November 2005

November 30, 2005
Wednesday:

I didn’t get up until after noon today because Ericka and I had stayed up until almost 6 o’clock in the morning. The house was completely quiet at this time and the other three roommates were either sleeping or gone. We went out to eat lunch at 1:30 at a nearby restaurant that Ericka said had the best hamburgers in Chicago. It was an older-style diner that mentioned something about “best hamburgers” on it sign. Most of the employees seemed to be either European or Latino immigrants that didn’t speak great English. A sign below the clock said, “This clock will never be stolen because the employees are always watching it.”
We sat at the bar and both ordered what they are apparently famous for. Ericka also had a strawberry shake, which she barely touched even though it was excellent. I was saving room for the legendary burger. It was definitely an above average burger and it came with fries that were equally good.
On the way home after the meal, Ericka stopped to buy a newspaper so she could start to look for new places to live. Back at her house, I made some phone calls in order to get Ryan C.’s phone number so I could try and visit him today. I knew Mike would the number, but I couldn’t remember Mike’s number either. So, I called Josh to get Mike’s number, then got Ryan’s phone number from Mike. Ericka had to go to work at 3:30 and Ryan lives just 30 minutes from O’hare airport, so it would have worked out perfectly to visit him until I had to pick Johanna up. I also wanted to visit him because he ripped one of my $20 bills in half during Mike’s graduation party in May. I had owed him part of that amount, so just ripped the $20 into two pieces, saying he would take half home with him and then we would spend it together when I came up to visit him. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to visit Ryan today. I called his number and Mindy(wife) told me that he would be home at 3 o’clock, but then he called back a few minutes later to say that he actually wouldn’t be home till 5:30, which was just an hour before Johanna’s flight was supposed to land.
Ericka left for work at 3:15, then I stayed at her house for the rest of the afternoon. I spent the first hour sitting at kitchen table and typing Tuesday’s journal entry on the laptop that Tim had given me on Sunday. I was just about done typing when one of Ericka’s roommates woke up and came out of the basement with his dog. I ended up talking to this guy for the rest of the time I was at the house. He told me lots of stories about experiences he has recently had hanging out with the Chicago Bears, some of whom he went to high school with. He had once been hoping to follow the same career path, but an unfortunate incident had ruined that. He had received a football scholarship to a good university with a winning football program, then was kicked out because of a fight. He and his friends had beaten up a couple men at a bar after one of them hit his girlfriend in the head with a beer bottle. After that, he went on to the military and was accepted into the special forces, but was also kicked out of that when they learned that he had failed to report a misdemeanor charge that happened when he was only 16.
At 5 o’clock, a friend of this guy came to the house, then I decided it was time for me to head towards the airport. He gave me directions and said that it would take about 45 minutes. The trip ended up taking over an hour because traffic was heavy on some parts of the freeway. Traffic going the other direction was backed up for miles. I arrived onto the airport property around 6 o’clock, then made a wrong turn and ended up entering a one way road with no visible exit, which lead to the car rental return lots. I had to go the wrong way in order to get out, and had to back up once because a bus was approaching. People honked at me on my second attempt, but I also saw another car doing the exact same thing.
I then quickly found the International arrivals short-term parking lot and entered the terminal. I expected I would have to wait about an hour for Johanna, since she would have to get her luggage and pass through customs. She then surprisingly walked out in front of me as I was looking for the bathroom, saying that her flight actually landed at 6:05. Seeing her for the first time in months always makes her seem somehow unreal, and she says the same thing about me. Adding to the affect, was the fact that she was wearing a new white coat and had dyed her hair black.
We talked for just a minute, then I went to the bathroom and she bought some water before leaving the airport. In the parking lot, I put the camera on a timer and took a picture of us together. The parking charge was only $2, which is much cheaper than the last time we parked in this lot.
Getting out of Chicago took us about an hour. Traffic was slow at times, but not bad overall. We then stopped at a gas station just south of the city before continuing south. Johanna went in the station to buy a toothbrush while I pumped the gas, then I went in after finishing. The masculine-looking female cashier was looking at the mostly-naked women in a Maxim Magazine or something similar to it. Before taking my money, she pointed out that I was about to buy water that had caffeine included, which I hadn’t meant to choose. Back in the car, Johanna asked me what to say when someone asks, “How are you”, because the cashier had asked that question. I told her that the correct American response was, “F**K OFF!”.
We then continued on for the next three hours, stopping again south of Champaign in order to get dinner from McDonald’s. We wanted something other than that, but it was the only open restaurant.
We finally arrived back in Carbondale at about 1:30AM. I’m sure Johanna thought my neighborhood looked great when she saw the three police cars that were scanning the block with their search lights, obviously looking for somebody.

November 29, 2005
Tuesday:

My plan for this morning had been to study Chinese from 10 o’clock until class started at noon, but tiredness ended up changing those plans. I slept in till 11, then decided to skip the class because there wasn’t enough time left to study the material we would be going over.
So, I next packed my bags for an overnight trip to Chicago to pick up Johanna at the airport tomorrow. Before leaving town, I stopped at the university to use the computers there because mine will still not access my website. I luckily was able to find a parking spot in front of the Student Center.
I was going to pick up some McDonald’s food before going to the computer lab, but the lines were long, so I held off on the food. I then spent an hour in the lab getting pictures from last week and journal entries for the past three days online. I also uploaded the phone software that I got for John on Sunday, so he can download it from me.
Next, I went back to McDonald’s and ordered a double cheeseburger, McChicken, small fry and a water, then took all the food back to the car. I sat in the car and ate the food, then realized that I had forgotten to print out directions to Ericka’s house, which was where I would be staying tonight. So I walked back to the computer lab to do that, then left town just before 2 o’clock.
I stopped in Marion to get gas at the BP station before getting onto the Interstate. I bought a bottle of water there that I thought was just regular water, but it turned out to have some artificial flavor added to it. I then drove for the rest of the afternoon and into the night, with my only stop being to use the bathroom at a rest area just south of Kankakee. I listened to AM talk radio most of the way because the FM is broken and the few CD’s in the car did not really interest me, except for Roy Orbison, which I listened to once.
I arrived at the Ericka’s Interstate exit, 111th street, at about 6:30, but knew Ericka had to work until 8. So, I found the street she lives on, then decided to go sit in a lighted parking lot and study Chinese. I had brought my textbook with me in case I arrived very early. I found a Costco store just a few blocks from Ericka’s street and sat in their lot reading my text for about 30 minutes, then went inside the store to buy a couple things. I also used the bathroom, which had keypad locks on the doors and was opened for me by a young black girl that worked at the pharmacy.
I purchased a travel size container of shaving cream for myself and a small box of chocolate Santa’s to give Johanna at the airport tomorrow, then sat in the car and studied more until Ericka got off of work.
I found her house among a couple dozen other brick houses that looked exactly like it. The street faces the train tracks and passenger trains often pass by and shake the house for a moment. Ericka answered the door when I knocked, then took me downstairs to meet one of her roommates and two other guys that were all hanging out in a small bedroom down there. Everyone that lives in the house is a musician and the basement is full of all kinds of equipment.
Neither Ericka nor I had eaten dinner, so she next cooked us garlic bread and Ravioli. Her friend Sara came over after that and we sat and talked at the kitchen table. Sara is a high school art teacher and Johanna was asking her for tips on some recent drawings she had done. She showed us methods for drawing faces and horses.
Another friend of Ericka’s, Aaron, then came over. Aaron works at the same music store that she gives piano lessons at, but recently was told that he will soon be laid off. The 4 of us sat at the kitchen table and played some games that were part of a drinking games kit. The kit was full of different cards that each had different kinds of games listed on them. The first game we choose involved making words and didn’t even last an entire round before we got tired of it. The next game was played with dice and relied mostly on the speed you could roll the dice. People at opposite ends of the table would each roll a dice at the same time until one of them got a 1, then would pass the dice to the left. You lost if you could not get a 1 by the time the other dice got back around to you.
We decided to add special rules to our last round, with each loser having to oink like a pig. Then, the first person to loose three times had to walk across the kitchen floor on all fours and oink as the person of their choice rode on their back. Aaron ended up loosing and having Sara ride him.
Next, Aaron went home and the rest of us went out to a bar called Keegans, which I had been to several times in the past with Ericka. The bar is usually empty on weeknights, but is full on Tuesdays because a locally-popular bluegrass band plays then. I started out by sitting near the bar with Ericka and Sara as I watched the band, then later walked around with Ericka and met some other people. We once stopped at a table where some of her friends were and played that video game where you have to look at similar pictures and determine the differences between them. There were four of us playing the game and we could go about 20 rounds before the speed became too fast.
Just before closing time, the bartender forgot to charge me for 2 drinks, then I found a dollar on the floor right after that. Next, several people from the bar came back to Ericka’s house with us, including two guys that rode with her and I in her car.
Back at the house, we went downstairs into a room where she has her keyboard set up so she could play some music with a female guitar player that she is in a band with. The two of them had the potential to sound really good together, but didn’t get to play long because the roommate that lives in the basement had to get up at 6AM and complained about the noise.
Next, we went back upstairs and talked to all the other people there until they left sometime very late. The night ended with a roommate fight, caused by the fact that one of them had opened all the windows in the living room and Ericka had quickly re-closed them. This fight went a lot farther than it should have and ended with Ericka saying that she would be moving out soon.

November 28, 2005
Monday:

The tornado sirens went off at 2:28AM last night. I was lying in bed with the window open and woke up confused, thinking for a moment that they were just being tested. The first thing I headed for was not the basement; it was my camcorder. Nothing was really going on outside, except for light rain the same wind levels that had been present all night. I recorded the wind and sirens outside, then kept the camera on as I checked the radar on the Internet and the news on TV. Two exceptionally powerful bursts of wind startled me as I sat down at the computer, but each one lasted only for a split second.
Through the National Weather Service website, I learned that a tornado had been detected near Murphysboro and was moving to the northeast, which most likely meant that Carbondale was not in its path, so I was left with little concern. I could hear people in the building making noise and opening doors, so I went downstairs to see if they were congregating there. I found just a single man and woman, who where standing by the exit door with their two tiny dogs, which growled and leaped at me from their leashes. I recognized the girl as the assistant who works in the office. She looked very frightened and said that her mom had left a message earlier saying that tornadoes were moving through Missouri. I talked to them for just a moment, then went back to my room. The TV news at that time said the tornado warning had ended, so I went back to bed. I guess my tornado dream last night was psychic…..well, I hope not, because I dreamed for the rest of the night tonight that people were walking around in my room as I slept.
Back to school today…The guy that sits next to me in marketing class, Lou, was not present for the first time ever, but he showed up during the next class, statistics, which we also have together. I talked to Ricky as I first arrived in the statistics classroom, who is also another student that is in my marketing class and is a daily acquaintance of both Lou and I. I had heard him mention before that he ran a factory in Germany, so I asked him about it. He said that he had started out as a low level employee of a US factory that employed about 150 people, then worked his way to the top management spot. That job had led to his employment at the German factory, which only employed 15 people.
I went home after statistics class because I don’t have to go to management class anymore. I have passed with an ‘A’ grade because students who did well on the first 10 quizzes do not have to take the final two quizzes or the final exam.
The ride to school had been against winds that could almost stop my bike, so the ride home was like a sailboat ride. I talked to Johanna for a while, then took my laundry to Laundy World because the apartment’s laundromat is still broken…..8 weeks later.
There, I ordered the two hot dog special for $1 as my clothes washed, then read the local paper as they dried.
I next worked on cleaning up my apartment until it was time to go to economics class. Before class started, I talked with the girl I had met at the Janice Jacobs dinner two weeks ago. It was the first time I had spoken with her in class, and I mentioned that I had only realized she was in my class a week after I had met her. She replied that she had exactly the same experience, but, I at least remembered that I had sat next to her earlier in the semester.
Back at home, I had a message from my dad saying that he would pick me up so I could borrow Clara’s car and drive it to Chicago to pick up Johanna tomorrow. He came by at 3:30. Clara was still out running errands with the car when we arrived, so I went out to look for things at my storage area. I found some speakers and cables to use with the amp that John gave me yesterday, a couple small electronic devices to possibly sell on Ebay and some sheet music for my keyboard.
Clara got home just as it was getting really dark outside, then I quickly loaded up the car with all the things I had found, including my black leather coat, which had been stored in the house.
Before leaving, my dad asked me to park the car by the greenhouse so he could check all its fluid levels. The temperature was now much lower than it had been and the wind was still going strong.
I left the house just after 6 o’clock, then stopped at the Murphysboro WalMart on the way home. There, I bought a sheet set and comforter for my bed, because I did not have the proper setup at home for a guest. I had been using just a sleeping bag and loose sheet ever since I moved in.
At the WalMart checkout, I had to wait an extra long time because the comforter’s barcode would not scan. After going through 4 different employees, somebody was finally able to figure out the problem. My stop at the nearby Mcdonalds was equally as slow, but I eventually ended up getting two double cheeseburgers and a small fry from the drive-through.
Back at the apartment, I installed by new bed sheet set and hooked up the speakers to the amp in the living room. Rufus then unexpectedly came by shortly afterwards. We sat and talked for a while, then went to pick some beers from Old Town Liquors, which we brought back to my place. Josh L. then also unexpectedly showed up. He stayed for about an hour and a half, then went off to collect his paycheck from work.
Next, I gave Rufus the idea to use my ultra-cheap Internet phone service to prank call Hilton hotels in Paris, Bankok and Tel Aviv. Rufus must be really good at his telemarketing job because his prank calls were some of the most hilarious I have ever seen. I had a hard time not laughing too hard as I videotaped these calls. They will be posted on this site as soon as possible.
I finally got to sleep about 3 o’clock, which had definately not been part of my plans for the evening. I intended to just study Chinese for a while, then go to bed early. As of the time I went to bed, my computer will still not access my website, so that’s why it had not been updated in a few days. It can be accessed from any other computer I have used. Johanna is also having the same problem in Finland, so I think there may be a conspiracy. Seriously, I think my hosting service could have possibly blocked both of our IP addresses from the servers in order to save bandwidth. Those two computers combined were probably the cause of at least a gigabyte of monthly traffic, and the hosting service has had problems in the past with exceeding thier monthly bandwidth limits. I expect it will be working again in early December. I’m switching hosting services as soon as my contract ends next summer.

November 27, 2005
Sunday:

I was brutally awaken on John’s basement floor at 9:30 this morning by Mia the dog. I tucked myself tightly under my blanket when I heard the dog’s footsteps coming frantically down the stairs. As I expected, the dog went straight to me and began an overexcited attempt to burrow underneath the blanket. I held off the attack for the first few seconds, but Mia was determined and there was just too much blanket edge area for me to protect. Once her head was under the blanket, she went straight for my face, then my only concern was protecting it from her slimy tongue. She left after about 10 seconds of unsuccessfully trying to get her snout between my hands and face.
Mia was not the only excitement going on in the house this morning. Dylan started talking to himself and playing with toys in his room around dawn. His door was right next to my blanket, but it only woke me up once. There were also lots of other unusual noises in the upstairs section of the house, one of which sounded as if it was caused by the spilling of a few hundred poker chips. Another incident was when Dylan broke into the bathroom while Carolyn was taking a shower. The house is still under construction and the downstairs bathroom door does not yet have a handle. Carolyn had used a knife to keep the door wedged shut, but Dylan somehow got in. She said she peeked out from the shower curtain and saw him creepily standing there with the knife in his hand and a smile on his face.
All this activity did not really keep me awake, but it did cause many unusual dreams, two of which were very vivid. In the first one, Dylan was speaking in-depth about political issues. In reality, he’s about 3 years old and can barely form an intelligible word. In the other dream, I watched as a huge tornado ripped through the middle of a big city. Large buildings were exploding and burning and the clouds were orange because of the flames. Both of these dreams were almost certainly caused by the things that were going on around me as I slept.
I went upstairs to join the insanity at 10 o’clock. I started out by getting on the kitchen floor and wrestling Mia to the ground. I was trying to get even, but she just loved it. John, Amy, Mike, Carolyn and Dylan were all there eating and talking. Dylan had a small motorized toy train pulling its cargo on the floors between everyone’s feet. I stepped around the train and got cup of coffee from the coffee maker. My cup was square and Amy said that was because it had been a free gift with a bottle of liquor. I ate a toaster strudel and two sausage biscuits, then John asked me to come out into the garage and see if I would like to have any of the things that did not sell in a recent yard sale he had. I decided to take a nice-looking Teac amplifier, which is a piece of electronics that I was in need of because playing music on my computer sometimes slows it down too much. Also, Mike gave me three pieces of homemade pie from his mother. So, that means that I had a very successful visit to John’s house, which included a free laptop computer from Tim last night, the amp from John, $11 from poker and three pieces of pie. I had expected to come home with even less than I started with, considering my bad history at poker.
Mike, his dad, John and I were all supposed to play racquetball this afternoon, but they decided to cancel. Mike and Carolyn brought me home at 11:30 and I did not leave again all day. The first thing I did was check out my “new” laptop, which seems to be able to do everything I need it to. Thanks again Tim.
Next, I downloaded some software from bitTorrent that John had mentioned he was looking for. It unlocks certain features of Motorola phones that are restricted. After downloading the files, I attempted to upload them to my webspace, but the servers were down and remained down the rest of the day. I talked to Johanna for an hour in the early afternoon, then spent some time getting all this week’s pictures ready to put online.
I fell asleep from 4 o’clock till 6, then got up and studied Chinese for a few hours. The temperature kept rising all night and was up to 63(17C) by 10 o’clock. With that rise, came very strong winds and the looming threat of severe weather later tonight. I watched the weather at 10 o’clock, which said the approaching storm system had already produced over two-dozen tornadoes today and was moving at 65MPH. This is the third round of severe weather that has passed through the area in the past few weeks. Temperatures by the end of the week are predicted to get down to 17(-8C). 64 to 17 in three days is never pleasant, but I love the storms, as I always have. I will keep my windows open all night so I can hear them. It’s now about 11 o’clock and the roar from the wind is increasing

November 26, 2005
Saturday:

I didn’t really get up till about noon today. Johanna called at 10 o’clock, then I fell back asleep. I made myself some sausage and biscuits for “breakfast”, then didn’t leave my apartment all day. The temperature outside was quite a bit warmer than yesterday and there was a thunderstorm in the mid-afternoon.
I spent most of my time doing various things with my computer or digital camera. I used the computer to burn some files onto DVD’s, copy an old movie that my family had asked me to and get pictures from this week ready to put online. I went through the my digital camera’s menu and tried to learn some of its many features, one of which can take good pictures without a flash in almost complete darkness, but the camera has to be held perfectly still.
Jared called to ask if he left his coat here last night, which he did. I really don’t see how he walked to his car without realizing he was cold, because it was freezing outside. I wrote some fake love letters and put them in the pockets of the coat, one of which is written in colored pencil and is supposedly from an 11-year-old girl. I stuck a picture on the note of a kid’s school portrait that I found on the stairwell when I was leaving last night.
Jared came and picked me up at 9:30 and we went to John’s house for a poker party. We made a stop at the Murphysboro Shell station to pick up some beer and smokes. Jared and I were running later than expected, but the poker games had still not yet started when we arrived at John’s house. Already there, was Tim, Josh, Mike, Matt, Barb, Matt’s brother, Amy’s friend that went out with us last night and some guy I had never seen before. Nikki and Bear got there a few minutes after me, and it was the first time I had seen them since returning from Finland. Nikki also spent part of the summer in Europe and got to see the Running of the Bulls.
In the kitchen, John had a spread of snacks, including a great tortilla dip, deer sausages, Chex mix and some other really good dish made with Chex, cream cheese and powdered sugar. I think 145 pound Josh ended up eating about 1/4 of the food by himself.
Poker was not played consistently throughout the night because lots of socializing was going on, which was due to the fact that most people there were in from out of town or just hadn’t seen each other in a long time. We often took breaks to go smoke on the back deck of the house. The temperature was still near 60 degrees even after midnight.
I was getting very few good poker hands early in the evening, but started winning consecutively later in the game. Two single hands each brought me several dollars, which was really good considering each person had only put in $5 to play.
Tim recently got a new laptop computer at Walmart’s well-publicized $400 laptop sale, where he and his mom had to wait in line at 4AM to get one of the few that was available. He said that she literally was throwing elbows to fight the hostile crowd. Since he now has a new laptop, he brought his old one to give me for free! It is an older 100-megahertz model that is running Windows 95, but I have actually been wanting something like that so I can do some simple word processing and other tasks when I travel.
The poker games continued till at least 3AM, maybe later. The flow of the game became more and more erratic later in the evening because some of the people at the table had been drinking since early in the evening. Not to mention any names, but one person actually passed out several times with cards in their hand. It was the funniest thing that happened all night. We were playing a game called 357, where everyone had to simultaneously drop their cards at the count of three if they didn’t think they could win, or hold them if they thought they could. There were several occasions that the person in question dropped their cards on the count of one or two because they passed out during the count.
After the games had ended, I went to sleep in the basement. Mike and Carolyn took the two couches there, and I had a sleeping bag on the floor. Damien crawled into the sleeping bag and stayed there the whole night. I wouldn’t usually sleep with a dog, but Damien is small and well cleaned. He growls if you try to try and move him in the night.

November 25, 2005
Friday:

I always have a night full of weird dreams when I sleep in the spare bedroom at home. Police in a small booth were interviewing me when my dad came with a wake-up knock on the door at 8 o’clock. The police had just given me a check for $7.42. My dad and I had some cereal, toast and coffee for breakfast, then went out to get started again on the cement-laying project. I wore layers upon layers of clothing because I expected the temperature to be about 20 degrees, but it was actually about 10 degrees warmer than that, so I ended up getting hot and shedding a layer within an hour.
Chris came to help sometime around 9:30 and my dad’s friend Ryan came not too long after that. We had to put sheets of plastic and wire fencing underneath where the concrete would be poured when it arrived at 11 o’clock. It showed up right on time, in a huge mixing truck that barely fit up the driveway. It took us about two hours and two truckloads to get the entire floor finished. The driver of the first truck was very helpful with getting the cement put down right, which is a good thing since the only other person there with much experience at this was Ryan.
Cement laying is kind of stressful when most of the work is being done by non-professionals, because it starts to dry within a relatively short period of time. This cement also had a drying accelerant added to it because of the freezing temperature, so that put even more pressure on us. Since I didn’t really know what I was doing, I just tried to make myself available anytime Ryan or the truck drivers said something needed to be done.
Ryan is always a high-energy worker, but his cement-laying work mode is even more incredible. It was sometimes as if he was doing emergency surgery on a dying patient or wresting a crocodile, as he was running and jumping back and fourth as he rapidly yelled out what needed to be done. If my brother or I did not understand something he said, then he was already on the task before we could even say “what?”. The process did become somewhat more organized towards the end.
We finally made our finishing touches to the floor at 3 o’clock, and amazingly had just about two gallons worth of extra cement, which the truck drivers said was very unusual. My dad must have done a very good job at calculating how much to order.
We next cleaned up all our tools, then went in to eat as the concrete sat to dry. Clara had us a full spread of leftover Thanksgiving food on the table ready to eat. Just like last night, I completely stuffed myself. My brother left shortly after the meal, then Ryan, my dad and I went back out to cover the concrete with plastic and pick up everything we had used to do the job. The cement was covered with plastic because keeping air and moisture off of it supposedly makes it dry harder. My dad said he would let it set under the plastic for 10 days, and after all the hard work we had put towards it, I felt like we were tucking it in to bed.
Ryan left just before dark, then my dad brought me back to my apartment in Carbondale.
I left again at 7:30 to go out to dinner. Jared and Holly picked me up, then we went to Midland Inn and met Mike, Carolyn, John, Amy and two other females she knew, including one I had met before named Angie.
The restaurant was almost completely full when we first arrived, so we had to sit in two different booths, then before we ordered, a table opened up that was big enough to hold all nine of us. Everyone but me ordered a full meal. I just had a basket of fries and beer because of my very late lunch. Our waitress added an 18% extra charge to all of our bills because our group was large.
We next decided to go out to Tres Hombres. I again rode with Jared and Holly. Holly did not want to go out, so we dropped her off at her home on the southeast corner of Carbondale. The rest of us went to the bar for about 45 minutes, where Josh also met up with us after he got off of work. Next, we all went to the Cellar to have a couple more drinks. There, I saw someone from my high school that had recently been shot twice in Iraq. I couldn’t remember his name, but remembered that he was an Eagle Scout and that he used to volunteer at the same Murphysboro museum that my dad did.
Jared and I went back to my apartment after 1 o’clock because we were supposed to role-play with Josh, Jeff and Josh L. Josh drove separately from Jared and I because he was engaged in conversation with several different unusual women. Josh L. was waiting by my apartment door when I arrived, then Josh and Jeff came a few minutes later.
I found that I am not very good at role-playing games after having a few drinks. We played for about an hour and a half and I really didn’t do anything constructive in the game because I was always loosing my concentration on the developing details of the plot. The game ended just before 4 o’clock, then everybody but Josh left soon afterwards. He stayed to use my Internet access for about 20 minutes, then also left.

November 24, 2005
Thanksgiving Thursday:

Clara called and woke me up at 10:30 today, saying that my dad would be by at noon to pick me up. I walked to retrieve my bike from the Cellar before that time. My dad and I spent the whole day working outside. Yes, that’s right, it was Thanksgiving and we spent the whole day working. Well, not actually the whole day, but from 1 o’clock till 5. The temperature kept dropping all afternoon and was quite cold by the time we finished. The reason we worked all day was that my dad had ordered a truck full of cement to be delivered and poured at 11 o’clock tomorrow morning. It will be poured onto the floor of a new garage he is building onto the side of the barn.
We spent most of our time today redoing things that had been done wrong or that he just wasn’t satisfied with. The first redo happened because he decided that the level of concrete to be poured should be lowered by about an inch to save money. That entailed lowering a bunch of metal rods we had already stuck in the ground and perfectly measured with surveying equipment. Lowering them by just that slight amount meant that they each had to be painstakingly remeasured. The same remeasuring process also had to be done to all the boards that would contain the concrete at the edges of the building. Lowering these boards also meant that we had to dig out the ground from underneath them, which was often filled with big rocks and cement chunks.
The worst was yet to come. We were resetting the next to last board when my dad realized that one of the beams holding up the roof needed to be moved about 12 inches to the north! The beam was incased in solid concrete and buried almost 3 feet deep. We dug a big hole around it, then I rocked it back and forth as my dad tried to pry it out of the ground with a board. It didn’t move, so he got the tractor to pull it out. A 75-pound concrete chuck was found to be blocking the spot where the new hole had to be dug. We had now spent about 2 and a half hours working and had really seemed to get nowhere.
My dad’s friend Randy and his two sons stopped by for a few minutes so Randy could drop off some cement laying tools. Chris and Carry showed up around 4 o’clock and Chris helped us level out the ground where the concrete will be poured. We finally went inside when darkness came.
Everyone else showed up for our late Thanksgiving dinner at that time, including my sister, Brant, Anna and a friend of hers whom I had never really met before. If working all day on Thanksgiving had any advantage at all, it was the fact that I was incredibly hungry for all the good food. Clara and Keri had the dishes spread out all around the kitchen so we could just line up and serve ourselves.
After the meal, Clara passed around a bowl and each person pulled a slip of paper out of it. The papers had incomplete sentences on them that we had to read and creatively finish. Mine said, “I am glad that my hair is not(blank)”, so I finished it with, “on fire.” Next, Clara put all of our names into a hat and we drew them for our Christmas gift exchange. We have never done Christmas this way before, but it is a good thing considering how broke I am. Johanna’s name was also in the hat since she will be here for Christmas. I didn’t draw her’s, so does that mean I don’t have to get her anything for Christmas?
We played a new version of Cranium next. We have been playing the old version of the game for a couple years. Right before the game started, my dad reminded Keri of a recent time when he told her she had “cow eyes”. He had meant it as a compliment, saying that cows have pretty eyes, but it is one of the weirdest compliments I have ever heard of. I then heard Chris make some joke about cow thighs. Brant was probably happy we weren’t picking on him. So was Anna. They are usually our targets.
During the game, I was on a team with my dad and Keri. I thought we would win at one point, but the team with Clara, Chris and Anna’s friend ended up beating everyone. The game was really fun, but I was incredibly tired from my late night, being in the cold all day, a few glasses of wine and all the food.
Everyone else left sometime after 9 o’clock. I had previously planned on going out bowling with Tavis, Katie and Jared, but decided against it since my dad wants me to help him again with the cement project at 9 o’clock in the morning. That is going to be terrible because the temperature tonight will be below 20 degrees.
I watched part of an old movie with him and Clara at 10 o’clock, which was about a female Russian Communist Party member and a French businessman falling in love. My dad said the woman looks like Johanna and I kind of also saw a resemblance. The communist woman ends up becoming more accepting of western ways and the businessman starts to feel the same way about communism.

November 23, 2005
Wednesday:

Another late night made for another late morning. Johanna woke me up with a call at 10:30, then we talked until she left home for an exercise class. Lunch was a bowl of cereal and a pan of macaroni and cheese, nice combination. The local newspaper’s website had more information about the evacuation yesterday. Part of my street was apparently one of the ones evacuated, along with about 100 other homes and several large university buildings, but I had never noticed any activity. The article described the scene as having dozens of emergency vehicles, police and firefighters, so I must have just slept to late to notice.
I went to work from 1 o’clock till 6 and moved thousands of books from the old to the new section of the store. Cookbooks are really heavy. For the first hour of my shift, the store was more full of customers than I had ever seen it. Carl’s father and his girlfriend came in to see him just before the store closed. They had driven from Indiana. His father looks to be about 90, but is tall and seems to get around good.
Back at my apartment, Tavis came over as I was cooking some rice and bean with bacon soup. He brought his hard drive back over so I could copy some of his music. He has about 20 gigs of it on his drive, but I only had 12 free on mine. So, I just picked out all the stuff that I wanted most or he said was really good. There was a lot of very unique material there that I really like. It took us about an hour to get all the files transferred, then we spent another hour listening and talking about it.
I completely abandoned my dinner on the stove after Tavis arrived, then heated it back up after the music was transferred. I took one bite of the rice then threw it away because it tasted and smelled like moths. I didn’t see any bugs in it, but it surely smelled like them.
Tavis left after 9 o’clock, then I got ready to meet him out at the Cellar. The night ended up being another late and fun time. Several people ended up meeting at the cellar, including Jared, Holly, Katie, Melissa, Gabe, Stephanie and several of their friends that I either did not know or were just acquaintances with. I first sat at a table and mostly talked to Jared and Tavis, then Tavis, Katie and I played trivia. For anyone not familiar with this trivia, it is played by using a device that is borrowed from the bar. The same questions are displayed on TV screens at bars across the country and users enter their answers. Most of the questions are entertainment-related, so I don’t usually guess anything right.
Everyone moved over to the shuffleboard table later in the evening. I started taking a lot of pictures at this point, and kept taking them for the next couple hours. An SIU math teacher named Mark started a conversion with me as I was photographing. I think there is a possibility that some math teachers are aliens. I don’t know how else to describe Mark or these other math teachers because they are so different and intriguing than the rest of the human population.
People had problems making decisions after the bar closed. The first plan was to go eat at Denny’s with Tavis and Katie, but the rest of the group was opposed. I ended up piling into a van with Tavis, Katie, Melissa, Gabe and another guy. We stopped at Pick’s Liquors, then went to the other guy’s house. The house was only a couple blocks from my apartment, and was an older building with a few bedrooms surrounding a common area. The common area was on the second floor at the top of a dark wooden staircase. Katie left at this point and the rest of us sat by a TV and watched a recording of the band Fugazi. Tavis, Gabe and the other guy then got in a very long debate about which songs were being sung in the video. I don’t know if any resolution was ever made.
Tavis, Gabe and I left this building after an hour, then walked towards the house that Katie had went to, which was just about a block away. About half way there, we took a detour to climb and ring the bell in a church tower, then went to where Katie was. The girl that lived at the house, Julie, said she knew me from when I worked at WIDB radio several years ago. I think I remember her as the girl who hired me, but it was dark and I’m not sure.
Gabe unsuccessfully tried to take Julie’s bike by force, then he and I walked down the street in the same direction. His stop was before mine, then I ran into an interesting stranger. This guy said hello as I was walking by, then asked me to turn around and look at the fire. I turned around having no idea what he was talking about and saw a large pile of leaves on fire about a block away. I initially thought this guy must be crazy beyond belief, but we ended up getting along quite well as we walked along. He said that he had graduated from SIU last spring and owned a house nearby. About the fire, he said he saw a pile of leaves and just could not resist.

November 22, 2005
Tuesday:

I slept in till almost 11 o’clock this morning because I had been up till almost 4 last night. I thought I might have to go to work in the early afternoon, but I called Carl and was told not to come in till 5.
I had a huge plate of leftover beef stroganoff for lunch, then talked to Johanna. I left the apartment at 1:30 to run a couple errands on campus. The local newspaper’s website said that a portion of the university had been evacuated because of a gas leak today, but I didn’t see any evidence of that. My first stop was to get a prescription refilled at the pharmacy(the pills for my sore jaw, which isn’t very sore anymore). Next, I went to the library to try and clear up a $50 late fee they sent in the mail the other day. The charge was so large because it was for a “reserve” item, which cost $50 for each half-hour it is past the two-hour limit. An old man with really bad breath said that the charge would be removed from my record since I didn’t have any history of overdue reserve items. That’s good since I only had the item in question for an hour and a half. I will always get receipts from now on.
Back at home, I cleaned up my apartment and edited the video I shot last night, then went to work at 4:30. I left a few minutes early so I could drop a bag of old clothes off at the Goodwill. The clothes were in a large trash bag, which was heavy and awkward to carry on the bike.
There was only about an hour’s worth of work to do tonight. Carl had also asked Nic to come in because his back was still sore from last week’s racquetball and a lot of heavy shelving had to be removed. Most of the shelves are now in their final locations, but a few still have to be moved again when the construction worker finishes a few last things. Sara was also there tonight and she helped Nic and I remove books from the shelves that needed to be moved.
On the way home, I stopped at a gas station to buy a package of tobacco. Dinner tonight just consisted of a ham sandwich and a hot dog, then I spent the next couple hours with my computer, first getting the video finished, then clearing out space on my hard drive. The space needed to be cleared because Tavis was coming over to trade some music. He arrived in town from Cincinnati this evening and will be staying the rest of the week.
He got to my apartment around 8 o’clock, then Josh came after 9. We had a couple drinks together and played some darts as my computer transferred music to a hard drive that Tavis had brought with him. Tavis also played us three songs by William Shatner. Yes, that’s right, William Shatner has songs, and I’ve also noticed a couple books by him at the bookstore.
Next, Tavis, Josh and I left the apartment and went to the Hangar. Katie and Tavis’s sister, Melissa, picked him up and I rode with Josh. We then all stayed at the bar till it closed at 2 o’clock, spending much of the time sitting in a booth. Nate W. also joined us at the booth for a while. He said he was about to open a hair salon in town with his girlfriend, whom he had met at barber school. He made barber school sound like a good time, saying that there were 300 female students and 4 males, 2 of which were gay.
Josh gave me a ride home, then came up to my apartment for a while. We watched a few videos from my website and ate 2 partial bags of chips, then he left at 3:30.
(note: Katie may be eligible for a reward because she reads this every day. If you think you should instead get the reward and would like to challenge her, then I will create a test to determine the winner)

November 21, 2005
Monday:

I rediscovered cereal for breakfast this morning. I hadn’t had any in about a year, but there were two unopened boxes of it with the food that Buckley and Jen had given me when they moved to St. Louis. I had two bowls of Total, which is equal to 4,000 bowls of the leading brand(sponsored sentence).
I left the apartment at 11 o’clock to do laundry and some shopping. The apartment’s laundromat is still broken, even though they promised it would be fixed by last week, so I again had to take my clothes to Laundry World. There, I started the wash cycle, then went to True Value to get copies made of the spare key I had been given on Sunday after I lost mine. True Value has been remodeled and the key desk has been moved to the back of the store. I walked up to what used to be the key desk and asked an employee there to copy my keys for me, but he just said “I can’t do that”, then waited about 5 seconds before laughing and saying, “because the key desk has moved to the back of the store”. I had two keys made there, one for me and one for Johanna, who arrived next Wednesday. The employee that made the keys did it in about 30 seconds. Next, I also bought a little can of WD-40 for my bike and a $1.99 box of Christmas lights to decorate my giant pinecone.
Back at the laundromat, I ordered a small coke and read the paper while the dryer did its job. At home, I decorated the pinecone, which was given to me by Mark Beams last year. It is from a kind of tree that exists in California, and is about 15 inches high and 5 inches wide. The cones weigh about 5 pounds when they are green, and the trees can be a few hundred feet tall, so there are rumors that people have been killed.
I talked to Johanna for a while during the mid-afternoon, then went outside to work on my bike. The rear brakes have been broken for almost a year now, and the front breaks have not been working that well. I bought a piece to fix the brakes a couple months ago, but never got around to installing it. I almost got hit by a white minivan last week because it ran a crosswalk and I could barely stop fast enough, so I decided it was time to fix the brakes. I had most of the tools I needed to do the job, but no wire cutters or allen wrenches. I heard people riding on the ramps at the stunt bike house behind my apartment building, so I went to ask them for the tools. The guy I met at the party, Derrick, was there, and he told me to just go in the house and get whatever I needed. I then went in and found a toolbox by the front door, which just so happened to have exactly what I needed. Now I need not worry about not being able to stop quickly.
I went to the Rec Center with Dawn in the early evening to play racquetball. We had been talking about playing for the past few weeks. She usually runs to the Rec Center, so that is how we got there. She had never played racquetball before, so I first went over the rules with her. She said she understood the rules, but would often let balls go by her without hitting them. Maybe she just didn’t want to run, but I wasn’t sure. After teaching her the rules, we just practiced hitting the ball back and fourth. She can hit the ball pretty hard and accurately sometimes, but doesn’t seem to have a lot of natural racquetball skills. Maybe I started out playing the same way, though.
Back at home, I made myself a hamburger and peas for dinner. I spent much of the rest of the evening doing things on my computer, including putting pictures and videos online and chatting with Tavis. He will be in town tomorrow night.
I got a call 12:30 and thought the voice sounded like Mike’s. I said “Hey Mike”, and the voice replied, “No, it’s Zach(Reed)”. Zach was a good friend of mine in Jr. high and high school whom I had not talked to in about 5 years except for a couple recent emails. He now lives in Champaign and attends U of I. He told me that he wanted to go out tonight and see if there were people camping outside of electronics stores waiting for the new Xbox 360 game system to be sold in the morning. He thought I might like to go along and videotape those people, and I said I would. So, I met him outside of my apartment and we drove to Toy’s ‘R’ Us in Marion, where we found a group of 5 people sitting in front of the door with sleeping bags. We walked up to them and I said I was filming for a local website and would like to speak with someone on camera. Everybody denied my request, so I just started recording after talking to them for a couple minutes. Two older women in the group protested a little at first, but didn’t really seem to mind. There were also two young boys in the group and one older one. The older one said he was the first in line and had been there since 9 o’clock. The store didn’t open till 9 in the morning, so his total wait would be 12 hours. I don’t even think he had a sleeping bag.
Next, we drove back to Carbondale and found a line of about 30 people camped in front of Best Buy. Here, I didn’t give them the chance to say no to my filming request. I went up to the first person in line, a guy who appeared to be about 20, and started asking him questions. I planned on making the interview interesting by asking some stupid questions like, “So, do you live in your mom’s basement”, but he was too nice and had been sitting in the cold for 6 hours already. I then filmed as I walked down the line of people. A guy in the middle asked what I was filming for, then I asked him some questions. He and his friend started laughing when I asked how many hours per week they play video games, then admitted, “40”.
Zach now had the idea to have me record him pretend to be waiting for an Xbox in front of Barnes and Nobles, which is a bookstore that doesn’t sell electronics. We then did the same thing in front of Denny’s and Rural King, with me asking him a few questions each time. In front of Rural King, he said, “Those guys in line at Best Buy said I could get a free Xbox here with 50 pounds of horse feed”.
We decided to call it a night at 2:30, then Zach dropped me off back at home. The video will be coming soon.

November 20, 2005
Sunday:

Today was pretty much a wasted day because I stayed up so late last night. I woke up on Rufus’s couch around 10, then walked home because nobody else was awake yet. I made a McDonalds breakfast stop, then cut across campus, where I walked through the woods because it was the quickest way. About halfway home, I realized that I did not have my house key with me. I didn’t want to walk all the way back to Rufus’s because I wasn’t even sure I would find it. Elisa and her boyfriend arrived at the apartment building at the same time as me, so we talked for a couple minutes.
I decided I would get into my apartment by breaking the lock on the bedroom door because it is a simple slide-lock that could easily be fixed. But this wasn’t as easy as I had thought it would be. I rammed the door hard twice, but it didn’t budge. So, I decided I would have to call the emergency maintenance number to get back in. Dawn was getting out of her car as I walked to the office to see if the number was posted on the door. I asked to borrow her phone, then we went to her apartment. The emergency maintenance number is Tammy’s cellphone. She answered my call, then called back a couple minutes later to say that a maintenance man would be at my door in a few minutes. The man came and gave me a spare key, then I went inside and talked to Johanna for a while. I was back asleep at 1 and slept till after five because I was just exhausted. I was still tired when I woke up, but I knew that sleeping any later could really mess up my sleep patterns.
I made a beef stroganoff kit for dinner while watching a CNN special about the recent election violence in Egypt.

November 19, 2005
Saturday:

(in Murphysboro) My dad woke me up around 9 this morning so he, Clara and I could all go to breakfast together. We first tried to eat at Mary Lou’s Café, but decided against it after being told that there was a 20-minute wait. Our next breakfast attempt, Denny’s, was also foiled for the same reason. The fullness of the restaurants was at least partly due to the fact that this is the beginning of deer hunting season. Larry’s Pit BBQ was finally a breakfast success. The food there was inexpensive and the building was not overcrowded.
Our next stop was across the street at Lowe’s, where my dad and Clara bought a sink for their new bathroom. I browsed around the store as they shopped and was amazed by some of the prices of some things. For example, a shower faucet kit that costs $1700.
Our next stop was the bookstore so I could inquire if I would be needed to work today. I wasn’t, but I introduced my dad and Clara to Carl and Kelly. In my dad and Carl’s conversation, Carl mentioned that he used to be the editor of the Southern Illinoisan, which I did not know until now.
We stopped at an auto parts store after leaving the bookstore. There, my dad bought a rear view mirror adhesive kit because the mirror had fallen off the car we were driving. The car is a 90’s model Bonneville that my dad bought on impulse as he was traveling in the south. He and Clara have been driving it lately because Amanda has Clara’s Intrepid right now.
We made one more stop before going home, which was at Jackson Square. There, Clara did some shopping at Dollar General while my dad and I put some gas in the car.
Back at the house, I used the rear-view mirror adhesive kit to fix the Bonneville’s mirror. My dad and I spent the rest of the day doing a few other odd jobs, including taking down a dead tree limb and building part of a fence. The tree limb had been blown off the maple tree that is closest to the old chicken shed. It had become wedged between some other limbs and was a hazard because it could fall on a car or person. I climbed into the tree and first tried to push it out, but found that it was way to heavy to safely do that. So, I tied a rope to it and my dad attempted to pull it out with his truck. The rope broke when it was almost completely freed. It was now left wedged between some other branches, so I climbed back into the tree and cut off one of the branches it was stuck on. The branch I cut was under enormous spring-like pressure, so I cut very slowly in case it would come my direction. Removing this branch just caused the broken limb to slide further down and get stuck on something else. Now it wasn’t just my dad and I working on the problem, as another man was also helping. This man had come to look at one of my dad’s cars, then stopped to help as he was about to leave. I used my camcorder to record him and my dad pulling on the stuck limb in all kinds of different ways. We eventually found success by attaching another rope on it and pulling with the truck again. It ended up landing just a couple feet from me and the other man, too close for comfort.
Next, I attached another rope to the limb and pulled it out of the yard with the three-wheeler. My dad then spent some time talking to the man and I rode the 3-wheeler around the property and up and down the road. We then started working on the fence project. My dad is putting up the fence because our new neighbor had complained about being able to see all the cars in the field. We put up five or six new sections of fencing today, which makes the project about ¾ way finished. It was an easy job except for problems getting screws to go into the wood. The screws were about 5 inches long and my dad and I both had to push on the drill at the same time to get them all the way in without stripping out the heads.
We ran out of new fence sections about the time it was getting dark. As I was about to go inside, Clara pointed out to me that I had left a saw up in the tree we had worked on earlier, so I had to get the ladder back out and climb up it again.
Inside, Clara made Venison out of the deer we processed last night. She used the tenderloin, so it was extremely good and tender. My dad brought me back to Carbondale after the dinner, making a stop at PK’s along the way. He has always had an interest in this bar because it was a place he sometimes visited when he went to college here. We drank one beer apiece here and my dad asked the bartender some questions about the place.
Back at my apartment, I talked with Johanna for a few minutes, then went back out. Josh B. and Rufus came to pick me up in Josh’s truck. Also in the vehicle, was his girlfriends daughter and a younger guy named Richard. We all went back to Rufus’s trailer, then hung out there for the rest of the evening. We sat in the yard for a while too, because the night was much milder than the past few.
The little girl that was with us kept hurting herself. She had a bruise between her eyes from hitting a wall earlier in the evening, then she leapt out of Josh’s lap as I was talking to him, which resulted in cutting her forehead open on the edge of the kitchen table. Josh would surely have some explaining to do when he took her back to mom later.
Josh, the girl and the other guy were all gone by sometime after 10, then Rufus and I stayed up most of the night. I always end up having really late nights when visiting him. We spent our time either just talking in the trailer, yard or as we walked around. We opened up a couple nearby manholes thinking there would be tunnels underneath them, but there weren’t. I went to sleep on the couch around 4 o’clock I think.

November 18, 2005
Friday:

The first thing I usually do every morning is pause the file-sharing program I use. My alarm goes off, then I lean out of bed far enough to reach my computer mouse. The apartment’s newsletter a few months ago said that file-sharing programs were slowing down the network and that people using them would have their access cut off. I thereafter started only running the file-sharing program at night. So, every morning I shut down the program, which takes my computer out of its energy saving mode. Taking it out of energy saving mode activates a feature of another program I use, Skype. Skype is a service that is a lot like MSN or Yahoo Messenger, but can also call and receive calls from real phones. I keep Skype on all the time because it is the only way I could be contacted in an emergency(I don’t have any real phones). So, when I lean out of bed to shut down the file-sharing program, Skype notices the activity and tells other Skype users that I am “online”.
Now, getting closer to the point of this story… Johanna and I use Skype to talk for free almost every day. She is currently not working and only taking a few classes, so she is very often in her small apartment in the very cold and dark country she lives in. The time in Finland is 8 hours ahead of the U.S., so I usually get out of bed at 4 or 5 o’clock PM, her time. So image this; my alarm goes off at 8 o’clock and I lean out of bed to shut down my file-sharing program. I lazily lay in bed for a couple more minutes until “snooze” goes off, then get up for a shower. As I pass by my computer, I can’t help but notice an urgently flashing orange box at the bottom of the screen, which contains the text “Johanna Maki”. That orange box means that Johanna Maki has sent me a message. I click on the box and am greeted with a message that says, “Good Morning!”
The whole point of that story was to show that my girlfriend makes me feel that my computer is alive. It’s like my computer wants to wish me a pleasant day because it was sitting by my bed and noticed that I just woke up. The same thing often happens when I come home from lunch. I will click my mouse a couple times to check email, then the orange box will start flashing. Clicking on the box displays a message like, “how is your day going”. Then at the end of the day after class, it will say, “how was your day?”. My computer really cares. These delusions are the result of a long-term relationship, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
OK, now to the rest of the day if you’re still interested. If you read this often, you can probably guess what I did next on a Friday morning…went to class. The temperature was a bit warmer, so my face didn’t hurt when I got there. My marketing teacher was even more bubbly and perky than ever this morning, probably because it’s the day before our whole week off for Thanksgiving break. You could even feel the holiday atmosphere in my usually-dull Statistics class. For some unknown reason, there were twice as many students there than usual, which is even more weird considering it was the day before a long break. We had a short quiz at the end of class, then I had another at the end of my next class.
I came home for lunch and was greeted by my computer. After eating, the computer and I had a conversation and I completely lost track of time. It was 12:08 and Chinese class had started at 12:00. We were just watching the second part of the movie we started yesterday, but I had really wanted to see it. So I left my computer without even saying goodbye to it and quickly rode my bike to Chinese class. Only Elisa and the assistant teacher were there. As we watched the film, I snacked on a dozen different kinds of Chinese cookies that had been brought it. None of them contained any fish.
I spent my one-hour break in the computer lab, then went to economics class. The teacher started out by saying that today’s material was very interesting. I wonder if he could say that and pass a lie detector test, because it was just simply not true. I didn’t see any different from any other day’s lectures, but I still have come to like this teacher. I even managed to stay awake during 95% of class today.
Right after class, I had a follow up appointment about my jaw at the dental clinic. In the examination room, the assistant mentioned that she was taking a webpage design course, so I told her to check out my site. I was hoping that the dentist would prescribe me more muscle relaxers, but he didn’t. I wanted to keep them on hand for emergencies, but the truth is that they probably would have ended up being recreationally consumed within a couple months.
Back at home, my dad and Clara were supposed to come pick me up at 5 o’clock. They didn’t show up till 6, so I spent the waiting hour surfing the Internet. I discovered a site called dubyaspeak.com, which was successfully entertaining for the whole hour. It is designed to make fun of the president, but I actually found some of his comments to actually be funny. Of course, most of his most popular blunders are due to his own ignorance, but I found that he can actually be really funny in unscripted and less formal events. I don’t mean funny in a joke telling kind of way, but funny in a picking-on-the-establishment kind of way. In one interview for example, he is having dinner with a reporter at a restaurant. The reporter asks the president about how he feels about certain Democratic Party views, and the president responds, “I feel like I want to order some ribs”. This attitude continues during the rest of the interview. The reporter keeps throwing out more questions and the president keeps talking about ribs. But the reporter just won’t give up trying, so the president starts making fun of him to the waitress. I found it truly hilarious to read because I could imaginr myself doing something like that in the same situation. Although, I could never be elected as president……well actually, look at Bush…maybe I could……..OK, if I am, then I promise not to start a war unless I have to.
My dad and Clara came over at 6 o’clock, then we went to eat at El Bajios. At the end of the meal, I noticed Jan sitting at a nearby table. I thought that was quite a coincidence since Jan and I’s short friendship mainly consisted of just a few El Bajios visits a couple years ago. As I left, I walked by her and said, “Some things never change, it looks like we still both like El Bajios”. I didn’t say it to be mean or anything, as I actually wish we were still friends, but I don’t think we are.
Next, my dad and Clara took me shopping at the mall, which was an unexpected treat. It was great timing considering I am broke and down to a couple pairs of wearable jeans, tattered shoes and a stained backpack. I just planned on picking out a new pair of jeans, but at the Old Navy checkout, Clara handed me a gift card from Payless shoes. You may think Payless is worthless, but I am still wearing the same pair of shoes that I bought last December in Hong Kong. That’s a lot of miles for one pair…..11 months, three continents and a lot of racquetball. As I was trying out the shoes, a friendly salesgirl came up and mentioned that anything in the store was half-price with a shoe purchase, including already reduced items. So, I found a backpack that had been reduced to $5, making it $2.50(I took Calculus).
After the mall, I went back home with my dad and Clara so I could help them butcher a deer. Yes, you read that right…butcher a deer. I was actually looking forward to the butchering since Clara had mentioned it on the phone earlier, because I had never done a whole animal before. A friend had shot the deer and given it to them. It was stiffly laying in the back of my dad’s truck, with its guts gone, two feet in the air, tongue sticking out and a stick propping open the ribs. None of us had ever butchered a deer before, so this was an experiment. Clara got things ready in the kitchen while my dad and I formulated a plan outside. The plan; open up the tailgate and get out a hacksaw. We started by filming with my camcorder for a couple minutes, then went to work. My dad held the flashlight and steadied the small deer as I began to cut off its left hind leg with the hacksaw.
I cut and cut as my arm became more and more tired. Then finally, the first leg was removed. I was then so exhausted that I had to start resting about halfway through the second hind leg. The saw’s teeth were becoming so clogged with hair and skin that I had to frantically cut to make any progress at all. Maybe we should have skinned the animal first, as you’re supposed to do. I was halfway through the third leg when my dad brought out a knife that Clara had just sharpened. That leg was then off within seconds and we learned a valuable lesson; do not cut up an unskinned deer with a hacksaw. The fourth leg was off within two minutes.
So, we now had just a deer body with a propped open rib cage and a head attached. Surely there was more meat there. We could take the legs inside to process them further, but not the whole bloody body.
My dad then proposed that we take the deer into the greenhouse so we could see it better. I carried the body myself because he had badly hurt his ankle walking in the woods yesterday. In the greenhouse, he laid a big piece of cardboard on a bench and turned on a bright overhead light. Now I had an operating room. I first recognized the tenderloin as a piece of meat inside the rib cage. The next step was a mystery. I felt around the body till I came to a large section of flesh, then dug in. After I had cut all the meat off one half of the body, I had a little bit of an idea how to cut the other half. Within 30 minutes, we had at least 5 pounds of flesh in the bottom of a five-gallon bucket. My dad filmed much of this process and I can’t wait to edit the video. You will of course see it here soon, if you dare.
He then went to dispose of the body and I took the flesh inside. There, Clara was at work in a bloody kitchen with a table full of leg bones. I sat there with her for the next hour or so and helped get the meat fully ready to freeze. That included removing the rest of the meat from the legs and removing fat and gristle from all the meat. My dad was exhausted from his hurt ankle and a cold, so he went off to bed early.
Clara and I had the remains fully cut up and the crime scene mostly cleaned before midnight, then I just drank some wine and talked to her as she did some tasks around the house. She showed me two watermelon-sized sweet potatoes her and my dad had grown and we ate a banana that they also grew. I stayed up till almost 4 using the computer and typing this.

November 17, 2005
Thursday:

Today was again terribly cold. I made myself a frozen pizza for lunch, then went to Chinese class at noon. The bike ride there was painful. We watched a Chinese movie in class today and will finish it tomorrow. The teacher gave us some Chinese snacks to eat while we watched it. They looked like rice krispy squares, but kind of smelled like fish. The movie is a about a simple hard-working man who has a brother that comes to live with him. The brother is into organized crime and tries to get the simple man involved. The brother kidnaps a Vietnamese nightclub singer and rapes her in the simple mans apartment, in the hopes of getting information out of her. Things got really weird at this point of the movie. The Vietnamese girl became the brother’s girlfriend after the rape, and she even appeared to like him. She was really upset when he kicked her out of the apartment a few weeks later.
The movie had English subtitles, but I could understand a little bit of the spoken language. I need to watch a lot more Chinese movies. While in China, I heard several older people say they had learned English just by watching English movies.
I went to work after class. Carl was not there today and Kelly said that he was too injured from yesterday’s racquetball games to work. She said that he had even already been to the doctor. I don’t like to think that one game will also have the same affect on me someday. Currently, I never feel a single pain after games, and I hope it stays that way for at least the next 30 years, but that’s probably kind of optimistic.
I only thought there would be a couple hours of work for me today, but I ended up staying till the store closed at 6 o’clock. During that time, I reorganized the entire paperback science fiction section, shelved some other random books, moved shelving in the new section of the store and moved books onto that shelving. The last books I moved were chess books, which had to be alphabetized. While doing that job, I kept thinking about how much I would hate to read a chess book. There were at least 300 hundred chess books, most of which were written by just a few different authors. That made me think how boring it would be to write such a book, especially dozens of them. I have never yet seen any customers browsing these books, but I’m curious to see if my theoretical profile of such a customer would be true.
I stopped at Save-A-Lot on my way home. After I checked out, the cashier asked me to enter a free drawing for the store’s Turkey-A-Day giveaway, in which they will be giving away turkeys every day until Thanksgiving. I don’t even know if my mini-oven could handle anything larger than a chicken.
Back at home, I had a bowl of canned chili and macaroni and cheese for dinner. I watched CNN for about 45 minutes just so I could see a short special about lobotomies. A man in his 50’s was the feature of the story. His mother had taken him to have a lobotomy when he was just 12 years old because they thought he was misbehaving. Several doctors had told her that he was just acting normal for a child, but she went ahead with it anyways. The man said that his mother had told him he was just going to the hospital for testing, but he ended up getting a lobotomy through his eye socket. A picture was shown of him lying on a surgeon’s table with a metal rod sticking out of his eye. He seemed surprising normal in the interview, but said he had been an alcoholic most of his life.
I spent the rest of the evening studying for quizzes in Statistics and Management. I hate statistics more than………nothing. By that, I mean that thinking about statistics bothers me more than trying to think about nothing. If you don’t know what I mean, then try to image that the universe didn’t exist, not even empty space. Sound crazy, well that’s how statistics makes me feel.
In other news, the bar-code scanner I had listed on Ebay did not sell, even though it had four “watchers”. And, here’s some more other news; The sink in my bedroom had a new faucet on it when I came home yesterday afternoon. It had dripped away dozens of gallons of fresh water for the past month, but not anymore. I will miss the familiar sound; I’ve been having movie-like dreams for the past few nights. I think it’s from the pills I was prescribed. In one, Johanna and I suddenly found ourselves in a very unfamiliar place. We eventually realized that we had gone we had gone 750 years into the future somehow. A lion almost attacked me, but it knew sign language and I was able to communicate with it. In another dream, a giant lizard I was photographing underwater turned into a woman I used to work with, named Dee. After the transformation, Dee asked me what it would take for me to quit taking pictures. Very weird.

November 16, 2005
Wednesday:

Today felt almost painfully cold because it has been so warm for the past few weeks. The sun was out all day, but the wind made the air feel terrible.
Nothing exciting or interesting happened in any of my classes today. I ate my lunch at Mcdonalds because I didn’t really have anything quick and easy to make at home. The cashier at Mcdonalds, a small Latino woman, gave me a lot more attention than normal. She asked what my name was, then I heard her another employee that she thought Garth was such a great name. The cashiers are supposed to write names on receipts, but they usually just act like they hate you. When my food was ready, the woman said that she couldn’t wait to see me again.
Back home at 3 o’clock, I talked to Johanna. Nic came over around 5, then we went to play pool at the student center. I saw Steph talking to someone there as we were leaving, so I snuck up behind her and unzipped a section of the backpack she was wearing. I was trying to do it rough enough for her to notice, but she didn’t until I said something.
Nic and I went to the Rec Center at 7 o’clock to meet his dad for racquetball. His dad was a pretty good player, but hurt himself during the first game. He appeared to be in serious pain, but went on to play two more games. I’m sure he will really be showing it when I see him at work tomorrow afternoon. Nic won two of the 3-person games, and I won one. Nic and I played a 2-on-2 game after his dad left, which Nic somehow won. I got back home at 9:30, then ate a pork steak and some leftover rice for dinner. After that, I watched the news and the movie “Enemy at the Gates”.

November 15, 2005
Tuesday:

Strong storms took place for most of the night. They started before I went to bed and continued until almost daybreak. With them, came almost constant thunder, lightning and heavy rain. I turned on the TV at 9:30 this morning and Jim Rasor said that the worst weather was still to come. He said that a second round of storms would come through later in the day that could very likely produce “severe long-track tornadoes”, meaning large tornadoes that stay on the ground for long distances. He also said that the storms were moving at an incredible 60+ miles per hour. I had never heard a forecast like that before. Even the national news channels were talking about it. I would make sure and have my camera with me all day(in a sealable bag).
I talked to Johanna for a while in the morning and ate lunch before going to Chinese class at noon. Another strong, but small, storm passed through town just as I was wanting to leave. I waited at the ground level of the building for the heaviest rain to pass before I went outside. The ground level is actually about 4 feet below ground, and Tammy was standing there with a broom trying to keep a drain unclogged so the first floor didn’t flood. She said it had already partially flooded overnight, and that the courtyard had earlier become a lake that was just inches below the windows of the first floor. She also said that the entire basement of the office building was flooded, but that is only used for storage.
On the way to Chinese class, I noticed a couple new lakes that had formed overnight in front of the library. I went to work immediately after class. There, the rest of the wall between the old and new sections had been removed and the carpenter was still at work. Kelly pointed out to me that the ceiling in the new section was several inches higher than that of the old one, so the project would take even longer to finish. Karl had me spend my shift moving horror books from the old to the new section. First I moved paperbacks, then hardcovers. I was surprised how many female horror authors exist.
Just as I finished moving the paperbacks, the big line of storms we all had been waiting for came through. It slowly got darker and darker, then the rain came down so hard that even the street in front of the store couldn’t be seen. I have only seen rain like that a couple times in my life. It only lasted a few minutes because the storm was moving so fast, but a few inches of water was dropped during that time. Directly after the storm, it appeared that all the drains in the road and parking lot had done their job well, because there was just a couple inches of standing water. But, the water kept rising and rising over the next 30 minutes, which was due to the fact that this area of town is lower than the rest. So, the water kept running off into this part of town faster than it could be drained. There was eventually a foot or more of water on E. Main St. and cars were beginning to stall. The store was completely surrounded by water, but none came inside because the building sits about a foot higher than the parking lot. I went outside and took some pictures when things were at their worse. This chaotic scene continued for about an hour before the drains could catch up with the water.
I left work just after 4:30. The area of the parking lot where I had locked up my bike unfortunately still had about 6 inches of water in it, so I had no choice but to soak my shoes. The temperate had fallen about from about 70 to 50 while I was at work for 3 hours, and winds were gusting very hard against me as I rode home. The gusts were strong enough to almost bring my bike to a standstill at times. I think our extended fall season might finally be over.
Back at home, I cooked myself a grilled cheese sandwich and an Uncle Ben’s rice box. I chatted with Johanna for a few minutes while I ate. It was 1:30 in morning there and she couldn’t sleep. I luckily almost never have that problem.
I watched a couple episodes of Mastermind on CourtTV at 10 o’clock. The first one was about nobody that unique, just a guy who dug a tunnel to rob a bank. But, to his credit, he did think to have others in his team act like they were robbing the bank regular-style and take hostages. Meanwhile, the rest of his team came in through the tunnel and removed $12 million of cash and jewels from the safe deposit boxes. Their downfall; the mastermind’s brother owned the business next to where his tunnel led. I guess he wasn’t such a mastermind either because even I would have chosen a bank farther away from my brother’s business. The second episode of Masterminds was really good. It was about a master antique document forger who operated in the 1970’s. He grew up in Salt Lake City, so his first target was the Mormon Church. He forged a document that was supposedly created by the founder of the church, then sold it to them for $20,000. He went on to forge hundreds of documents over the next several years, which netted him millions of dollars. His forgeries passed the inspection of the most sophisticated laboratories in the country. His downfall; he just went insane. He began living an expensive lifestyle and borrowing money from document dealers, who were not peaceful about collection of the money. So, he decided to start building mailbombs and sending them to his creditors. One of his bombs killed the intended target, but another blew up in the forger’s car while he was delivering it, seriously injuring him. The police thought his story didn’t pan out, so they began investigating him and discovered everything he had done. He got a sentence of natural life. So, this story makes me think; if his hundreds of documents could pass inspection by the best laboratories, then what documents out there now could be fake?
After these two shows, I watched a movie called “Kill Me Later, where a woman about to jump off a roof is taken hostage by a bank robber. She is standing on the ledge when he grabs her and puts a gun to her head. I’m sure you can figure out how it ends.

November 14, 2005
Monday:

Today was cool and dark with cold rain in the afternoon. My marketing class had to fill out surveys this morning, then the teacher made a long sales pitch for a summer trip she hosts to Europe. My statistics teacher couldn’t get the overhead projector to work until the class was about half way over. Some man eventually came in and fixed it for her, saying that it was the 4th broken projector of the day. The crazy professor taught my Management class, but he didn’t do anything exceptionally crazy today.
The cold rain started during my lunch break. It started out really hard, but luckily slowed down by classtime. I ate some chili and a turkey sandwich for lunch. I finally finished off that turkey roast that Buckley gave me a week ago.
Last Friday’s tests were handed back in Economics class. I got a 70 because I missed just three problems, one of which was worth 15 percent even though you just had to color in an area on a graph. I think I start to doze off in this class every day. I realized today that the girl I met at the dinner with Janice Jacobs last week, Joline, is in this class. It’s a small class, so I am surprised I didn’t realize this sooner. She has even sat right next to me before, but she somehow looks different at school. She might be some kind of shape-shifter.
Back at home, I talked to Johanna from 3 till 4. We are trying to work out the details of her arrival. I hopefully will be able to go meet her in Chicago and escort her back here. I checked Amtrak prices and was surprised to see that some trains cost twice as much as others, even though the only difference is the departure times.
After talking to Johanna, I put a copy of the video I made yesterday into the mailbox of the house where the stunt bike party was. I had seen one of the guys that lives there, Derrick, at school today and told him I would drop the video off. I included an uncut version on the CD, which was 52 minutes long.
I cooked myself a chicken breast and mixed vegetables for dinner and watched an episode of Smallville. Next was a couple hours of Chinese studying and some time having a conference chat with Jared and Tavis. Tavis turned 28 years old today and got his first pair of glasses. Thunderstorms went through the area later in the evening. The local news at 11:30 said that severe weather would be moving through the area for up to the next 12 hours and that a tornado watch is in effect all night. I watched the channel 3 news with Jim Rasor, who has been a very accurate weather man for as long as I can remember. He said the situation was really serious so I will leave my window open and my camcorder nearby. The open window in order to hear the tornado sirens and the camera to record it.

November 13, 2005
Sunday:

I spent a couple hours this afternoon editing the video I shot at the party last night. I think I’ll give a copy of it to the people who hosted the party. Johanna just got back from a weekend with her parents and we talked for a while today. She said her mom had given her a flu shot(she’s a school nurse).
The weather was beautiful later in the day, but I didn’t go out and enjoy it. I did at least have my windows open. The only time I left the apartment all day was to carry out the old computer I had found yesterday. I noticed it had an second hard drive just as I was about to throw it away, so I removed it, but it’s case doesn’t say what size it.
I roasted turkey sandwiches for both lunch and dinner and watched a CNN special about North Korea while eating dinner. The special focused on videotape that had been smuggled out of the country(cameras are illegal). The footage showed people laying dead in the streets and public executions. The show followed one man’s struggles after he escaped into Thailand. He tried to get the United Nations and the American Embassy to give him refugee status so he would not be sent back to North Korea, but both agencies refused his request.
Later, I hooked the second hard drive from the old computer I found. I was hoping to find some interesting personal information on it, but there was nothing except for programs. It was only 1.5GB, so I put the other drive back in my computer. I heard on the CNN news that there has been a terrorist threat against the US embassy in Guangzhou China, which I once visited when I had a problem with my visa. A car horn got stuck on a car parked on the street and it sounded for durations over the period of an hour. One of the durations lasted about 10 minutes. I could hear people yelling out thier apartment windows. I went out to look at car and saw that people living all around were coming out to investigate.
I read on the Internet that there is a giant liquid lake underneath Antarctica that has been sealed off from the outside world for 500,000 thousand years. Scientists want to send down a probe to see if anything lives down there, but so far have not devised a way to get through 2 and a half miles of ice. I also read on the Internet that some book collectors collect books bound in human skin. And here is a link to the website of a company that will create diamond rings out of dead peoples ashes. -here-

November 12, 2005
Saturday:

I left my apartment at noon today in shorts, short sleeves and sandals. It was about 70 degrees again. I took a few pictures along the way, including a couple of a roadkill possum. I bought a 50-pack of CD-R’s from Radioshack, which cost 14.99, but had a $10 mail-in rebate. An older man was working at the store and he didn’t know what CD-R’s were when I inquired about their location in the store. He did understand “recordable CD”. Next, I went to Mailboxes Etc. and bought some envelopes, then went to True Value. All of these stores are in the same shopping center. At True Value, I bought a big bowl to put under my big plant in the living room. Leaves have been falling off lately and I think it’s because it needs more water. Having the bowl underneath the pot will help hold more water in.
I also stopped at Schnucks to cash this week’s paycheck. Stacy(store manager’s wife) was walking in at the same time as me, so we talked for a few minutes. She said her son would graduate high school this year. Girls from a dance team were collecting money at the door of the store, one of which was a very aggressive saleswoman. She asked me if I had a girlfriend and said that I should buy her a ticket to one of their dances, because my girlfriend would think that was really “sweet”. I said that my girlfriend didn’t live here, then the girl introduced me to the other people working in the booth and asked me I had just 50 cents I could donate. I ended up giving her a couple dollars worth of change.
Back at the apartment, I noticed a party getting started at a house behind the building I live in. I had been wanting to go to one of their parties and videotape it because they have bike ramps built in the back yard. Today’s party was complete with 2 bands and about 10 bikers, and was sponsored by The Bike Surgeon. I recorded about an hours worth of tape in order to capture all the wipe-outs. The best one happened when I first arrived, but I hadn’t yet started taping. It happed when the only black guy at the party tried to do a 360 when his bike was about 10 feet in the air. He lost his footing on the pedals and landed hard on the bike frame before hitting the ground.
I left the party about 7:30, then started taking apart a computer that I had found by the dumpster earlier in the day. I had taken it in the hopes that it would have a decent-sized hard drive that worked. The writing on the hard drive’s case said it was 40 gigabytes, but my computer only recognizes two gigabytes. I guess I will keep it till I get something better, though.
Josh came to my apartment later in the evening. I had earlier called and invited him to the bike party, but I had left because I didn’t think he was coming. We went back to the party and I gave him a cup identical to the ones they were selling at the party. The guy hosting the party immediately came up to him and asked where he bought the cup. I was really surprised that the guy was able to keep track of something like that, considering he had probably sold a hundred cups throughout the night. Josh just said he bought it earlier and the guy appeared to believe him. Josh is a professional actor. Steph and Elliot were now at the party. Things appeared to be winding down, so Josh and I talked to them for just a few minutes before leaving.
We next went to Marina’s house and met up with her roommates and several of their friends. We sat outside on the porch for a while, then walked towards the Hangar. Halfway there, I realized that I didn’t have my ID, so Josh and me walked back to my place to get it. We had a sword fight with a couple sticks on the walk back to the bar. Josh hurt my thumb and I hurt his, then we quit fighting.
I stayed at the bar for the next hour or so, where bluegrass band was playing. I talked to Marina and Josh most of the time and also saw a guy from my Chinese class and the girl I met at the dinner with Janice Jacobs on Monday. I can now finally remember that girl’s name, Joline.

November 11, 2005
Friday:

I went to work today at 10 o’clock. On the way there, I passed a large telephone pole that had fallen into the side of an abandoned building. It happened on East Main street near the railroad tracks, and was most likely the result of being hit by a car. There were at least ten different utility trucks and 20 workers on the scene.
I spent my whole day at work moving the same thousands of paperback mystery books that I had moved yesterday. They went to their final location today and it took about 5 hours to sort through. Most of that time was spent getting them in alphabetical order and separating the duplicate copies, which went on the top shelves. A construction crew consisting of a man and woman was on the scene when I first arrived and they were still there when I left. During that time, they tore out most of the wall that separates the new section of the store from the old section. The man and woman seemed really flirty with each other, even though I heard them both mention that they were married to other people.
I took a 20 minute lunch break at 1:30 and ate at Wendy’s, which is only a couple hundred feet away from where I work. The Salvation Army already has their bellringers out in force. I arrived back home sometime before 4 o’clock, then fell asleep for over an hour. I had a message from Nic when I woke up, saying he wanted to play racquetball, so we went to the Rec Center around 6 o’clock. I beat him in 4 games, then he still wanted to play another one, which I also won. I hope he now realizes that I am just better than him, and always will be.
Back at home, I roasted a turkey sandwich for dinner, then got ready to go out with Nic and Larry. Nic and Larry came in for a few minutes before we left. Nic threw darts everywhere and extensively examined the contents of my computer hard drive. I hope he’s not an undercover agent of the recording industry. Larry bought us all sandwiches from Jimmy John’s, then we went to Gatsby’s, where we played several games of pool. Larry and I both beat Nic once and he didn’t like it, even though he eventually beat both of us too. He took the racquetball loses surprisingly well, but not the pool loses. That’s just how true losers act; they just can’t accept the fact that they will never be really good at anything.
I thought most of the students would be out of town tonight since it’s a three day weekend, but the strip was packed with people. Gatsby’s is usually a mostly empty bar, but people were lined up to get inside tonight. Nic, Larry and I left the bar about 12:30 and then went to Nic’s house. There, we played Mario Brothers and Contra on a game machine that is shaped like a penguin and contains dozens of Nintendo games.
Larry dropped me off at home around 1:30

November 10, 2005
Thursday:

The weather got cooler today. I arrived to Chinese class a few minutes early and the only person sitting there was someone I had never seen before. He told me that he just came to watch the class because he was trying to brush up on his Chinese. He went on to say that he learned the language when he taught English in China for 3 years, and that he would soon be returning. The teacher and him had a short conversation in Chinese before class started. Judging from the conversation, he was way ahead of anyone else in the class. I had to read a couple times in class and did poorly at it, so the guy told me to “stick with it”.
I went right to work after class. I removed thousands of books from cases on the wall that is about to be torn down, then Carl and I moved all the cases to the room next door. It took about 5 hours, then I stopped at Save-A-Lot on the way home. There, I bought some bread, 2 bananas and milk. An employee sold me a football for $1 as I was checking out. They were having a football clearance sale because they were not selling at $6.99.
Back at the apartment, I made myself a pork steak and peas for dinner, then watched Smallville for the first time ever. After that, I did some things with my computer, including listing a hand-held bar code scanner on Ebay. A lady I worked with gave it to me a couple years ago. She had been shopping at WalMart and it was in one of her bags when she got home.
I went out with Josh T. at 10:30. He picked me up, then we met some of his friends at the Communications building, including Marina and Emily. The plan had been to go to the Cellar, but Emily had a ticket and no ID, so we decided to go back to Marina’s house. Josh and I first drove to the liquor store to buy beer and rum, then went to Schnucks to buy soda. The girls wanted the rum and Coke, and the beer was for me and Josh. I talked to Anthony for a minute as we were leaving the store. I asked him, “how’s married life”, and he said, “terrible”. He got married a few weeks ago. I remember being asked the same question hundreds of times right after I got married. I could have really entertained myself by saying, “terrible”, every time.
At Marina’s house, was Emily and a guy whom I had never seen before. We sat in her room for a few minutes, then another guy and one of Marina’s roommates came home. This other guy had brought two movies with him, which he claimed were the worst he could find. One was about killer clowns and the other was about murderous sorority girls. We took a vote and decided to watch Delta Delta Die. So, everybody went into the living room and laughed at the movie for the next hour and a half. The sorority girls lured guys into their house, then killed them and made pies with the meat, which they sold at bake sales on campus.
Marina’s house is only a block from mine, so I walked home at 1 o’clock. I thought the lights behind my apartment building made the yellow leaves on the ground look photogenic, so I took a couple pictures. I couldn’t get the pictures to come out exactly how I wanted, so I went inside and got a tripod, then went back out and took several more.

November 9, 2005
Wednesday:

I took a marketing test at 9 o’clock this morning and did well on it. The temperature was again great today, but not record high like yesterday. I was again tired most of the day from one of those muscle relaxer pills I took last night before bed. The prescription says to take 3 a day, but I would never leave my bed if I did that. At 2 o’clock today, I was still feeling the affect of one I took at midnight last night. They also have a weird side affect that makes me see strange colors and lines. For example, I dozed off for a second in statistics class, and the large air vents on the walls were bright neon blue for a split second when I opened my eyes(they are actually dusty and brown). This kind of thing has happened dozens of times since yesterday, but only when I start to fall asleep. I have had things happen like this in the past when I was not on anything at all, but it has become quite rare as I get older. I remember it being quite scary when I was a little kid, and it would often last longer than a split second back then.
My management class watched a video about Sam Walton today, then was asked to write down our opinions about the company’s controversial practices. Somebody bombed some American hotels in Jordan while I was eating lunch at home. The news broke as I was biting into a ham sandwich.
I stopped at the business building on the way back to class so I could pick up a letter of recommendation from my marketing teacher’s office. She wasn’t there, but the letter was in her mailbox outside. I now had everything I needed for my externship application, so I printed and organized everything after economics class was over. It took me about 45 minutes to fill out all the forms, write a couple required statements and make 3 copies of everything.
Next, I went back home and talked to Johanna, then studied Chinese for the next 2 and a half hours. For dinner, I had a frozen turkey roast and instant mashed potatoes. Buckley and Jen had given me the roast and I think it was a little freezer burned, but not too bad.

November 8, 2005
Tuesday:

I went to the dentist at 8 o’clock this morning and the temperature was already over 70 at that time. I thought I would be getting x-rays of my jaw today, but that never happened. The dentist asked me to describe what he called “my creaky jaw”, then felt around on it as he had me open and close it and move it around in several different ways. His examinations led him to believe that I had a temporary jaw joint problem caused by putting pressure on the teeth at night, which he said was caused by “taking my stress to bed with me”. But, I love to sleep, it is the least stressful thing in the world. He prescribed a muscle relaxer and a higher dosage of the same medicine that I was given two weeks ago, saying that these medicines should allow the jaw to heal itself after two weeks. He mentioned a couple times how strong the muscle relaxer was, and grinned whenever he talked about it.
I next took my prescription over to the pharmacy on Greek Row and the woman who waited on me said that the muscle relaxer would make me feel like Gumby. Now I couldn’t wait to take it.
I then went home and started feeling incredibly tired a few minutes after taking the pills. I talked to Johanna for a few minutes, then just couldn’t force myself to stay awake. I did get up for Chinese class, but I could barely keep my eyes open. There is no way that I will be able to take those pills during the day anymore, at least not the muscle relaxers. After class, I walked back to the apartment complex with Elisa. We talked about having pets and I told her about all my families many dogs that died in short periods of time.
I spent the next couple hours still being extremely tired and talked to Johanna from 2 till 3, then fell asleep from about 4 till 6. I could still feel the pills when I woke up, but managed to make myself a cheeseburger and French fries for dinner. I then realized that I have a marketing test in the morning, so I went to the library to check out the textbook. It is usually hard to get the textbook the night before the test because there is only one of them and the class has about 150 people in it, but it just so happened to be available when I arrived.
The temperature was still about 70 degrees when I left the library at 9 o’clock. I think we set a new record high today at 81. I have had my windows open day and night for most of the past week and have still been waking up hot sometimes.

November 7, 2005
Monday:

I went to a doctor’s appointment at 10:30 because my jaw still has a problem. The doctor had prescribed pills at my appointment two weeks ago and told me to come back if they didn’t help. I’m not in terrible pain, but the jaw is not an ordinary place to have pain, so I just want to make sure nothing more serious is wrong. The second floor waiting room of the clinic was full when I arrived, so I had to wait a few minutes past the scheduled appointment time. Some of the people there seemed very sick…probably bird flu.
I read a photography magazine for a few minutes before being called.
It turned out that the doctor just said to go to the dentist. He did go through the normal procedures beforehand, but couldn’t really figure out anything new. He sent me to the dentist’s office because they have better head X-ray machines. I will go there tomorrow morning.
I went to the remainder of my management class after the appointment. The old professor was teaching today and he was analyzing the personalities of CEO’s. The lecture involved a lot of female stereotyping and I heard some female sighs coming from the room. Female personalities were being discussed because a small percentage of successful CEO’s are female.
At home during my lunch break, I ate, talked to Johanna and studied for my 2 o’clock economics test. I went back to school at 1 o’clock to meet a professor during his office hours. The professor’s name is Henri Shurz and I had him for a math class a year and a half ago. The reason I went to see him today was to get a letter of recommendation for the externship program. It would make sense to get recommendations from more recent teacher, but most classes are too large to really get to know teachers. I knew this guy better than normal because he used to shop at Schnucks.
He was not in his office when I first arrived, but I waited and he showed up a few minutes later. He at first had no idea who I was and didn’t seem too receptive to the idea of giving me a letter of recommendation, but quickly warmed up once I helped refresh his memory. This was no surprise since most teachers teach hundreds of students each semester. Within a few minutes of talking, it felt just like I just knew him yesterday. As most of the offices in the mathematics department are, his is filled with stacks upon stacks of paper and files. As bad as I am at math, I always really seem to get along well with math teachers. I actually got a B in Henri’s class, but it was only because the material was not that difficult. Henri wrote my letter as we talked for the next 40 minutes.
I next went towards the Faner building so I could take my economics test there. A man was standing outside yelling about God to the passing students, so I filmed him. He then got a phone call and quit preaching. Keith C. walked up to me as I was putting away the camera, then the military guy from my Chinese class walked up at the same time. I talked to them both for just a few moments before realizing that the economics test had already started.
The test began terribly, then reading the questions a few times gave me some hope. After reading them all several more times, I felt like I would actually do OK. But, one question worth 15% was probably a total loss. A chart had to be examined, then a certain section of it had to be shaded in. Sounds like an easy 15%, but I didn’t have much of a clue what to shade.
I returned home after the test, checking the mail along the way. I GOT MY CAMERA!. A “parcel notice” was in my mailbox, then the office worker Tiffany gave me the box. I was careful to open it because I had already reported the seller for non-delivery 8 days ago. But sure enough, there was the exact same camera I had ordered, and no anthrax. I talked to Johanna while the battery charged, then tested it and found out that all was good.
Next, was the dinner with Janice Jacobs. Riding my bike in a suit got lots of weird looks from people on the street. The dinner was held at the Old Main Lounge on the second floor of the student center. The restaurant was closed to the public and only people on the list were allowed in. I arrived at the proper time, but almost nobody else was there. My name was checked at the door, then me and an old couple were allowed into a reception area. I introduced myself to the old couple and found that the lady’s last name was Pulliam. I asked her if she had any relation to the Pulliam building and was told that it was named after her father.
A few people were now trickling in and wine was being served. I had somehow expected this dinner to be a small event, but it was looking otherwise. I then saw the Chinese language student Ron sitting in a corner and went to talk with him. We then talked for the next 30 minutes and a girl he was acquainted with joined us.
The three of us sat together when the dinner started. About 100 other people where present now. The dinner was not as small as I expected, but everything was free. The wine kept flowing and all the food was great. The guest of honor, Janice, made a short statement to the room before we started eating.
A 4th person was at my table when I returned to it with food. He had arrived late and was attending in the place of the University of Illinois provost. His name is Obrad and he is the assistant director of international affairs at U of I. He was full of jokes and quickly became a hit at our table.
The scheduled lecture started in a nearby auditorium after the meal. I sat with Obrad and it lasted for about an hour. Janice spoke for most of the time, of course, after a short introduction from a university official. She is in charge of the country’s visa program, so that was the content of most of her speech. Microphones were set up next to the audience after she spoke so questions could be asked. About half of the questions came from international students who almost seemed to be using the event as a protest session. They were not directly complaining, but the tones of their voices and their expressions were telling. A woman from Kenya looked like she had tears in her eyes when she inquired why the price of a visa was so high.
After the lecture, I walked downstairs to get a drink with the girl I had eaten with. On the way back up, I talked to Thomas Saville and his wife. Tom runs the study abroad department here and is responsible for my trip to Macau. I had never met his wife before, who is a very giddy woman from Taiwan. She was extremely giggly and friendly for the several minutes we talked. I think she wanted to speak some Chinese when I told her my major, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself.
Back upstairs, I talked to Matt Jacobs and his cousin. I graduated high school with Matt, and it turns out that Janice Jacobs is his aunt. I had a picture taken of he, Janice and I after most of the other people had left the building.
During dinner, Obrad, the other girl and I had all agreed to go out after the lecture. Obrad had said that he wanted to see the town, so the girl and I had offered to show it to him. I didn’t think he was serious at first, but he had told me before the lecture started that he was “dead serious”. So, we agreed to meet up somewhere in the reception area after the show was over. The plan was for me to meet up with him, then for us to go meet the other girl at her house, which is near the bars on the Strip. I also invited Matt and his cousin with us after the lecture, but Obrad was then nowhere to be seen.
Matt, his cousin and I rode in their car to the strip, then walked to the girls house. I am really retarded for not remembering this girls name after spending hours with her. After getting the girl, we all walked to Tres Hombres together. There, we sat outside for about an hour, then went inside to listen to a Jazz band that was playing. It was truly a good experience to hang out with Matt, whom I have known for years, but never really talked to that much. It also turns out that his cousin and I know lots of mutual people, mostly through my sister.
The other girl left about 10:30, then the rest of us left about 30 minutes later. I walked back to their car with them, then walked home.

November 6, 2005
Sunday:

Rufus came by at 11 to return my wallet because I had left it at his house last night. I didn’t even realize it was gone before talking to him on the phone today. I talked to Johanna for a while in the morning, and also to my brother for just a couple minutes. He again told me about a job interview he has in California in two weeks. The company is paying for his flight, hotel, rental car and all expenses. I have never heard of an interview like that.
I left the apartment at noon to go out to get some things done. I carried out the old black and white television that has been sitting in my living room, and put a sign on it that read, “Black and White TV – Free – Works”. The weather was about 70 degrees and sunny today, so I was wearing shorts, short sleeves and sandals. My first stop was to put laundry in a machine at Laundry World, then I went to buy a pair of dress pants for the dinner I am attending tomorrow night. The plan was to buy them from the mall, but I decided to first check and see if there was anything that would fit me at the Goodwill, which is surprisingly open on Sundays. There, I ended up finding a whole suit that fit me perfectly for only $14. It doesn’t appear to be an expensively made one, but looks brand new.
Next, I went back to the laundromat to finish the load of clothes. I ordered the 2 for $1 hot dog special and a soda while I waited for the dryer to get finished. I noticed that the old TV was already gone by the time I returned to my apartment. That was the TV that I grew up watching for years when I was a kid.
I went to the library at 4 o’clock so I could check out an economics textbook and study for tomorrow’s test. The library was stifling hot and big fans had been set up everywhere. This university apparently is not aware of an invention called the thermostat. I sat at a table in a back corner in front of one of the huge fans as I studied. The heat made me doze off several times as I tried to cram the boring material into my tiny, tiny head.
I returned home at 6, then cooked myself a pork steak for dinner. After that, I created a resume to hand in with my externship application this week. I spent the rest of the nigh doing other various things on the Internet, including looking up information about the woman I’m going to dinner with tomorrow and getting ripped of for $13. I lost the money when trying to order a background check of myself online. The website I used just provided links to other websites after I had paid the money. The links were just to sites that required payments for background checks. When looking up the woman, Janice Jacobs, I discovered that she’s married, has two kids and has been moving up the government ranks since graduating from SIU in the 60’s. The president nominated her as the Ambassador to Senegal a couple weeks ago. I even found a video of her online.

November 5, 2005
Saturday:

I slept in till 10 o’clock this morning, then didn’t leave the apartment till 1:30. I rode my bike to work at that time and the weather was again beautiful for November. The past 3 or 4 days have been in the mid 70’s and mostly sunny, but with constant strong wind gusts. Carl and Kelly told me I could come to work whenever I wanted today. I’m so glad to not be working at Schnucks anymore. This new job is perfect for me right now.
I didn’t think I would be working very long today, but ended up staying until 5 o’clock. I first had to alphabetically shelve 3 boxes of science fiction books, then moved a few hundred books in the vintage paperback section. All the vintage paperbacks were alphabetically mixed, so I had to realphabetize them, which took at least a couple hours. The cat jumped on my back and tried to lick my face while I was putting books on a bottom shelf. A local author was supposed to be in the store at 4 o’clock for a book signing, but she never made it because of an accident that was blocking a highway. Kelly wrote me a check for $84 before I left.
On the way home, I stopped at Save-a-Lot to buy some groceries for this week. Save-a-Lot is just like Aldi’s, only it is cleaner and the bags are free. They also had a really gorgeous girl shopping there. Maybe she is paid to just act like she’s shopping. I got home and found that one of my bags smelled rotten, which was caused by a broken egg. I figured that the egg had been broken for a long time and the other ones were fine, so I rinsed them all off and put them in another container.
I then made some pasta for dinner before riding my bike over to Rufus’s trailer. He lives a couple miles away and the wind was blowing hard against me the entire way. He was at a neighbor’s house when I arrived, but Jennifer and Christina were in the kitchen playing cards. I stuck my head in the window and really scared Jennifer good. Rufus arrived a few minutes later, then we hung out for the next few hours. We spent our time sitting either inside, outside or walking around the trailer park. Josh Barkley came over with his girlfriend’s daughter after I had been there an hour or so. The kid was probably only about 3 years old and played with a toy truck while we all talked in the front yard. We took a walk and Josh showed us a trailer where he said an old man had died. Someone had offered to sell it to him for $100. There was a full-sized tree growing out from underneath the trailer.
Josh and the little girl left after a while, then they came back a bit later with his girlfriend. Rufus, him and I then walked back to the old trailer that the man had died in and went inside with my camcorder. I don’t think I recorded any hauntings, but maybe I should check the tape. Strong storms came through the area after 10 o’clock. We noticed two local warning show up on TV, then there were 4 more just a couple minutes later. They looked pretty serious on the radar, but almost completely missed Carbondale. We got some heavy rain for a few minutes, but barely any of the wind or lightning.
I left Rufus’s place sometime around 2 o’clock and rode my bike home. I was riding under the SIU parking garage when I flipped over my handlebars. I was trying to go over a curb, but the bike just stopped and threw me off. I landed on by back on a concrete sidewalk, but amazingly didn’t get a scratch or feel any pain at all.

November 4, 2005
Friday:

Today was long, from 8 AM till 2 AM. At school, I went to all of my 5 classes except for Statistics. I actually went into the Statistics classroom for a minute, but then a guy(Randy) who is also in my Marketing class reminded me that we had a quiz today in that class. So, since statistics is usually such a waste of time, I decided to go the library and study for that test. There, I checked out the Management book to read a couple cases that would be on the test, but the book available there must not be the same as the class textbook because I could not find the cases in it. I still studied by taking practice tests online.
The test was a little different than usual and a bit harder, so I would have done terrible if I had forgotten to study. I want to do well on this test and the next because I could then quit going to this class. There are weekly tests and only the ten best are counted. Students that have an A or B average on their tests also have the option of not taking the final. This means that next Friday will probably be my last day in class. I might consider taking a couple more tests if I end up with a B then.
My test was finished by 11:15, then I went home to eat lunch. Tammy was painting the door of my apartment at that time. She had to have it open while she painted and then leave it open to dry afterwards. I talked to her while she painted and I ate a sandwich. She said that she had recently walked in on a naked guy when doing work on another apartment. Apparently, the guy was just walking around naked like he didn’t care, so she asked him to put something on. She also said a girl that works in the office, Tiffany, walked in a couple having sex a few weeks ago. I don’t know if I believe that one.
Back at school, I had another test that I wasn’t completely prepared for; Chinese. The teacher always gives certain information about the test the day before it, but I skipped class yesterday. There were two questions that I could not fully answer, but did well on the rest.
I spent my one-hour break checking out the Externship Program, which is a spring-break job-shadowing program that I mentioned earlier in the week. I first stopped in the FLIT office to talk to my advisor, Brooke, but she was eating lunch and didn’t really have much information about the program. I next went to the Alumni Office, which administers the program. I stopped along to way to talk to Aaron(pool player), whom I saw in walking in a hallway. The Alumni Office is in the big International Lounge on the second floor of the student center. A very friendly lady at the front desk gave me some information and said to fill out an online application. She also allowed me to look through a file cabinet in another room that had 3 drawers of files from cooperating companies. A friendly foreign lady in this room gave me a couple Externship fliers and asked that I put them up on my apartment’s bulletin board. I wasn’t looking for anything specific in these files, but was just wanting to see if I could get any ideas. I thought Nokia could be good because they have offices in the US, Finland and China, but that company did not have a file. One interesting file I did see was the Bank of America, which is currently making investments and opening branches in China. This company could be good for me because my dad knows the regional president and Mike works for them. As I left the Alumni Office, I asked the woman at the front desk if they had ever been in contact with Nokia about Externships. She said that they hadn’t, but would be glad to contact them and try to work something out. I also asked about past experiences with Bank of America, but she just said that the company was too big to say anything certain.
I spent the rest of the time before economics class using the Faner computer lab. I checked my email and found that I had been invited to a dinner with a State Department official on Monday the 17th. The official is Janice Jacobs and she runs the Visa Services Department of the State Department. I had received an email last week from my advisor saying that this woman would be in town for a lecture and would like to speak with some FLIT students. I replied to the email, but didn’t really expect I’d be able to go. Meeting this woman could be good for me because her department of the government employs Americans in every country of the world that we have good relations with.
I went off to work as soon as Economics class ended. There, Carl and I first moved some very heavy shelving in the soon-to-be new room of the store, then we got in his old white pickup truck and went to a storage area a few blocks away. Along the way, I asked about a big solar panel that was on the dashboard. Carl said it was a battery charger that he uses because the truck’s battery drains when not in use. Never seen one of those before. It just stays plugged into the cigarette lighter and constantly sends the battery a charge when light hits it.
The storage area was near the apartment I used to rent by the police station. It had weeds growing in front of the door and was full of lots of things, including boxes of books and shelving. Carl picked out about a dozen boxes and I loaded them into the truck. I sat on top of them during the ride back so no lids would blow off. Carl made a sudden stop at a light, which made me slide forward. He had also made an unusual maneuver on the way to the storage area, but it is probably more the old truck’s fault than his, which has about 250,000 miles on it.
Back at the store, we unloaded the books into a back door of the store, then I had to put them onto storage shelves there. These were the same shelves that I had almost filled up on the last day I worked, so I didn’t have room for all the books. Several of the boxes had roaches in them. One of the boxes had an old school notebook of Nic’s, in which there were a bunch of his drawings and the name Nic Rexroad written everywhere. I guess Nic Rexroad was his alter-ego or something. One page said “NIC REXROAD is bad, the bomb…..etc”. Three of the book boxes contained paperbacks that I was supposed to alphabetize and shelve in the main section of the store. I didn’t get that job completely finished before I had to go back to school at 4:40.
The reason I went back was to attend a review session for an economics test that I have on Monday. The teacher usually gives a few hints about the test during this time, and today was no different, although not as many as last time.
I returned home at 6, then talked with Johanna for a few minutes before Josh came to pick me up. He came to get me so I could go to dinner with him, his sister and her friend. He was alone in the car and we were supposed to meet the others. Josh couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant, but thought it was at the Murdale shopping center. We drove there and walked into the Happy Reunion Chinese restaurant, but that wasn’t the place. We then went to a restaurant on the Strip called Kaya, which is a Japanese place that I had never been to. We at first didn’t see the others there, but then a waitress pointed us to a hidden corner of the restaurant. There, I met the others for the first time. Josh’s sister’s name is Sara and she was there with her friend Sara and Sara’s sister Molly. Both of the Sara’s are Carbondale lawyers. Molly is younger and is a student.
Our waitress walked up to our table and said “Hi Garth”. I looked at her and was surprised I couldn’t remember the face of such a pretty girl, but she then said, “I heard the introductions”. Her name was Laura and she had a trainee named Ryan with her. I ordered a dish called Beef Don, which turned out to be a salad with beef on top of it. After all the food was gone, we ordered a little pitcher of plum wine, which was served with five tiny little tea cups. Josh’s sister must be a good lawyer because she got us a second free pitcher of wine by mentioning how small the first one was.
I noticed a very unusual sisterly bond between the other Sara and her sister. First of all, I noticed the fond ways that they looked at each other, then the younger one started lightly scratching the back of the older one. Never seen anything like that.
We all had a great time together and ended up sitting at the restaurant for about two hours. We then said goodbye and Josh and I headed out to Josh L’s trailer. Josh L was at work, but we had gone there to meet Jeff. Jeff often spends time at Josh’s house because he lives with his grandparents in a rural area out of town. After a few minutes here, we all went back to my apartment. Jeff drove separately and Josh and I stopped along to way to buy some beer at Old Town.
We spent the next couple hours at my place continuing the role playing game that we started a couple weeks ago. I’m a little stinky gnome. I don’t really know how to describe this kind of game to someone who has never played, but one person(Josh) controls it by using both his imagination and a set of loose rules.

October 3, 2005
Thursday:

I got up before 5 AM this morning because I had gone to sleep so early last night. I had a piece of steak for breakfast at that time and watched some TV as the sun came up. I studied Chinese from 6 till 7, then talked to Johanna for an hour.
My plan for the morning was to study Chinese till 10, then go to the library to do economics homework, but not of this actually happened because I fell back asleep right after talking to Johanna. I’m often tired when I’m bored, but am never as tired as I have been for the past week, so I decided it must have been the pills the doctor prescribed for my jaw last week. The bottle is nearly empty already and it had no positive affect on me, so I decided to stop taking them when I got up from my morning nap today.
My dad and Clara came to pick me up at 1 o’clock because I had said I would go with them to see a display at a museum. I didn’t know it when I got in the car, but we were actually going to the museum at the university. We tried to find a parking place on campus, but that was of course a lost cause. We ended up parking just a block from my apartment and walking onto the campus.
The temperature today was in the 70’s and the wind was gusting to about 30 mph. So, there were thousands of leaves blowing everywhere and most people were out in short sleeves. It was sunny all day long. At the museum, my dad and Clara wanted to see a display about the Trail of Tears. For anyone not familiar with that, it’s the route that Indians were herded in the 1800’s during their forced removal from the southeast. Thousands of them died as they passed through this area in the wintertime.
The Trail of Tears display was very small and did not have many artifacts, but had some interesting information. Half of the museum was closed for renovations, but the open section had several different exhibits, including one that contained a couple hundred different masks. This mask display had everything from Chinese masks to a KKK mask.
We looked around the museum for about an hour, then slowly walked back towards the car. My dad stopped a couple times to look at some of the trees on campus he found interesting. I asked him about the mushrooms I had taken a picture of a few weeks ago that grew in big circles, and he gave me an explanation. He said they are called ‘Ferry Rings’ and they occur because the fungus that generates the mushroom grows underground before it creates mushrooms. It starts growing from a center point and expands outward in a circle, then when the climate is just perfect, it decides to grow mushrooms on all of its outer edges. I’m kind of disappointed that there was an explanation, but then again, how do all the sides of the circle know to grow at the same time? Probably subterranean aliens.
I arrived back home at 3:00, then went to the library to do my economics homework. There, I checked out a pair of headphones and the economics textbook, then sat at a computer and listened to Internet radio stations as I did the homework.
I caught a big leaf in the air on my bike ride home, which is now hanging on my refrigerator. For dinner, I made myself a cheeseburger and long-grain rice, then started studying for yet another Chinese test that I have tomorrow. I took a couple short study breaks to chat with Tavis, Jared and my brother. Tavis and Jared were in a conference chat when Tavis invited me in. Jared said that he put in a notice to quit his job on Tuesday. He will work till the end of the month, then move back home until he decides what to do. Tavis told us about a really crazy episode of Trading Spouses. I think part 2 of the episode will surely be worth watching. You can see a preview at http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2681739?htv=12 Seriously…watch this preview.
My brother also told me about something interesting; an artificial intelligence program that you can chat with. Sometimes you will be surprised by its intelligence and other times it will seem like an idiot. Check it out at http://www.titane.ca/concordia/dfar251/igod/main.html

November 2, 2005
Wednesday:

I planned on going to the library at 7 o’clock this morning and doing economics homework that is due today. I can’t do it without checking out the textbook. My alarm was accidentally set for 7 PM, so I woke up 30 minutes late, which I decided wouldn’t give me enough time to get to the library and do the homework.
Staying awake today was almost impossible, even though I had a full 8 hours of good sleep. I began to fall asleep even by the end of my first class. Statistics class came next and it was not better. I left after just 30 minutes because the teacher had nothing useful to say at all. She spent all that time talking about the bad grades everyone had been getting on the tests and homework. No wonder people are getting bad grades when she is wasting half the class time instead of teaching the subject. She regularly wastes the first 15 minutes, but this was a new record. So, I decided that my time would be better spent sitting in some yellow leaves on a hill outside the building. The weather was perfectly sunny and the trees are in full color right now. I used my backpack as a pillow and just lay on the side of the hill by the Stone Henge-like sculpture till my next class.
I ate lunch at the Student Center McDonalds after Chinese class, then spent my one hour break in the computer lab. I was still falling asleep during my last class of the day, which is the one I didn’t finish the homework for. I asked the teacher after class if it could be turned in on Friday, and he said it would cost a 5% penalty. As much as this guy’s lectures bore me, he is always more than fair and sometimes even has a decent sense of humor during class.
Getting done with school woke me up, at least for a while. I went straight from class to work, where Carl told me that he had tried to leave a message saying I need not come in today. He had planned on having Kelly watch the store while he and I moved some shelving around, but Kelly had to go pick up her daughter. He did at least find something else for me to do, which took an hour and 20 minutes. In a back room, I had to shelve the books that were in about 25 boxes that I had moved last week. This shelving was not as time-consuming as the shelving I had done in the customer areas of the store last week, because today the books didn’t have to be put in alphabetical order.
But, a lot of books will fit into 25 boxes, especially when 6 of them are full of thin children’s books. All the books in the store are separated by certain categories. Today, I mostly dealt with science fiction/fantasy paperbacks and non-fiction and fiction without ISBN’s. Some of the non-fictions were from the early to mid 1800’s and were falling apart. There was also a box of Elvis books and two boxes of Christmas craft books. Most Christmas books are too long to fit on a regular shelf. There must be 100’s of millions of little Star Trek paperbacks in the world. Who reads some of this stuff?
I checked my mail back at the apartment, passing the music professor that lives in the D building, who told me that the Halloween BBQ had been moved to tonight at 5 o’clock. I went into my apartment and waited for it to start. There, I cooked a chicken breast and watched TV. The chicken needed to be cooked because it was going to go bad if it just kept sitting in the fridge. Cooking it also gave my TV time to warm up. I was telling my dad in an email today that both my TV and oven are appliances that must be warmed up. The TV switches from just a line to a full screen after 10 minutes. I guess I don’t really mind, but must remember to turn it on 10 minutes early when wanting to watch a program.
I went to the BBQ at 5:30. The music professor and his wife regularly host free breakfasts on Sunday mornings, but this was the first nighttime event. It turned out to be much more popular than Sundays have been, probably because everyone was in church then, or I mean sleeping. There were about 25 people when I arrived tonight. Not only was there a nice assortment of food available, but there were also two coolers full of ice-cold Budwiser and Budlight. One guy was standing on the stairs and doing beer bongs by himself. Tammy was there with her husband Mark, who I used to work with at Schnucks. I talked to them for a few minutes, then talked to Dawn the rest of the time. I consumed a hot dog, bratwurst, bowl of chili, some chips and one Bud-Light before returning to my apartment.
I then planned on spending the evening studying Chinese, but my tiredness came back. I accidentally fell asleep at 8 o’clock, then just decided to do it for real at that time. It’s been a long time since I went to bed at 8. I woke up a couple times to hear screaming from the BBQ outside, which must have continued past its 7 o’clock scheduled ending time. I wished I had the energy to join them and nothing to do tomorrow.

November 1, 2005
Tuesday:

I was on my way to work this morning when I realized that the brakes on my bike were disconnected. I had disconnected them last night in order to take front wheel off so the bike would fit in the back of Buckley’s truck. I first realized this when trying to stop on Sycamore St. for traffic, so I had to take a hard turn onto the street to avoid maybe getting hit by something.
At the bookstore, I moved boxes and shelved books till 11:45. I took another full van-load of books to the Goodwill, which contained about 3000 books and made the van a low-rider. Nic stopped in the store for a few minutes, probably to talk to his parents. We agreed to play racquetball later.
I went to Chinese class at noon, then went to talk to my advisor afterwards, but she was not in her office. I wanted to speak with her about the externship program, which is a job-shadowing program that takes place during spring break. Fifty percent of the people that participate in the program supposedly are offered internships with the companies they spend that week with, so I though it could be a good way to get an internship with a big company in China either this summer or next, or both.
I talked to Elisa on the way back home(the Spanish girl in my Chinese class). She has apparently been recording a short film outside of our apartment building lately. She recorded it with a film camera and said it is costing her $2000 to have it developed in California, but would be a lot cheaper than the other option, which is filming in high definition. Film students are always spending tons of money on their projects.
The air was all cloudy when I walked into my apartment, which I first thought was smoke, but quickly realized it just smelled like dust. I was trying to imagine where it could have possibly come from when I noticed new track lighting had been installed on the ceiling. The track is in a wavy shape that contains about 8 adjustable lights, which is something that I can really use. The bedroom was also dusty due to a hole that had been made at the top of the north wall for some reason. The maintenance workers have been making random improvements to the building for the past two months, but most of that work has been done in the hallways and stairwells.
For lunch, I ate a sandwich and a piece of the 3 pounds of leftover cooked steak that Buckley had given me last night. I was back to work at the bookstore at 1:30, then worked till 4. During that time, I boxed some pamphlets and shelved science fiction, fantasy and romance novels. It appears that some romance authors never leave home because they have written dozens upon dozens of novels. I have seen no other sections of the store where single authors have written so many books. Staying in and writing all the time and never going out is probably why they are so good at writing about romance; they are very lonely because they never get any of the real thing, which makes them passionate romance writers. Two customers browsed the romance section while I was shelving, both of which were middle-aged women with rings on their fingers. I am already starting to notice that different areas of the store are frequented by very different kinds of people.
I talked to Johanna after work. I received a package from her this morning with a letter and picture in it, but hadn’t unwrapped the picture till we talked this afternoon. It contained a piece of construction paper with pictures of us glued on it in a nice pattern. She picked pictures from many of the different places we have been together. She had cut most of them down to just our faces, so it was at first hard to figure out where some were taken. The glass on the frame was broken into a million pieces.
Nic and me went to play raquetball at 6 o’clock. Luckily I had made a reservation in advance, because the Rec Center probably had 1000 people in it. We had to kick a guy and girl out of court #15 because it was the one we had reserved and nothing else was available.
Nic actually beat me in two games today and did a lot better than in the past. He even won 8-0 once. We played 5 games, and our tie breaking game ran 3 points over because the winner has to be ahead by two. Good exercise. There was a huge aerobics class on the basketball court behind where we played. It took up at least half of the full sized basketball court and is the biggest class I have ever seen there. There were a few extremely fat people in the back row who were barely moving.
I got home before 8 o’clock and found a new ceiling fan in my bedroom. That was nice to see because I hadn’t had any ceiling lights. I next spent a couple hours putting away all the things Buckley and Jen gave me. I had to rearrange all my cabinets to make room for the food. I took a break to eat more steak for dinner.