly interviewed me about my trip until the tape ran out, then we watched a video that he had made of the property and gardens within the last few weeks. After that, he showed us a 5 gallon jug of homemade wine that he had made. It was sitting in the under-construction bathroom at the front of the house. The wine had just recently become ready to drink, but nobody had yet tried any of it, so tonight was the night. We had to be careful not to stir up ingredients that were sitting at the bottom of the jug, so we could not tip it to pour the wine out. My dad looked around the house for some kind of a small hose so he could siphon it out, but couldn’t find a proper one. We ended up using a turkey baster, which actually worked quite well, but was just a little slow. The wine was semi-sweet and very alcoholic; a success. We recorded all of this wine tasting; video to be released soon.
Amanda had to leave for a while to go pick up Brant, then we all went out to eat together when she got back. The restaurant we went to was in a tiny town near Gorham, which is also a tiny town. The restaurant is called Bottoms Up and the town it is in is just a cornfield with like 2 houses in it. The restaurant’s sign has faded so bad that you can barely still read it. Despite the abandoned look of the town, the restaurant was full of people; maybe 30 or more customers. We sat at a table for 6 and I ordered the special with an Amber Bock to drink. The special was fried fish with French fries and cold slaw. I told everyone about an idea I have been thinking of while we were sitting at the table. The idea is to take a picture of a plate of noodles that has a fork buried in the noodles and a pair of chopsticks pulling the fork out. I have wanted to take the picture for a couple weeks and have already run the idea by a few people to see if they get it. Everyone made fun of me tonight and didn’t seem to get it until I explained, then they made fun of me even more.
I had my camera with me at the restaurant and I filmed us talking at several points before during and after the meal. Brant, Amanda and Clara are not big fans of me always being paparazzi, but my dad and Chris are naturals in front of the camera. I got some real funny stuff recorded tonight.
We went back home after dinner. There had not been room for all of us in one vehicle, so Clara, Chris, dad and myself had all ridden in the Suburban, and Amanda and Brant had followed us in his car. Chris, dad and I smoked a cigarette on the deck when we got home. Brant hung out with us while we smoked but he didn’t partake. I think he wanted to, but Amanda is brainwashing him. We next all started playing word games at the kitchen table and my dad used the turkey baster to fill up a pitcher with his homemade wine, which Chris started referring to as “moonshine”.
I ended up getting next to last place at a game of Scrabble. My best moment was the word “animate”. Amanda and Brandt were on a team and they won the game by 14 points. The game Boggle came out after Scrabble. It was my first Boggle experience and it showed. Chris had played the game online before, and it seemed like he must have played for days on end considering how much better he sometimes was than the rest of us. The game just consists of making words out of random letters that are displayed on a small square board. Your words do not count if someone else also picks them. I never won a round, but I did tie Clara for first place once.
I had planned on probably going to bed after the game, but I decided to go out with Chris. As we were leaving my dad and Clara announced that they were giving Amanda, Chris and I $1100 each. My dad said that it had been left in an account by my mom when she died. This is great news because I now only owe my dad and Clara $400. I made a lot of money today considering I also received a student loan check for over $4000.
Chris and I ended up having a very late night; till 4 o’clock. We first went to his place and met up with several of his roommates and several of his friends, including, the John’s, Brian, Carrie, Jacob, Tiffany, Anna and a couple guys I didn’t know. We didn’t stay long, then I rode to Pinch Penny in Carrie’s car with her, my brother and Anna. Not everyone at the house had gone out to the bar. The bar’s huge parking lot was almost completely full and there was barely room to walk inside. I saw Tyler Skyler(wrong spelling) on the way in and talked to him for a minute. He used to work with me at Schnucks and he cut part of his hand off one day. It mostly grew back.
We stayed at Pinch Penny for about an hour, spending most of the time in a less crowded area of the beer garden. I saw Keith Conrad there and talked to him for a while. He was supposed to go to Europe this summer, but he ended up canceling because he didn’t have anybody else to go with. We all left Pinch Penny sometime after 1 o’clock, then got back in Carrie’s car and went to Sticks. Two other people went with us, so it was crowded in the car. Anna had to sit on Chris’s lap. I knew one of the other people that came with us. His name is David and I had a couple boxing matches with him at a party a couple years ago. He won. I think he is a good friend of Brandt’s.
Chris could not get in to Sticks because he had a ticket. He showed the bouncer like 3 forms of official ID, including a FOID card, but nothing was accepted. It doesn’t make sense how quick the bars here are to turn down money coming in the door. We were considering going on to another bar, but we just decided to buy some beer and take it back to Chris’s place. The same two other guys rode back to Murphysboro with us in the car, so it was crowded again. We stopped along the way so Anna could get her car, then went to Chris’s place. The other two guys and Anna left after just a little while, but Chris, Carrie and I stayed up till 4 o’clock. We sat on the porch for a while, then went inside to look at some pictures and video on the computer. After that, we took some bottle rockets into the back yard and shot them off. I had kept my camera with me throughout the night and will soon have a lot of good video to show.

August 18, 2005
Thursday:

I got up early again today, at 8:30. It was raining hard at that time and continued for the next hour. I was supposed to go downtown and meet Mike for lunch at noontime. I thought I would have to cancel, but the rain started to lessen at 10 o’clock, so I left the apartment at that time. I first needed to catch a bus to the train station, then take the train downtown. There is a bus station in front of the apartment, but that bus goes the wrong way. The right bus stop is a bit of a walk away and I was worried that it would start raining hard again as soon as I got halfway there, so I decided that I would get on the wrong direction bus until it took me to a point where I could transfer and go the other direction. Well, things didn’t quite work out that way. It started raining hard again while I was waiting for the first bus, which didn’t seem to be coming very often anyways, so I decided to go back to the apartment and cancel the plans. The sun started coming out about an hour later and the sky almost instantly became perfectly clear, but it was already too late for me to get downtown in time for Mike’s lunchtime. I ended up eating leftover sirloin steak and a sandwich. Carolyn had moved the steak from the fridge to the freezer and I almost panicked when I couldn’t find it right away.
I went back to sleep from 12-3 because I knew I would be having a very late night. After waking up, I made sure all my things were packed up and ready to leave, then I took Damien outside and threw his tennis ball for him. The sun had now been out for a couple hours and the heat and humidity was incredible, The air conditioning in the apartment is set to a very low level, so walking outside was quite a shock, especially considering that I had not been in that kind of heat all summer long. Damien didn’t seem to mind the heat that much and he chased the ball up and down the hill behind the apartment at least a dozen times before going back to the door and waiting to be let back into the air conditioning.
Carolyn came home at 4:30. She had driven Mike’s truck to work so I could put my suitcase in the back of it for the ride home. There were two little kids playing on bikes near the truck when I was packing my things into it. They both appeared to be about 8 years old and I heard one say to the other, “I’m hot nigga, lets go for a ride”. Carolyn and I first had to stop at her parent’s home, where we dropped off Damien and met Mike. Mike was driving Carolyn’s car and we happened to see him a few blocks before we got to Carolyn’s parents house. I waited for him to stop at a red light, then I got out of the truck, ran up to the car, opened the door, grabbed his arm and yelled, “get out of the car bitch”. He had seen me coming, so he just laughed. I had my camera in-hand. Carolyn’s mother was just returning home from a walk with her dog when we got to the house. We all went inside and Damien started terrorizing a little cat that was trying to sleep in a chair. Carolyn told me that there is another larger cat in the house that will come protect the littler one when Damien messes with it. I was hoping to see the confrontation, but it never happened.
Mike, Carolyn and I now all packed into his truck and headed towards Carbondale. The truck has a very narrow extended-cab, so Carolyn squeezed into a little fold-out chair back there for the whole 2-hour ride. We stopped once at a Dairy Queen in the town of Lebanon and all ordered dinner at the drive through there. A sign on the interstate had implied that the Dairy Queen was very near the interstate, but it was actually several miles away. But, Dairy Queen always has good fast-food, so it was worth it. I thought the cashier was so nerdy that I turned my camera on him. He noticed and I think it made him mad, because he did not come back to wait on us after taking our money and giving us the drinks, then a very young thuggish-acting manager rudely gave us the food. I was sure to check inside my burger before I ate it.
We arrived in Murphysboro sometime around 7:30 and went to Mike’s mothers house. Carolyn and I caught a tiny lizard on the sidewalk outside. I dropped off my luggage here because Mike, Carolyn and I all planned on spending the night later. We spent about 30 minutes talking to Mike’s mom and Lloyd(Mike’s step-dad). His mother was in the process of canning jam in the kitchen.
We headed into Carbondale a little after 8 o’clock and went to the Cellar to have some drinks and meet Tim and BJ. Tim and BJ had been planning on coming after going to eat out, but they never showed up. But, Matt and Barb showed up unexpectedly. Mike, Carolyn and I had started playing online trivia when we first arrived, but we stopped when Matt and Barb got there. Mike, Matt and I then started playing pool while Carolyn and Barb talked. I lost all the games of pool. The table malfunctioned twice and we had to get assistance from the waitresses. Two other guys put quarters on the table after we had been playing alone for a while. Mike and I played doubles with them and lost.
Jen had said that she would come and meet me at the bar, but she never showed up by the time Mike and Carolyn were leaving, which was around 11. I wanted to make sure and see her because she had driven an hour and a half from Beleville to hang out with me. So, I had Mike and Carolyn drop me off at Steph’s house, which was where Jen was. Carolyn agreed to come back and pick me up in the morning when she was in town running errands.
Steph recently rented an apartment in a big old house that is right behind the hospital. I was at first confused as to which one of the apartments was her’s, but I found it at the top of a staircase on the side of the building. Also there, was Jake, Ericka and Morgan. They were all sitting around the table playing a card game that I have never learned, called Yoocker or something that sounds like that at least. They gave me a couple beers and I sat there for an hour and talked to them while they finished their game. I interviewed them on-camera about the geography around Finland. I know that most people here know little about that part of the world, so I thought it would be funny for people in Finland to see this video(even I just last year thought that Helsinki was in Asia). After the card game was over, we decided to walk to Tres. On the way there, I was telling Jake about a recent news story I heard; that one of the formers actors from the Power Rangers series has been charged with murder. He and his wife apparently answered an ad for a yayt that was being sold by another couple. They went out on a test ride with this other couple, then tied them to an anchor and threw them overboard. After I was done telling Jake the story, he said, “It must have been the blue one”. I think that was the funniest thing I heard all day. I know some people probably won’t understand why, but trust me, it’s really funny.
Tres had opened a new beer garden while I was gone, and that is where we spent most of our time at the bar. There was a jazz band playing inside, but as usual, that section of the building was really crowded. The beer garden is built right next to a liquor store, so I think somebody could make some quick cash by just selling cheap beer over the fence. I notice that they had designed the fence so that the holes in it are just a bit too small to pass a can or bottle through, but it is only about 7 feet tall. After spending an hour or so at Tres, we headed to the Hangar. Elliot and two other guys I don’t know had met us at Tres, and then came with us to the Hangar. It was almost closing time when we arrived, so there were not a lot of customers. Cheech was working and he spent a while talking to us before closing time. I also ran into a friend of a friend that I recently tried to contact, unsuccessfully. My friends name is Bob and he used to work with me at Schnucks. His friend is Adam and Adam was working at the bar tonight. Adam had Bob’s phone number programmed into his phone and he gave it to me. Bob had given me his new number when he moved away a couple years ago, but it had since changed and I had been unable to find him.
After the bar closed, Jen, Steph, Elliot, the two other guys I don’t know and myself all walked back to Steph’s apartment. Elliot and I jumped some parking meters on the way there, which is a lot more difficult than I would have thought. The guys I didn’t know only stayed at the apartment for a few minutes, then everybody went to sleep. The only thing for guests to sleep on was a futon in the living room, so Jen and I shared it. Steph only had a couple blankets and one pillow. Jen claimed the best blanket and the pillow. Steph had one other blanket that she gave me with the description; “my mom thinks this is a blanket, but I think it’s a rug. I guess you could use it as a pillow, but you might want to cover it up.” It seemed clean enough.

August 17, 2005
Wednesday:

I expected to sleep in late this morning after yesterday’s 40+ hour day, but I ended up getting up at 8 o’clock. I just didn’t feel like I was tired anymore, probably because of the 8 hour time difference. My first day back in the States was not much different than most of my weekdays in Finland; I used the computer for several hours. Mike and Carolyn have high-speed Internet, so I used it to update my journal, send a bunch of emails and make a few phone calls. I called my dad’s office, Gretchen, Jen and Schnucks. My dad was not in his office. Gretchen had sent me an email last night saying that her big Collie, Dakota, had just died overnight a couple days ago. Jen now lives at home in Belleville and I thought she might come over to Mike and Carolyn’s and hang out tonight, but I got her voice-mail. I talked to Kevin at Schnucks(meat manager) and he told me that I could come back to work in September.
I had some leftover BBQ ribs and a sandwich for lunch, then continued with the computer. I downloaded some software that will allow me to put webcam images onto my website. You will soon be able to watch me do things like cook and study. I promise to wear interesting hats or something so it doesn’t get boring. I took Damien outside twice during the day and threw his tennis ball for him. Carolyn’s brother, Mark, knocked on the door at 4:30 and I did not at first remember who he was. I had only met him one other time, which was over a year ago. Carolyn got home just a few minutes later, then Mike got home after 5. He had pre-made lasagna yesterday and Carolyn cooked it for dinner along with garlic bread and breaded zucchini. During the meal, Mark told us about a time when he and his mother had rented a dog sled with 8-10 dogs during a vacation in Canada. I am going to have to check it out if I am ever in that area. Mark left shortly after dinner and Mike then went off to exercise on a new elliptical machine that he and Carolyn bought. They both use it for 30 minutes every night. While Mike exercised, I gave Carolyn a container of Finnish bottle caps that I had been collecting all summer. I had also saved caps for them when I was in China because they are planning on using them to make a bar when they build a house in a couple years.
Mike and I drank some gin and tonic later in the evening and I talked to Jared and Matt P. on the phone. Matt is getting ready to lose his job because the factory is shutting down, so he is considering moving to Chicago and taking a job with a garbage company. Jen had also called back later in the evening to say that she would be coming to Carbondale tomorrow night and meeting me there when I arrive with Mike and Carolyn. We are all going out in the evening and Mike and Carolyn are spending the night there before going off on a weekend trip to Bennet Springs, MO with their families. I helped them pack their luggage into the car tonight and it made Damien flip out. He apparently knows that luggage being taken out of the house room means that people are getting ready to leave. Last March, I was packing a car to leave for Chicago and he went out in the yard and put his head down for a while, then tried to get in the car. Pathetic.
Mike and I were flipping through the TV channels at 10:10 tonight and were surprised to see a special about anal sex on at that time. It would not have been that unusual if he had a satellite or paid extra money for cable, but he only has channels that are offered for free by the apartment complex. This show featured 4 or five couples in a room that were going at it in all kinds of different ways. There weren’t any close up shots, but the people were completely naked and you could easily see what they were doing. One of them was wearing thick rubber gloves.

August 16, 2005
Tuesday:

I arrived at the Helsinki airport sometime after 4 AM. It had started to rain while I was sleeping. The sky was still completely black, which was much unlike the 3:30 AM sunrises that were happening just a few weeks ago. I got a luggage cart, then walked in the shiny international terminal and waited in a long line to check in for my flight. I was paged by security just a couple minutes after passing through the inspection point. I went back and a female guard had my one of my checked bags on a table; the big camping backpack. She told me that they would need to search my bag and asked if I had put a lighter inside of it. She asked me to take the lighter out. I did so, then she explained that all lighters must be put in carry-on luggage so they can be “supervised”. I held the little orange lighter in my hand as I walked away, saying in my head to it, “your in big trouble”.
I then had just a 30 minutes wait before my flight started boarding at 5:50. My ticket incorrectly said that the flight left at 6:40, so I am glad I was early. There was a little boy getting on the plane all by himself, and the staff made him wear a big folder of documents around his neck. The plane left on time and I had a window seat. A warm cheesy pastry was handed out after we reached cruising altitude. I spent some time reading the airlines magazine which had some really weird articles that had nothing to do with travel. The best was about the angler fish, which is a scary alien-looking creature that has chemicals in it which make it glow. The glowing attracts its prey. These fish mate by the smaller male using its teeth to tear into the belly of the female, where it stays until it dies. Dying in there somehow fertilizes the female’s eggs.
I ended up sleeping for just a little while before the plane started making its descent into Amsterdam. Everything on the ground looked extremely green and nice. My left ear would not pop at all, which started to hurt really bad by the time the plane got near the ground. I could then hear a weird sound in it every once in a while and the pressure seemed to be slowly letting off. The walk to my next gate must have been at least a mile. I stopped at some TV screens to check my departure information and saw a woman get hit by one of those big motorized carts that the airport staff uses to shuttle elderly and disabled people. The woman was side-swiped by the cart and there had been a collision between her and an elderly man that was riding. Both of the people appeared to be in a little bit of pain, but it was nothing too serious. I later saw the same driver almost hit another passenger in another section of the airport. She was taking a wide, fast turn and this person had to quickly move away.
After finding my gate, I had a couple hours to wait before boarding started. I used that time to buy some gifts for the people who had helped me out with the trip; Mike and Carolyn had let me stay with them in St. Louis and taken me to the airport and my dad and Clara had given me a loan. I browsed through several stores, but had a hard time deciding on anything. I spent some time in electronics stores looking at awesome camcorders and wishing I owned them. I especially liked a tiny 2 megapixel JVC with a 4 gigabyte memory card, but it was over 1300 Euros, so I won’t own anything like that for a while. One of these electronics stores also had some really cool toys, including a large radio controlled flying saucer and an inflatable jet-ski that held 170 pounds.
I eventually found the gifts I was looking for at a duty free liquor store and a food store. At the liquor store, I bought Mike a cool looking clay bottle of gin and Carolyn a little tin container that holds 12 tiny bottles of vodka energy drinks. I can’t say much about my dad and Clara’s gift because they haven’t yet received it, but I was told that it would be good for up to two days out of refrigeration.
After shopping, I sat down in a casino bar and started talking to a guy named Jeff that is from Evansville. I had started talking to him when I heard him tell another passenger where he was from. We ended up talking for the next hour, mostly about traveling. Jeff was very high energy and very goofy. He happened to be getting on the same plane I was, so we walked to the gate together a few minutes after boarding had started. Customs officials were interviewing everyone before they were allowed to board the plane. People traveling in groups were being interviewed together. A customs official thought that Jeff and I were traveling together, so he started questioning us together. We didn’t at first realize that the official thought we were traveling together. His first question was, “If you are traveling together, then why are your boarding passes different”. Jeff said, “because we just met an hour ago in a bar.” I was then sent to be questioned by a young female guard. It looked like it was her first day or something because she was trying not to laugh when asking the questions and listening to the answers. She asked me why I was in Finland for so long and if anyone had given me any gifts. When I said “no” to the gift question, she said, “you mean you girlfriend didn’t give you any gift when you left?”. I then told about a bouncy ball she had given me last night, which says “Nokia” on the side of it and flashes when it is bounced. The woman could no longer control her laughter after I told about the gift. I think she might be soon transferred to another position. We had to put our bags through a scanner before getting on the plane. They did not find my lighter, but they found Jeff’s and took it.
I had an isle seat next to an old wise Turkish man during this next flight, which was 8 hours long and to Detroit. This man I sat next to was hard to follow, even though he was very well spoken in English. The problem was the combination of his slight accent and the complicated nature of what he spoke of. I really liked a couple of his comments that I could understand; “some people say that they live their life with the attitude that they could die tomorrow, but I live thinking that I could someday have gene therapy which allows me to live 200 years”, and “Some ocean organisms are born at 8 o’clock in the morning and die at 4 in the afternoon. So, they have had a short life if they live until noon”. I talked to the man occasionally throughout the flight, but both of us spent most of our time watching movies. I watched “Wall Street” and then a movie about an American artist who had run away to France when he was 13 years old. Robin Williams played the part of this kid’s retarded older friend.
A steward on the flight gave me a really bad look after I had used the bathroom once because he just so happened to be going in for a scheduled cleaning after I had used the toilet and forgotten to flush it. For the in-flight meal, I chose chicken with pasta, which also came with a tray-full of other foods and a little bottle of red wine. The whole meal was better than average for airplane food and I ate it all. I put on my sunglasses and earplugs for an hour to sleep before the meal, but didn’t really feel tired anymore afterwards. All the passengers were given forms to fill out before landing, where one of the questions asked if you were carrying any snails.
The eight hour flight had left Amsterdam at 11:30AM, then passed though several time zones and landed in Detroit at 1:30PM. All passengers then had to go through customs, regardless or not of whether they were actually staying in the States or just transferring planes and flying on to another destination. Foreigners must be hating this country. The first part of the process was waiting in lines to have our passports checked. There were about 10 lines, some of which were for US citizen and others that were for foreigners. A terrible big middle-aged woman was in charge of keeping the right people in the right lines. She was like a drill sergeant and would single certain people out to be screamed at. She was especially hard on the foreign-looking people that entered the US citizen’s lines. She would first get uncomfortable close to these people and unnecessarily loudly ask, “ARE YOU AN AMERICAN CITIZEN?!!”. She once discovered a group of veiled women in the wrong line and screamed to the whole crowd, “DON’T PEOPLE LISTEN, AMERICAN CITIZENS HERE ONLY!” There was an American man in line in front of me and his family later came to join him in line, causing the woman to scream, “BACK OF THE LINE PEOPLE, WHATS WRONG WITH YOU!” The man spun around and said, “I’ve been in line lady”. The woman didn’t make them move, but yelled to the whole crowd, “PEOPLE THINK THEY CAN JUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE!”. I think this woman should be held accountable for all the hatred she is breeding among foreigners. Imagine being made to go through customs of a country you are not entering, then having this huge American beast of a woman scream at you.
Next, all passengers had to collect their checked luggage and take it to inspectors, who were running it through machines before sending it back to the planes. We then had to have our carry-on luggage scanned and walk through metal detectors. The person running the scanning machine stopped the conveyor when my bag passed though. A woman then came, got it and asked everyone who the owner was. I stepped up and she opened it and pulled my little orange lighter out of the front pocket, saying, “lighters are not allowed in the cabin, you may surrender it here”. She didn’t wait for me to say anything, she just walked away with my lighter. So, in Helsinki I had been told to “supervise” the lighter, now I was being told to “surrender” it. Looks like a possible conspiracy by lighter manufacturers, maybe Bic. In Helsinki, I had put the lighter in my checked luggage because I knew it would be taken when I transferred in the States. But, as I said in yesterday’s journal entry, it had been taken out in Helsinki and given back to me because they are not allowed in checked luggage. So there is no possible way to get a lighter from Europe to the US. What if you were carrying a 100 year old family heirloom or something? You might not be so quick to “surrender”.
I only had about an hour to wait in Detroit before getting on my last flight; to St. Louis. I called Mike from a pay phone to say that my flight was leaving later than I thought. I had previously told him an earlier time because the time printed on my tickets were again different than the actual flight time. I tried to sleep for the one hour forty-five minute flight, but never had any luck. I got water to drink from a stewardess and it tasted disgusting. The skies near St. Louis were very clear except for scattered clouds, which gave a great coming-home view. The plane landed at 4:20, but it was after 5 before I left the airport. My luggage was some of the last to be put through, then I put on both of my backpacks and drug my heavy black suitcase through the airport to the Metrolink station. I would have like to have used a luggage cart, but they cost $3 at this airport. Well, they are getting what they deserve for charging, because a stuck wheel on my suitcase left a half-mile long black line on the floors of the airport. I was sweating by the time I reached the Metrolink station, then I realized something terrible; I had left my bag of gifts by the luggage conveyor. I drug my bags back through the airport expecting to surely find that someone had taken my bag. I was completely exhausted by the time I returned to the luggage conveyor, but it made it worthwhile when I found my bag still sitting exactly where I had left it.
My black line on the floor was about a mile long by the time I got to the Metrolink for the second time. A “homeless” black woman asked me for a dollar as soon as I stepped on the platform, saying she just needed food and a train ticket. An old white-haired woman was driving the train, and she was driving it just like an old woman would drive a car. It approached the platform at turtle-speed and took off the same way. She nearly stopped every time there was a curve in the rails.
Mike was waiting at the second stop for me, and he had already been there for an hour. We put my bags into the back of his truck and headed to his apartment. He stopped at a Schnucks store on the way, but I stayed in the truck to watch my bags. Carolyn was outside when we pulled into the apartment parking lot. Her and Mike helped me carry my bags inside, then I gave them the gifts I had brought. The gin bottle was encased in a flexible plastic netting, which we took turns putting on our heads and Damien’s(dog) head. Mike and I had a beer, then he and Carolyn started cooking sirloin steak, shrimp kabobs, mashed potatoes and salad. I had not eaten a real steak since May, so it was great. Mike and I tried making vodka and tonics after the meal. I think someone had put the tonic in a paint mixer because of the violent explosion that happened when Mike opened the bottle. It sprayed every surface of the kitchen and all of us. It was the first time either Mike or I had made or drank gin and tonics, but they were good.
I did not stay up very late because my day was now over 40 hours long. I had slept for a couple brief periods, but not much. I watched TV with Mike for a while before going off to bed. We saw an episode of South Park and girls softball championships. There must not be many sports for ESPN to cover right now.

August 15, 2005
Monday:

I got up at 8 this morning because I had a lot of things to do in order to get ready for leaving the country tonight. Not only did I want to take some time organizing and packing my things, I also wanted to get my Stockholm pictures and video online because I didn’t know if I would have time when I got back to the States. The only thing I ate all morning and afternoon was one bowl of instant noodles because there was again nothing else to eat in the apartment. I began the picture and video work after I had emptied all my drawers and folded up all my clothes. I couldn’t yet pack all the things into my suitcase because I wanted to put the computer in first and I still needed it to make the video, which I started at noon and didn’t finish up till after Johanna got home at 4. She came home early because she had taken the train to work. The people she usually car pools with are not driving this week.
I had my computer taken apart and completely packed my huge black suitcase by about 5:30. The side of the computer case had been crushed on the way to Finland, so I packed it better for the return trip. I wanted to put a piece of wood on top of it for protection, so I went outside on a wood search. I could find nothing except an orange lily that I brought in for Johanna, so I came back in and used it to convince her to let me have part of a shelf from the apartment. There were unused shelf parts in several of the many cabinets in the apartment, so I don’t think the management will ever notice that one is missing.
Next, Johanna opened up one of 2 bottles of wine that she had brought home with her. We then had more work to do on the computer because I needed to show her how to operate her new website; www.johannamaki.net. A few weeks ago, I had signed her up for the same hosting service that I use, but had never yet showed her how to use the site building software that comes with it. The main thing she wants to use it for is displaying pictures, so I showed her how to get a few test pictures up, then had her do it on her own twice more.
At 7:30, we walked to Satu’s apartment to give her a birthday gift from Johanna and Maria(J’s sister). We did not stay long because we had dinner plans for my last night in town. I said goodbye to Satu for the last time this summer, then Johanna and I walked to the restaurant. The place is near the main church and Johanna had heard that it is good and inexpensive. It is in the basement of a building and is a very uniquely designed restaurant, with its maze of brick hallways and scattered eating rooms. The menu and everything else there is written only in Finnish. I had to ask what the word “male” was before going to the bathroom. Nobody came to wait on us when we sat down, so Johanna went up to the bar to order. I had the first real hamburger I have had since leaving the States, and Johanna had a vegetable and pasta dish. My burger was great but Johanna’s food wasn’t all that.
The trip home was my last summer walk through the city, and it turned up something interesting; a porcupine. It ran across a gravel path at the university and tried to hide in some tall grass. Johanna could not remember the name of the animal in English, and I at first thought it was an armadillo before I realized that this animal had spikes and that armadillos live in warmer climates. The animal was too scared and slow to run from us, so it just tucked its feet and head under its body and raised it spikes. I pushed down the tall grass around it and it took a couple bites at my foot and ran under a tree. I then used my sweatshirt to pick it up and protect myself from the spikes. Some of them were so long that they were poking through several layers of sweatshirt. The animal did not put up any kind of a fight at all when I had it in my hands, and just stayed curled up in a little ball. Johanna took a couple pictures of me and it, then I sat it down in some shorter grass and took a couple close-up shots of it. Before tonight, I had no idea that porcupines even existed in Finland, but Johanna said that they are very common.
We got back to the apartment at 10, then had 3 hours before I needed to leave and head to Helsinki to catch my flight. We walked to an ATM at 11:30 because I realized that I did not have any cash with me for the bus, which does not take non-Finnish debit cards. Johanna took 50 Euros out of her account and let me borrow it because mine was becoming dangerously low and I could not remember the exact amount that I had spent out of it the past couple days. I am glad that I get my student loan money in just a couple days. We had to cross the river on the walk to the ATM, and it was roaring louder than it had been all summer because of all the rain we had last week.
Johanna called me a cab at 1 o’clock, then we took my luggage downstairs to wait. My big black suitcase must weigh 75 pounds. I was just hoping that it would not be over the airline’s weight limit. After just a couple minutes of waiting, the cab drove right inside the apartment complex and up to Johanna’s building. We then put my things into the car and said goodbye. We probably will not see each other for months again. She is going to make visitation plans after she takes a couple last tests before graduation and does some job hunting.
I had a young blonde-haired female cab driver, which is unusual. She didn’t seem to speak much English. Johanna had told me that the cab might be more expensive than usual because it had come to pick me up, but the price was actually a bit less than normal. I ended up getting to the bus station at 1:15, which was a bit too early for a 2 o’clock bus. I sat in a bus stop booth and a couple other people arrived to wait with me about 30 minutes later. I put my sunglasses on and my earplugs in as soon as the bus left the parking lot, which is the last thing I clearly remember before arriving at the airport.

August 14, 2005
Sunday:

We slept OK again on the boat last night. I woke up a lot of times, but never for long, and only heard people pass by once or twice all night. I packed my things at 6:30 and walked up to the top deck for a few minutes while Johanna kept sleeping. The ship was very slowly moving into the Turku harbor at that time.
Johanna and I decided to have breakfast at the buffet when I went back downstairs to wake her up. The ship was getting ready to open its doors at that time, but a woman working at the buffet said that we did not have to leave until 8 o’clock. Almost all of the other passengers had already eaten by the time we started, so we were almost alone in the big buffet room, which could hold hundreds. The buffet was set up on two sides of a long isle, with the same lineup of foods being in multiple spots. I had scrambled eggs, sausages, hashbrowns, cereal, a turkey sandwich, cottage cheese and apple juice. I only ate one bite of my turkey sandwich because the bread was too dry, and I only ate one of my 3 sausages because they were just glorified cheap hotdogs.
There were still a lot of passengers exiting the boat after we finished eating, so it was slow going getting down the ramps. Outside the terminal building, the bus we needed to take just happened to be pulling up. At the first stop, two Japanese women and a boy tried to get on the bus using a credit card. One of the women was doing the talking, but her English was very poor. After the driver refused her card, she asked what kind of money Finland used, and the driver patiently replied, ‘the Euro’. The woman then looked flustered for a few seconds before she impatiently stomped off the bus. Just as the doors where closing, a man outside waved for the driver to open them again. It appeared that nobody had any money today, because this man was also trying to talk the driver into a free ride. He was saying that he just needed to go to an ATM machine, and even showed the driver his ATM card. He was reluctantly allowed the free ride.
We had to get off this bus downtown, then wait 10 minutes for another bus to come along that would take us home. We arrived at the apartment at 8:30. I unpacked my things then started using the computer to write journals and answer emails. Johanna went off to take a nap at 9:30 and slept for a couple hours. I finished what I was doing with the computer at noon, then decided to take a nap for a while. I never ended up being able to sleep.
In the mid-afternoon, Johanna and I decided to go downtown together to eat and buy some things we needed. We had also planned on meeting Mari there later to go to a free concert. We walked into the city and ate at the same cheap pizza restaurant we have been to a couple times this summer. I wanted to try something new today, so I ordered a kebab plate with fries. A kebab is never a kebab in Finland. My plate arrived piled high with thin slices of the kind of meat that is served in gyros in the US. The cashier had misunderstood my order and given me rice instead of fries, but I didn’t really care. Johanna had a big thin crusted pizza all to herself. Both dishes together were only 7 Euros.
We next walked to the marketplace and went into one of the big department stores there. I was looking for some kind of a simple duffel bag that I could use to take home the tent, sleeping bag and mattress that I had bought a few weeks ago. This first store had some duffel bags, but not simple or cheap ones, so we went on. We then went to a similar department store a block from the other side of the marketplace. The best this store could do was a duffel bag that was on sale for 15 Euros, which is almost 20 dollars; not cheap enough. I really have to watch my money until I get home and deposit my student loan check. The sporting goods department had a couple more bags that would work for me, but they were not any cheaper, so we decided to look on.
We then crossed the street and went into the mall. Johanna was also looking for something to give to Satu for her birthday tomorrow, but most of the small stores in the mall were closed. We ended up going back to the first store we had been in so Johanna could try and find the right gift or card. It turned out that she couldn’t find what she was looking for and I couldn’t find what I was looking for. We were then just going to give up and have a drink in a bar, but I decided that it would be best that I bought one of the bags from the second store we had been in. I just knew that I would need my camping supplies at some time this fall or spring, and the store had a camping backpack on sale that would fit my stuff. So, I ended up buying one of these for 18 Euros, which is actually a really good price. I also purchased some shaving cream with the bag, then stuffed the backpack I was already carrying and the shaving cream into the new bag so I would only have one thing to carry.
We were not supposed to meet Mari till 6:30, which now gave us 45 minutes to spend somehow. We tried to find a bar to have a drink at, but many of them around the marketplace were closed. We went into a hotel bar, but left because they would not give us any of the specials without some kind of discount card. We settled on a tiny Mexican-themed place that was just a half block from the hotel. The business was just opening when we arrived and it appeared that the bartender was also the owner. I ordered a beer for two Euros and Johanna had a cider for 2.50, which are good prices. Our fun was almost ruined when we were told that they didn’t take cards, but I just so happened to find 6 Euros of change in my wallet. We sat on a bench along the wall, and the only other people in the bar at first were three people that the owner knew, who were all sitting on stools talking to her. Two women were coloring in a coloring book with colored pencils and a man was just smoking. Three other customers came in a few minutes after us, then it started raining hard. We thought the outdoor concert we were planning on going to might be cancelled, but the rain stopped after 20 minutes and the sun came back out.
Mari met us at the bar just after 7, then we all walked to the concert, which was on a big hill that overlooks the marketplace. There is an interesting castle-looking museum building at the top of the hill, which Mari told me just opened. The museum is surrounded by grassy slopes, and that is where the concert was being held. We were there just to see the last band, which started playing a few minutes after we arrived. The small covered stage was at the bottom of the north-facing slope of the hill, and there were 500 or more people there. The ground was wet from the rain so Johanna and I sat on some newspaper that she had, while Mari used a disposable raincoat. I walked around to a small rock hill behind the stage so I could take some pictures and video of the crowd with the sun shining directly on them. I also filmed the band for a couple minutes.
I spent the rest of the show sitting back with Johanna and Mari. We left right after the band quit playing at 8. Back at the marketplace, I said goodbye to Mari for the last time this summer, then Johanna and I got on a bus. We almost missed the bus. We ran across the entire marketplace and got there just after it had closed its doors. The driver gave me a bad look, but opened up and let us on.
We spent the rest of the night watching TV in the apartment; first Cheaters and then the last episode of Taken. Watching Taken worked out great because it is a 10 part series and the first episode had played on my first week in town. I can’t believe I have already been here 10 weeks.

August 13, 2005
Saturday(Stockholm):

I did not sleep past 5 o’clock because the place we slept began getting active. Cleaning crews were already getting the cabins prepared for the next voyage and announcements were being made on the intercom. Johanna still wanted to sleep longer, so I took the elevator up to the top deck by myself. The ship was slowly approaching the city through a waterway that was dotted with many small islands. Most of these islands had one or more homes on them, even though some of them were no wider than 50 feet. The ship was being closely followed by another ship that was just as large. There were a few other people around me on the deck, most of whom were carrying cameras with big telephoto lenses.
I took the elevator back down to level 2 to get Johanna at 6 o’clock. A woman and a 100 pound shaggy black dog got on the elevator after me, then another woman with an identical dog got on after her. These were two of the biggest dogs I have ever seen. I was shocked to see the first one get on, then I thought I was seeing doubles. There was barely room for these animals in the elevator and they smelled terrible.
Johanna was still laying down when I arrived, but was awake. She told me something that I had been thinking since last night; that she felt homeless. We were indeed the homeless people of the ship. The cabins on the deck were like houses in a city, the hallways were the streets and our big backpack was a shopping cart. We were the ‘people under the stairs’. Johanna said that a man passing by had stopped to ask if she was OK while I was gone.
We got off the ship at 7:30 in an area that is about a mile away from the downtown area of Stockholm. We had planned on putting the backpack in a locker at the harbor before going on, but neither of us had any Swedish money and there was no ATM or currency exchange at the harbor. So, we had to carry the stuff all the way into the center of the city. We were hoping to come across a subway station before the center, but never did. We did find an ATM, but Johanna then realized that she did not have her ATM card with her. I didn’t want to use mine because of the huge international usage fees I am being charged. We were finally able to rid ourselves of the backpack when we reached the central station. Johanna got money from a currency exchange, then we put the pack in a locker downstairs. Next was breakfast at Mcdonalds, where we were waited on by the friendliest fast food employee in the world. It was a girl who was clean, pretty and all smiles; unlike anything I have ever seen at a Mcdonalds in the States. But, I ordered an egg Mcmuffin meal and she was supposed to bring the hash browns out to me, which she never did. I eventually went to the counter and got them myself after about 10 minutes of waiting.
After breakfast, it was still really early and not much in the city was yet open, so we decided to go walking through the old section of the city. We checked a map outside the station, then walked a few minutes to get there. Most of this area consists of narrow stone streets lined with small shops selling medieval-looking things. These streets were mostly empty of people at this time of day. We eventually came to a very nice area where there is a conversion of two waterways. The royal palace is built here and lots of other impressive old buildings line the rest of the waterfront. The palace stands out among all these other buildings, with its military guards in dress uniforms, waterfalls and bronze statues. We were sitting by a statue in front of the palace when dozens of emergency vehicles started to come from every direction with their lights and sirens on. They surrounded the front and backsides of the palace, then just sat there for a few minutes before silently leaving. Must have been a false fire alarm, because most of the vehicles were fire trucks.
We next walked to the backside of the palace and to an even older-looking city square. I thought this was one of the most picturesque places I had yet seen, because of the unique design of a fountain in the center and the colors of the buildings behind it. We then walked onto a more crowded street that is connected to this square. This street took us over a bridge, under two large stone archways and onto a very long street filled with hundreds of shops and tens of thousands of people. This shopping area looked to be about 10 blocks long, and strings of flags hang between the buildings ever few feet along the whole length of the street.
We walked just a block or so into this shopping area before deciding that we should take a planned museum visit before later, when the museum could have been extremely crowded. This museum is called the Vasa, and my dad had been telling me to visit it all summer long. I think he had visited this place in the 60’s when he was on leave from his Army position in Germany. He didn’t tell me anything about the place and I didn’t ask, I could just tell that something about it had really impressed him. A couple weeks ago, I learned from Johanna that the Vasa has just one main artifact; the Vasa, which is a 300 year-old ship that was retrieved from Stockholm’s waters in the 1950’s.
We had found the Vasa Museum on a map this morning and thought that we would need to take a subway to get there. We walked back to the central station and bought 6 public transportation tickets, which includes both the subway and buses. We were trying to figure out how to get onto the subway when an employee told us that the best way to get to the museum would be by taking bus number 47. We went out to the street and were able to get right on bus 47. The bus was mostly full, so I stood at the center of it. The center has no seats so people with baby strollers can put them there. There was one couple with a baby, and the woman was holding the baby on her lap. I noticed something very disturbing about this woman halfway into the ride. I looked down at her baby and noticed that she was breastfeeding it. That in itself is not that unusual here, but seeing the largest and hairiest nipple I have ever seen is unusual, especially when it is on a woman. She could make money with those on the Internet.
Seeing the Vasa made me forget all about the nipple incident. I at first had some problems getting in the building. Like yesterday, the cashier at first did not want to give me the student discount because my ID doesn’t have a sticker showing that I am a current student. Then she couldn’t get my Visa debit card to work, so Johanna had to lend me the 40 Swedish crowns to pay for it, which is about $6.
There was a film about the Vasa showing just as we entered the door, so we wanted to watch that before looking at it. We did pass by it the front of it the way to the theatre and I was immediately impressed by its size. The video was in English and described the history of the ship and its recovery process. It was built 300 years ago to be the most impressive ship in the Swedish fleet; impressive not only in its size, but also in its design, which features thousands of intricate carvings. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for us), a ship this big had never been built by its designers, and they did not completely understand the physics of such a thing. The Vasa sank within 30 minutes of its maiden voyage, right in the harbor of Stockholm in front of thousands of people who had come out to celebrate it. Some people must have really been disappointed back then. A couple attempts were made to salvage the ship right after it sank, but none were successful. The ship was still intact when it was found in the 1950’s because of the type of water here. It is not salty enough to support a certain kind of ocean worm that eats wood. After raising the ship, it took about 10 years to clean all the parts and replace the water in the wood with a certain chemical. Over 13000 parts of the ship had fallen off. The original location of each one was painstakingly determined and they were all reattached. The ship sat in a temporary building until the 1980’s, when its final home was finished.
The building it sits in today contains a massive chamber that has precise temperature and humidity controls. The light level is always kept to a minimum, with just a few dim lights projected onto certain areas of the ship. It can be viewed from 5 or 6 different levels in this building, with some of the levels being within a few feet of the ship(nobody is allowed on-board). From floor to ceiling, the building is as high as a stadium, and the masts of the ship stretch all the way to the top. Most of the intricate carvings are on the back of the ship, and this is the area where you can get closest to it. I walked every level to find the best places to shoot pictures and video, then went sat in an observation area on the top floor for a while. It was difficult to get good pictures with the low light, but I think the video will turn out nice. I wish I had had a better camera.
We left the museum at 1:30 and bought two hotdogs from a vendor outside. There was some kind of a Pippi Longstocking convention happening on the lawn of the building. There were hundreds of little girls dressed like the characters and entertainment had been set up for them, like a jumping room and magicians. I don’t really know anything about Pippi Longstocking, but she must have originated from this country because I also saw dolls of her in some stores. Everybody probably knows who Pippi Longstocking is but me.
Johanna and I next took the bus back towards the shopping area that we had briefly been to earlier. There, we separated and both went off in different directions. The only thing I really planned on maybe buying was a troll doll for my dad, if I could find one. He bought an ugly carved wooden one when he was here years ago, and he had asked me to see if I could find something like it this summer. I did see a lot of trolls for sale, but they were all too pretty, not like his old grey-haired hunchback with a cane. I came up to an interesting fountain as I was aimlessly walking around the shopping area. It was in the middle of a circle intersection and had a tall silver tower surrounded by water spraying into the air. The fountain itself was not unique, but the underside of it was. There was an underground shopping center there, and the roof was the glass bottom of the fountain. The sun was shining in through the water when I discovered this, and it filled the room with the different patterns of light coming in through the glass. I can only imagine the disaster if someone ever wanted to break that glass. Maybe not a deadly disaster, but surely a big mess.
I spent the next couple hours walking through different shopping areas, mostly the street with all the flags that I had been to earlier. At the far end of that street, I came to a big hill with some kind of small museum on top of it. I walked to the top and found that the museum was closed and that there were very few people in the area, which was mostly wooded. The top of the hill offered a great view of the city, so I sat on a bench there until I got a message from Johanna. We had planned on meeting a former Macau exchange student who lives her, Johan, for dinner. Her message said that we were supposed to meet him at 5, so I had a while to get there. From the top of the hill, I noticed that the street at the bottom had dozens of old American cars on it, so I decided to go take a look. It looked like there must have been some kind of American car show in town. There was everything from 2005 Dodge Rams to 1930 era roadsters. Some cars were souped up to the max, while others looked to be in factory mint condition. A few of them were old beat up pieces of junk that barely ran. Some others were just ordinary cars from the 80’s and 90’s. I have never seen such a wide-ranging car show.
The walk between the car show and the place I was supposed to meet Johanna took 30 minutes. Something happened along that walk that could have the equivalent odds of winning the lottery; I saw someone I knew. Not someone I know well, but someone that Johanna and I had met at a bus station in the far north of Finland last week. I mentioned this guy in my journal then, saying that he was an old, rude black guy from Silicon Valley that was wearing a hat that said ‘Sweden’ and who needed help with his cell phone . So, I was walking down the sidewalk today and I just so happened to look closely at a beggar that was sitting in a wheelchair and playing a guitar. I did a double take when I realized it looked like the guy from the bus. The next thing I looked at was his hat, and sure enough, it said ‘Sweden’ on it. I walked up to the guy and said “small world”. He looked at me for just a second before remembering who I was, and he even remembered where I had told him I was from. I guess he must have just been having a bad day when I met him before, because today he was the nicest old man that you could meet. I talked with him for about 10 minutes and he told me that Sweden was his summer home. He had been in Finland just vacationing last week. I told him that I might be back in the area next summer and asked him to get ahold of me if he felt like it. He seemed to think it was a good idea, so I gave him my email address before continuing on.
The sky was now getting darker, and it began to rain just as I arrived to meet Johanna. She was sitting next to the big stone archways that we had passed through earlier in the day. I snuck up behind her and stood next to her for almost a minute before she noticed me. We then put on rain jackets that we had brought with us and went off to find the place that we were supposed to meet Johan at. We didn’t at first realize it, but the meeting place was the old picturesque square that we had been to earlier. He was standing there in the rain when we arrived and we decided to eat at a restaurant right on the square. It was kind of an expensive place to eat, but looking for something else would have meant walking in the rain more. We sat at a covered balcony outside and all ordered things from the specials menu. Johan and I both had beef and noodles, and Johanna had salmon and potatoes. We sat there for about an hour and talked about all kinds of things from Macau and about what the other exchange students were now doing. I think all of us really had a great time there.
Just before we got up to leave, Johan told us a story about atrocities that happened in the courtyard that we had just eaten at. A king had invited all the noblemen of the country to a party at his palace, then when the guests arrived, he had them all taken into the square and executed. The reason being that the king felt that his power was threatened by the noblemen. Crazy people are always the ones that are really remembered.
It was now about 6:30 and our ship would be boarding in an hour. Johan agreed to accompany us back to the harbor because it was on his way home. We first walked back to the central station and picked up the backpack that Johanna and I had left there this morning, then got on a subway train. I think it was the quietest subway I have ever been on, but maybe that is just because the last time I used a subway was in St. Petersburg, where the trains are 50 years old.
We had to get on a bus after getting off the subway, then take that bus for just a couple more minutes before arriving at the harbor. Johanna nor I realized that Johan was not also getting off the bus, so we didn’t really get to say goodbye to him. We realized it as soon as we walked off, then the bus was already pulling away by that time.
The only pathway from the road to the ship was way out of our way, so we decided to take a shortcut. We ended up going through muddy paths and over a cement barricade and a short fence before getting to the check-in terminal. Check in was easy, but the receptionists for some reason asked what my birthday was. Maybe she thought I was a child and that Johanna could be abducting me. We didn’t get to board the ship until just 15 minutes before 8 o’clock. Girls were handing out ship program schedules at the door, and Johanna asked one of them if there was a sleeping room. The girl said ‘no’ but offered to show us a good spot to sleep. The spot was right next to a main staircase of the ship; surely a terrible spot to sleep when people are coming back from the nightclub in the middle of the night. We took our things to a room with lounge chairs, which was just like the one we had been in on Friday night. I then went off to find out if there was also a theatre on this ship because I thought seeing a movie would be nice. I didn’t see one on the map, so I went to the information desk. I rude young man said ‘no’. I wanted to also ask him where the holo-deck was but I didn’t think he would get the joke, or even appreciate it if he did get it.
The tax-free store had opened by the time I was walking back to the lounge area, so I went in to take a look at things. I noticed that cider was relatively cheap and Johanna had said that she might like to drink some. So, I went back to her and asked again. She did want some, but drinking tax-free goods on the ship is not allowed, so we moved our things further back into the lounge before I went off to buy the cider. We only each drank about half of one cider before falling asleep. I can’t drink cider like beer, it is too filling. We woke up in the chairs a while later and decided to find a place to lay our sleeping bags. We checked the place the girl had showed us earlier, but sure enough, the stairway was full of traffic. We went back down to the same area that we had slept at on Friday night. The design was the same as the other ship, but there was no carpet underneath the staircase, so we slept in the wide hallway at the very end of the floor.

August 12, 2005
Friday:

I was lying awake while Johanna was getting ready for work this morning, and she came into the room and told about something she had just seen on the TV news; the Kansas legislature had just passed a law stating that public school must teach both evolution and intelligent design. It is always interesting to see what US news makes its way over to the local news here.
I didn’t feel like I could sleep any longer after Johanna left for work, so I got up, ate some sandwiches and cleaned the apartment. I walked across the street to the library at 10 so I could reserve a scanner to scan those pictures we bought from the kids last night. The next available time to use the scanner was 1 o’clock, so I went back home till then. The next three hours were spent doing things on my computer and Johanna’s. I sent an email to my web-hosting company about the problems I have been having with my videos not downloading properly. I then spent some time just surfing the Internet and read an article that said wildlife was flourishing around the Chernobyl disaster site. The author of the article said that she had accessed the site by using a private tour company that offers day trips there. I was curious about how much these tours would cost, so I checked into it and found that multiple companies were offering many different types of trips for very reasonable prices. Most of the journeys are day-trips that will take you within 100 feet of the sarcophagus. There are two government checkpoints as you approach the site; one that is 30 kilometers away and one that is 10. At the 10 kilometer checkpoint, all tourists are outfitted with radiation gear and monitors. This article also stated that 6000 people are working within this 10 mile zone, and none of them are using radiation gear, so I would not be at all worried about spending just a couple hours near the reactor. Wintertime is said to be the best season to go because the snow keeps radioactive dust down. I think it would really be interesting to see both the reactor and the surrounding 4000 square kilometers which have been evacuated for the past 20 years. Creepy, but interesting.
I headed back to the library at 1 o’clock to scan my pictures, then walked to the supermarket where I had forgotten my cheese yesterday. I was planning on making hamburgers tonight, so I was in need of it. I took the same kind of cheese to the register and a younger girl was working that looked like she would speak English. I asked her if someone had left cheese yesterday and she immediately said “yes”, then told me to go ahead and take the package I had in my hand.
Back at the apartment, I spent some time trying to learn how to do some new things about web programming and my video editing program. Johanna got home from work 25 minutes early and was very hungry, so I cooked dinner at that time. We had hamburgers potatoes and mixed vegetables. After dinner, I continued to experiment with my video editing program. I filmed Johanna when she was standing in front of a blue sheet, then put the video into the computer and removed the blue background. This is called blue-screening and it is how a lot of movie special effects are made. On the computer, I put the blue-screened video of her in front of another background and made her face spin around and deform. I had done a little bit of this kind of editing before with Tavis last summer, but I mostly just watched him do it, so I still have quite a bit of learning to do.
Johanna and I left the apartment at 7:15 for our 37 hour trip to Stockholm, Sweden. We needed to be at the harbor to catch our ship at 9 o’clock. There are no buses that go straight from the apartment to the harbor, so we had to change buses downtown. It was raining quite hard when we got on the first bus, but it had mostly stopped by the time we got downtown. We had a few minutes wait before boarding the second bus, so Johanna walked to a drug store to buy a pair of ear plugs for me; she already had a pair.
We arrived at the harbour just after 8 o’clock, then checked in for the ship. Johanna had reserved us student tickets, so we were both asked to show our student ID’s before getting the tickets. The woman who waited on us did not like the fact that my ID did not have any kind of marking indicating that I am a current student. All Finnish student ID’s have stickers showing every year that the school has been attended. The woman ended up letting me get by without the sticker. We then had to wait in a lobby with about 1000 other people for 30 more minutes before we were allowed to board the ship. When the boarding did start, everyone had to pass through some really narrow passageways, which was a very tight fit. But, there was plenty of space on the ship, as it had 10 decks and included a disco, nightclub, 2 bars, 2 stores, a theatre and a lot of other things which I don’t even remember.
We had not reserved a cabin for the 12 hour trip because all of the economy class ones were already full. We spent our first three hours in a semi-quiet and dark room with big reclining chairs. We planned on just resting there for a little while, then exploring the ship, but ended up falling asleep for about 3 hours in chairs at the back row of the room. I normally wouldn’t have been able to sleep that well in a place like that; it must have been the ear plugs.
We got up at midnight and decided to go to an outdoor deck of the ship for a few minutes. The sky outside was blacker than I have seen in months, and the water was even darker than the sky. I asked Johanna what she thought it would be like if a person fell into the water, and she told me that was too creepy to think about.
We next decided that we should find a place to lay down and go to sleep for the rest of the night, because we wanted to have energy tomorrow for our 13 hours in Stockholm. I had been carrying a big backpacking backpack with me that had two inflatable mattresses and two sleeping bags in it. To find the perfect sleeping place, we looked at maps of the ship that were on the walls. We saw that the lowest deck, a cabin deck, had an area at the end of it with wide hallways, so we decided to check that out. We had been told that we could lay our sleeping bags almost anywhere we wanted to. The spot turned out to be exactly what we were looking for, except that the whole floor was having a party in the common area. The common area was quite a way away from the sleeping spot that we wanted, but the people were screaming so loud that they could be heard all over the floor. But, Johanna said that they would probably all be going to the nightclub soon, so we decided to wait and see what happened. We ended up finding an even better sleeping spot a few feet from the one we originally wanted. It was under a wide staircase where there was very little traffic. I went back up to the top deck for a few more minutes after we had both laid out our sleeping bags. I saw stars for the first time since I left Illinois, and the ship was passing through an area of rocky islands.
Back at the sleeping area, the party was gone, just as Johanna had said it would be. We ended up sleeping much better then expected, probably in thanks mostly to the ear plugs. I am never leaving home without them again on long trips. We did occasionally hear some loud drunks coming in from their night of partying, but other than that, the only things I noticed was the ship making turns and accelerating its engines. The ship did make one stop at 3:30 to let some passengers off on an island.

August 11, 2005
Thursday:

Johanna and I both got up at 7 o’clock this morning because we had gone to sleep really early last night. There was nothing to eat for breakfast again because the food available was sandwich material, and the bread had become too dry and hard to eat. I waited to go out for food until 9:30, because a barber shop I wanted to go to was opening at that time. I had never been to the shop before, but Johanna had given me directions, saying that it was owned by some Turkish people who cut hair cheaply. I rode the bike to the area she directed, hoping that the dark sky would not rain on me. I could not find the shop where she had told me, so I sent a message asking for more specific directions. I eventually found it at 9:50; ten minutes before it was supposed to open. I waited by the door until an older grey haired barber came and opened up. He did not speak any English and was not particularly friendly. He showed me a book called “Hot Guys, Hot Cuts”, which had pictures of different hair cuts. I pointed out the one I wanted, then the he went to work. He was kind of rough and quick in his cutting style, but he used a lot of different equipment and seemed to be trying to get every hair perfect. His final act was using a straight-razor with no cream on the neck and sideburns, which was kind of uncomfortable. He was done by 10:30, then I paid him 9 Euros and left.
I next had to drop of the St. Petersburg guide book that Johanna had borrowed from the library before our trip. The building was not open yet and several people were waiting to get in. None of the libraries I have been to in town open before 11 or 12 o’clock. People are always waiting to get in before that, so I don’t know why they don’t just extend their hours. Because of construction on the outside of the building, the front door is the only part that is exposed, and I did not see any book drop-off there. I asked a cute girl on a bike if there was a slot somewhere, and she told me that there was a small one on the front door. The girl was real smiley and friendly and I thought about asking her to lunch and taking pictures of it, considering Johanna’s plans lunch plans today, but I didn’t. I put the book into the slot on the door, then rode the bike back towards home. I stopped at the nearest supermarket to buy some bread and cheese to make sandwiches for lunch. I also bought some hamburger meat, vegetables and a new dish brush. Our old dish brush needs to be sent to a toxic waste landfill. We just kept forgetting to buy a new one for the last 3 weeks.
There was good news and bad news when I got home; I just missed rain by a couple minutes, but the cheese was missing. The receipt said I paid for it, but I decided to wait until Johanna came home to go back and get it because I didn’t think the cashier spoke any English. Voi Ei, Juusto (oh no, cheese – that’s about the extent of the Finnish I know, but it just so happens I can use it in this case).
It was now just noon and I didn’t have any plans for the rest of the day, so I thought that it would be a good time to study Chinese for a while. But, I got out my book and started thinking about how much I will be studying in a week and a half when classes start. I ended up studying for about 20 minutes before deciding that I would like to sleep for a while. A while turned out to be about 3 hours, and I could not believe the time when I woke up. I haven’t heard about any alien abductions in Finland, but maybe it is happening, because I felt like I slept an hour at most.
I did end up studying again at 4, but in a different way. My Chinese book always is referring to different grammar definitions that I have long forgotten, like compliments, colloquialisms, etc.. So, I looked all of these things up online and wrote the definitions in my book. Johanna and I had a snack of instant noodles when she got home from work, then at 6:30, we left to go to Mari’s apartment. She had invited us over for wine and tortillas.
We saw an interesting sight on the way there; a group of very young children selling drawings that they had made. There were four or five kids sitting in a lawn next to the sidewalk on a side-street, none of which appeared to be older than 6 or 7. One of them was beating drumsticks on an old pan to attract the attention of people passing by. Another kid was using an overturned wagon as his desk and was asking people if they would like to buy some drawings. We first walked on by and I had no clue what the kid behind the desk had said to us. Johanna then told me and I insisted that we go back and look at their drawings. I first had Johanna ask them how much a drawing would cost, and a little girl told her 5 Euros. We both started laughing, then the girl immediately went down to 50 cents, next we were offered a deal of 2 for 60 cents. I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal, so I asked Johanna to film with my camcorder as I looked through a pile of drawings that the little girl handed me to look at. There were about 20 in the pile, so I picked out these two….

I then ended up just giving the kids what change I had inside my wallet, which was surely a lot more than what the asking price was. I thought that their entrepreneurialism deserved it, especially here, where I have never seen a non-shy kid before. As soon as we walked away, I was interested to see the video that Johanna had recorded. Very unfortunately, my camera did not record the event. The red record light had been on, so its old problems must be resurfacing. It was dropped in China last year by another person and has never been the same since. The problem disappeared over the summer, but it is obviously not gone. I got a repair estimate a few months ago, and it was almost as much as a new camera, so there is no fixing it. I am going to have to buy another one as soon as possible because I hate to lose good footage like I did today. Hopefully I can keep this one working till January when I get another school loan check.
So, we were on the way to Mari’s apartment. Our next stop was a grocery store, where we bought a red pepper an onion that Mari had requested, and two more bottles of wine from the Alco store there. We arrived at Mari’s sometime after 7:30, then drank one of our wine bottles before starting to make the dinner. We all cut up something for the tortillas, and I was in charge of the cheese and tomatoes. The food turned out great, then we had another bottle of wine afterwards. We tried to show Mari the videos from our St. Petersburg trip, but kept getting Media Player error messages half way through the videos. I have seen this error on Johanna’s computer before, but just thought it was a problem with her computer. Has anybody else been getting these errors?
We left Mari’s apartment and walked back home at 11 o’clock. Johanna wanted to take a taxi because there was a taxi stop right in front of the building, but no taxis were there.

August 10, 2005 - Wednesday:

It was chilly and rained much of the day again, but it was just showers and not the constant rain that we had on Monday. I got up at 9 and there was nothing in the apartment to eat. I left at 10 to put the laundry in a washing machine and buy some food. A mailman was outside the laundry room, trying to pile about 50 pounds of catalogs into his hands at the same time. He said something to me in Finnish about it. The washing machines just so happened to be reserved at the time I wanted to use them, which was the only time they were reserved all week. I didn’t feel like carrying the clothes back to the apartment, so I just left them under a table in the laundry room and reserved the washing machines for noontime. My next stop was the nearby supermarket, where I bought some butter and hamburger meat. The butter was to use to make ham sandwiches for lunch, and I thought we might eat the hamburger tonight.
Back at the apartment, I made my sandwiches, then worked on editing my Russia videos until it was laundry time. I spent much of the rest of the afternoon working on the videos between working on the laundry. Johanna called in the afternoon to say that she would be going shopping with a friend downtown after work and that she would like to meet me later and have dinner at a Chinese buffet.
She called again just after 6 o’clock, then I got on a bus and went to meet her in front of the restaurant. The buffet is upstairs, and there was a large group of loud drunken people sitting up there. This is the same restaurant that Johanna and I had been to with Stefan while he was visiting, and a fried banana with ice cream had been brought to us then when we had finished our meal. So, we sat and waited for our desert to be brought to us after we finished eating tonight, but it never happened. I guess they lure in first-timer’s with their free fried bananas and ice, then cut them off.
Johanna mentioned walking home, but the weather was still cold and drizzly and I still had a bus ticket that was good for another hour, so we took the bus. Back at home, Johanna tried on a new pair of jeans she had bought tonight, then told me that a guy in her car pool had asked her out to lunch tomorrow. New jeans and lunch with a guy…..suspicious. I might have to call Cheaters on her.

August 9, 2005
Tuesday:

I got up at 8 o’clock this morning and had a bit of a headache from the 4 juice and vodka drinks I had last night. Maybe we shouldn’t have bought that Russian 120 proof. I tried to do the laundry first-thing this morning, but the door to the laundry room would not open. There is a keypad on the door and I typed in the correct code several times….but nothing happened. I sent Johanna a message about it and she called the office, but they said the code had not been changed. I guess I will try again tomorrow.
I ate some leftover chicken breasts for breakfast, then fell back asleep from 10:30 till noon. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to finish up two videos I am working on; one from Russia and one from the trip last week. I got last week’s trip video done, but I am having problems with the other one. It makes my video editing program run so slow that I am going to have to edit it with another program. There are so many problems that you run across when working with video on non-professional computer equipment. I have a routine that usually works, but problems still sometimes arise.
I was planning on meeting Johanna at a barber shop when she got off work, but she called me and said that she thought it might be closing at 5, so I told her that I would just go another day by myself. She called at 4:30 to say that she was also not going because there was a line of 6 people there waiting to get their hair cut.
We planned on going out later and having a Chinese buffet for dinner, but ended up having pizza delivered instead and drinking more of our Russian vokda. It is a good thing that we didn’t go out, because some small but strong thunderstorms popped up and dumped a lot of rain if a very short period of time. They even had a little bit of wind with them, which I had not seen in any other storms here yet.
We ordered two pizzas and they took an hour to arrive; no 30 minute guarantees here, but at least there is also never any tipping. The pizzas were the very thin crusted type that seem to be the norm in this country. They also came with two salads that were tied up in little clear bags. I finished about ¾ of my pizza and part of both Johanna and my salad; she didn’t want hers. I was heading to the fridge with the leftover part when I dropped in on the kitchen rug, cheesy side down. The box was paper thin and it had just bent, which let the pizza slide right out.
We booked weekend ferry tickets to Stockholm, Sweden while we had been waiting for our pizza to arrive. We will leave Turku on Friday evening and arrive in Stockholm early Saturday morning. We will then have 13 hours to explore the city before getting back on a ferry home late that evening. We will spend a total of 24 hours on the ship and the tickets were only 65 Euros each, which is better than I expected. We got the better price because we did not book a cabin on the ship. Johanna says that there is a sleeping room where passengers can lay out sleeping bags. Should be an interesting trip.
Our last event of the day was watching the Simsons, which was an episode I had never seen that makes fun of the Freemasons. Very funny.

August 8, 2005
Monday:

It rained all day today. It did not stop even for a second. It was not warm. I can not remember a day where it did not quit raining once all day, but now I can. It had been raining for a while before I got up at 9 o’clock this morning, and it did not stop until 8 PM. Terrible.
I went to the library across the street at noon to scan the journal pages that I wrote in a notebook during my vacation last week. It was just opening a couple minutes after I arrived, and Satu was there also. I reserved the scanner for the next open time, at 1 o’clock, then talked to Satu for a minute. She was returning a stack of CD’s. The librarians usually speak good English, but the two working today barely spoke any.
I spent the next hour back at home editing some video on my computer, then returned to the library. I had 22 pages to scan, and the scanner stopped working after it had finished 69% of the first page. I pulled out the power cord and plugged it back in, then it let me scan one and a half more page before stopping again. I repeated this unplugging a couple times before just giving up and deciding that I would have to go to the main library.
It was raining a lot harder now and I got wet before I was even out of the parking lot. I stopped at the bus stop to call Johanna and ask her to call the main library and reserve a computer with a scanner for me. I was just going to take the bus to the library at that time, but the rain and street noise made it almost impossible to hear her on the phone. It was raining too hard to go out at that time, anyway. I went back home and put dry clothes on, then called Johanna again. She called back a few minutes later to say that she had reserved a computer for 4 o’clock.
I somehow turned that 4 o’clock into three o’clock. I had clearly heard her say 4, but I left the apartment at 2:30 and got on the bus then, somehow thinking I had a computer reserved for 3 o’clock. It was still raining hard when I got downtown, and I was not sure where the library was. Johanna had tried to tell me on the phone earlier, but I didn’t see the building she had described. I called her again from the street, but she was still not able to give me good directions. I eventually found a person who looked like they spoke English and asked them for directions.
The library is in a big old building by the river. The exterior of it is being renovated and a temporary plywood tunnel has been built at the entrance. At the main desk, I was told that the computers were upstairs. The main lobby of the building has two big winding staircases on either side of the room, which lead up to the computer floor. The building looks kind of like an old courthouse or city hall. I went upstairs and talked to a receptionist by the computers. I told her I had computer 3 at 3 o’clock, then she handed me a piece of paper with a password on it. I went to computer 3 and typed in this password, but it would not work. I asked the receptionist about this, but she barely spoke any English. I thought she told me that I would need to know a password associated with Johanna’s library card. I called Johanna again, but she did not know of any password, so I let her talk to the receptionist. When the receptionist handed the phone back to me, Johanna said that the problem was that my reservation was for 4 o’clock. What’s one hour, anyways?
The receptionist turned out to be very helpful. I was preparing to try and find a way to spend an hour at a library stocked with books written in Finnish when this receptionist told me that I could go ahead and use the computer now because it was free. She typed in a password for me, then I was set. The first thing I noticed about the computer was that the name brand was ‘Pinus’, but luckily, this scanner was not being a penis like the last one was. I spent about 30 minutes scanning all the pages of my journal, then put the files on my USB drive and left the building.
I needed to go shopping for dinner before getting back on a bus. I went to a supermarket in a department store near the marketplace and bought chicken breasts and potatoes, along with a few other things. The rain outside made it seem like forever before my bus came. I stood under a roof, but water was still blowing in. I was standing right across the street from the marketplace, so I saw a lot of people go by as I was waiting. I noticed that most of the dry people looked content, but almost all of the wet people looked mad, especially the ones on bikes. On the bus, I got to listen in on a rare English conversation that was going on next to me. The conversation was simple, because it was between a British father and his 8-year-old-looking daughter, but it was still nice to be able to have the unusual opportunity to listen in on someone else’s conversation. The father was telling the daughter about the science behind the colors white and black, incorrectly, then they talked about Muslims and Hindu’s. Actually, I guess the conversation was quite advanced for such a little girl.
Back at the apartment, Johanna got home shortly after me. She decided to go to an aerobics class at six with Mari. I started cooking the dinner at 6:30. The chicken almost burnt and the microwaved potatoes were over-done on the outside and not done in the middle. We ate the meal when Johanna got home after 7. We spent most of the rest of the evening watching the movie ‘Boys don’t Cry’. You always know that a movie will come to a terrible violent end when scenes are being shown in fast-forward or slow-motion.

August 7 - Returning from the north.
Sunday:

I woke up on the bus to rain at 5:30 this morning. I think I had been hearing drops hitting the windshield already for a long time while I slept. The bus stopped in Johanna’s hometown of Pori at 6 o’clock, and her dad met us there to collect the things he had let us borrow. We all stood under an umbrella for a few minutes while her and her dad talked, then we walked to where the bus had parked and got back on-board.
It was two more hours before the bus got back to Turku, and it rained the entire time. By the time it did arrive, it was the fullest it had been for the past 16 hours, at about ¾ capacity. The rain was still falling when we got off, so we decided to take a taxi home, which was expensive but our only option other than being in the rain for a long time waiting for a bus or walking home in it. Johanna locked up her bike at the bus station, then we were able to get a cab after just a couple minutes wait. The very short ride cost over $12. It was raining even harder when we got out of the cab, and we got a bit wet on the short walk to the apartment.
Inside, we realized that we had forgotten to take two bags of trash out when we left last week. The bags were sitting on the kitchen floor and a nasty smelling black substance had oozed out all over the floor and hardened. I spent a while cleaning up that mess and unpacking my things, then spent an hour answering waiting emails. Johanna spent some time studying, then we both fell asleep from 12 till 2.
I spent the rest of the afternoon getting my pictures from last week online and doing other things on the Internet. Johanna walked back to the bus station to pick up her bike at 5. I wanted to rollerblade there with her, but she said she didn’t feel like skating. Her mother had sent us a bag of food to the bus station with her father today, and that is what we had for dinner. There was a beef stew-looking container of stuff that Johanna said was supposed to be mixed with pasta. I made it up and we had it for dinner. It was good. We watched a lot of TV during the rest of the evening; a show about daredevils, Cheaters and Taken. There is a female daredevil in Australia who is really good-looking. Johanna actually went to bed before Taken started, then I slept after that.

Click here to see scanned entries from a trip Johanna and I took to Lapland, Finland - July 29-August 6