Realquickone

I have to do this really quickly, because there are about two minutes before this class ends and then I go back home to where our Internet connection is down. It's the first day of school, and boy do I wish it weren't. I'm really tired, but I still have to go to band practice at 1730. (I use military time. Get used to it.)
All right then bye.

The Hike

I got up, if you can believe it, at 8:00 this morning. I was astounded too. Then I gathered up my provisions, slipped on my shoes, and slipped off into Congress Run.
-The part I've already done many times before was the hardest part, because there the creek hadn't widened yet. It was about two feet wide. And the woods were about as thick as a tightly-knit wool sweater just beyond it. However, to avoid getting my feet wet, sometimes I did have to get up onto the bank. I did this as seldom as possible, because as soon as I did, I was met by a vast quantity of webs built by alarmingly large spiders, though they were probably just regular joes, out to make a bug like the next guy. I promptly got these webs all in my face, no matter where they were. If they were built on the ground, they ended up on my face.
-After about twenty minutes of that, I finally emerged into a wider spot on the creek, stationed at a subdivision called Central Park. It has to get wider because it goes through a huge tunnel there. I went over the tunnel, but I've gone through it before, and I can tell you it's not fun. It's a vast hole from which there is no escape but walking to the other side. It's an ideal place to get claustrophobics to Overcome their Fear. From the other side of that tunnel I walked maybe a couple hundred yards and came to the tunnel under Cross County. This tunnel is even more enormous than the Central Park one, and to make matters worse, there's no way to go over it. The traffic on Cross County is thick and there's a fence on the other side. So I had to go through it. And as I did, I noticed a beep from in my backpack. It was my mom's cell phone (which she had insisted I take along) going out of range.
-As I walked through it, I mainly stayed quiet. The end never seemed to get any closer. Foot by foot, I approached the way out, but it sure didn't seem like it. Towards the end, I got gutsy and started singing some of my Carmina Burana. Then I noticed the profound echo and started talking to myself to hear it. I also clapped really loud, and the sound didn't dissipate for at least three seconds. If you exploded a firecracker there, it would still be reverberating the next day.
-I didn't die, and I walked out the tunnel to a newly widened creek. Another little wash had joined it, turning it, for the first time, into Congress Run in earnest. I had also gotten to the point on Galbraith where there start to be houses. I watched the houses pass by and be replaced with new houses as I trekked through the dry creekbed. Mom called me--the phone was back in range--and asked just where on the creek I was. I told her. Then I kept walking.
-Eventually I came to Congress Run Apartments, and then left it. About there the creekbed became incooperative for walking in. I had to get up on the bank every once in a while to avoid having to walk in water about up to my knees. I tried that for a little while. And then, then I came to an impasse. It was another intersection of Congress Run with Cross County, and this time the tunnel wasn't big enough to walk through. I came up to the road to have a look around. There was nothing I could see to help me.
-Except crossing the road I had just not gone under. It hadn't occurred to me as an option before, because I was still thinking about Cross County, but now that I saw it, it made perfect sense. I walked leisurely across the street, not seeing a single car, and promptly found a pitiful little creek that couldn't've been the majestic Congress Run. Could it? I crossed the street again and sat down under a bridge to figure it out. I pulled out my print-out of the map. I puzzled. I couldn't figure out where I was, because the map had no street names. Eventually I decided I must be on the right track and went off downstream, using the term "downstream" loosely, because there was no current whatsoever. I skirted the border of a Horse Boarding place, rounded a corner, and punctually got lost. There was nothing to see on the banks. The creek looked dark and forbidding. I came to a spill of something that smelled like pumice soap, completely stagnant in the water, and decided I'd have to come up to ground level and have a look around.
-I came up behind an enormous, imposing, industrial-white building. At its side there was a fence, and on the other side of the fence I could see a golf course. I consulted my map to see just where on the face of the Earth I had wound up. There was no mention of a huge white building or golf course anywhere. Clearly the map was out of date. I called Mom and told her my predicament, whereupon she instructed me to find out where I was by way of the name of the building. I trekked around the enormous bulk of it and saw a sign that said, bluntly, "GENERAL POLYMERS". That was all. Then I walked up the street, found an "Advance Building Products", and gave her the address where I had found myself: 93 Caldwell Drive. I had come a long way, but even though the map said I could probably get to a railroad without too much difficulty, the golf course begged otherwise. I told Mom to come and pick me up.
-I waited for a while on the steps of Advance Building Products, and we came home. Then I ate a lot of food, and drank a lot of pop. And that's all I'm going to relay for now.
-Signing out

Prehike

Okay, so, yeah. I didn't really do much of anything today. I really was going to go to the trumpet sectional, but I was thwarted in that. I had my alarm all set to 9:00 sharp, and it even went off. But it was impossible to tell that it went off, because it seems that during one of my absences (band camp or something) Mom went into my room to sleep away from the power of Dad's snoring and turned the volume all the way down. I didn't hear a thing until I woke up and it was too late. So the most exciting thing I did was to go up to Kroger and buy a couple Lunchables for my trip tomorrow.
-And that's pretty much all. I'll probably post the answers to my Curiosity (I've got to think up a better name for those) in a couple days. Until then, keep commenting, and, uh, stay in school. Or something.

Feds Announce: Blog Cut 50% Today

I'm getting to bed way too late for three days before school. Last night? Three AM. Night before? Four. And I figured out my problem was I'm spending too much time typing in this blog, so I've decided I'm going to cut down today. And later, like, for the rest of whenever, I'll either do a short one or start earlier. That or not post at all. That probably won't happen too often.
-Well let's see. I woke up at the crack of noon, sat around awhile, and then followed Micah to Warder Park. He left me to go to Brian's house, so I wandered around it. First I went over to the west half of Burke's Pond, to try and find the creek that flows out of it. It wasn't there. Maybe it flows underground or something. Or maybe the cartographer was just trying to justify having a creek start nowhere at all by putting its beginning there.
-Then I went to band practice, six to nine. The last one before school starts! And now all my time is my time! I'm not going on my epic hike tomorrow, because as it turns out it's not actually completely mine. I have a trumpet sectional tomorrow morning. Plus it'll be too hot tomorrow. I'll do it on Saturday. That'll give me time to prepare tomorrow.
-How you guys doin' on that Curiosity? My mom couldn't figure it out. She got as far as the ch word before resulting to proper nouns and completely made-up words. If the comments box still says there're just two, and you already have the ch one, you can read it without having cheated.
-Okay, that's all I've got. Goodnight.
-Okay, that's pretty much it.

Warder Park

In my journal last night, I tried to draw a map of Warder Park. In accordance with what I wrote here last night--that it's "kvazaŭa ovalo", or "kind of an oval", I drew it as an oval with one right angle. But when I went to draw in the rest of my general area, nothing fit. So I went online to check on what it really looks like. And what I found is TopoZone.com. I believe what they have done is mapped out the entire world, in minute detail, and published it for your viewing convenience. I live in Finneytown, a suburb of Cincinnati, and I never even knew some of the things that they displayed there. They know Finneytown better than I do, and I've lived here (regrettably) for twelve years. First I found out what Warder Park really does look like. (I'm not going to describe it here, though, because you can just look at the map of it at TopoZone.) And then I noticed the little wash that comes out of Burke's Pond (that's what the little pond there is called). I followed it down through North Hill to where I realized it's part of the creek I usually creekwalk at. And then I followed it further, further than I've ever creekwalked. Past View Place Drive. Past the Cincinnati City Limits. Into Mill Creek, upstream to the railroad track.
-I love railroad tracks. When I saw the railroad, I realized that this was the event I needed to put a bang at the end of my summer. School starts in four days, only three of which count*, so I've got to savor things while they last. And I plan to use up one of the three that count by taking an all-day hike to the railroad tracks at Mill Creek. This will be incredibly great. I'll take my backpack, pack it full of Gatorades and lunches and stuff, set off down the creek, and not come back for twelve hours. The perfect end to my vacation.

-I'm losing my audience, it seems. Either that, or everyone who reads this is really quiet. Matt, are you there? Virgi? Aaron? Leah? Come on, guys, I need feedback! Let me know: do you want more funny? Or more other? Or what? I'm getting lonely here!

-Today's Curiosity (brought to you by Gooperton Rubber Membranes, Inc.):
Can you think of a word
:with a ch pronounced like a k;
:with a ph pronounced like a p;
:with an sh pronounced like an s;
:with a th pronounced like a t?
-Things to remember:
(1) The required letters don't by any means need to be at the beginning of the word--most of them aren't. (2) There is more than one answer to every single one of them. (3) And these are all English words--just when you thought you had come up with a loophole, huh?
-Answers to be posted when you all get fed up. If you have an answer you want checked, post it under comments. If you don't have the answer and you see someone has left a comment, don't look at the comments. If you do you'll just feel like a cheater. There's no prize, but you do get to pat yourself on the back if you figure it out.

*Tomorrow doesn't count, because I've got band practice.

Esperanta Nokto

Mi faris decidon: Mardojn estos Esperantajn Noktojn. Se vi volas legi mardajn taglibraĵojn sed vi ne scias Esperanton, lernu ĝin. Ĉi tie estos bona ejo de komenci post mi trovas unu, kio kontentigas min. Mi rekomendus lernu!, sed ĝi ŝajnas esti... por malgrandaj geknaboj. Kun "Zam" kaj "Maz", kaj la bildoj en la nura kurso, kion mi vidis. Eble mi rekomendos ĝin pli poste.
(I'll translate just this one paragraph:
-I've made a decision: Tuesdays are Esperanto Nights. If you want to read posts on Tuesdays but don't know Esperanto, learn it. Here there will be a good place to start, once I find one that satisfies me. I would recommend lernu!, but it seems to be... for little kids. With "Zam" and "Maz", and the pictures in the one course I've seen. Possibly I'll recommend it later.
-And this much isn't there in Esperanto:
-If you still want to visit lernu! after that shining endorsement, you can find it, suitably enough, at www.lernu.net.)
-Do, nun ĉar mi skribas Esperante, mi bezonas ion por skribi. Ne multo okazis hodiaŭ. Mi vekiĝis ĉirkaŭ tagmeze, sidis dum tempo, kaj kontrolis mian rettaglibron. Ĉirkaŭ tiam mia frato lasis por apuda parko, malantaŭ lia lernejo. Ĝi nomiĝas Warder Park. Ĝi havas malgrandan lageton, iomege da arboj, kaj vojeton. Li estis dirinta al sia amiko Brian, ke li renkontos lin ĉe Duonarbo. (Efektive, li parolas la anglan, do li diris "Half Tree".) Mi finis ĉe la komputilo, kaj decidis peni trovi lin.
-Mi eniris la vojeton, kiu estas kvazaŭa ovalo, kaj komencis serĉi lin. Precipe mi serĉis Duonarbon. La Duonarbo strikiĝis per fulmo foje--tial la nomo--do ĝi devis esti facilvida, ĉu ne? Ne! Mi neniam eĉ vidis ĝin dum la tuta tempo dum kio mi estis en la parko. Mi ne vidis Mikahon aŭ Brianon aŭe, sed tio estis ĉar ili estis lasinta la parkon mallonge post mi eniris ĝin. Post mi iĝis hejme, mi petis ilin kie estas Duonarbo. Nek de ili volis diri al mi. Mi postiros ilin je la sekva fojo kiam ili iras tien.
-Mi spektis la televidon, spektis la televidon, kaj, por ŝanĝo de paŝo, spektis la televidon. Retrospektivanta, mi ne scias kial mi malŝparis ĉi tion belan someran tagon. Mi havas nur kvar tagojn antaŭ lernejado rekomencas. Nur kvar! Mi faros ion morgaŭ.

Not A Beginning

As it turned out, I am able to post today. Only, there's not much to post. I can't believe summer's not even a week from being over and I have to spend two more of my precious six days doing band stuff. Technically, I'm not doing band stuff for the whole day, but it's strategically placed from six to nine in order to ruin any plans I might've been able to make.
-Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you: I'm in band.
-I have acquired a fan base, it seems. I have Mike Mintz, whom I e-mailed just yesterday for the first time, my mom's friend Virgi, who wishes only to be known as "vir", and probably several other people who haven't posted yet. For example I also publicized this to my friends Aaron and Matt and my stepcousin Leah. They should be coming as soon as they next check their e-mails. Matt already has, but I guess he's the quiet type--didn't post anything.
-Well, I got to kick my brother's friend Brian off the property today. It was fun. If anybody knows Brian Floyd and wishes to insult him, this is the place to do it. The official anti-Brian headquarters. But in true Brian spirit, after I kicked him off he never really went away, but just lurked around outside the house and across the street. He didn't actually go home for hours. My brother and Brianless have some kind of symbiotic relationship, where they have to meet at least once a day and exchange nutrients, by way of tapes with farts recorded on them. I'm serious. They actually record their farts and listen to them, at full volume. Once, Micah recorded some off of an unnamed Internet site and he had to make sure Brian wouldn't know, so he wouldn't say he was cheating. I can't think of any way to describe "idiots" better than them.
-I biked on up to band practice at the high school. We had a kind of an "off" day. One of the main reasons was that maybe eighty percent of us were actually there. One guy in my section was there but couldn't march because of a sprained ankle. So we didn't do too well. Oh well, I guess.
-When I got back, I watched a little bit of Stargate on the SciFi channel--it's my dad's favorite show--and then Mom came home with Micah from swimming at the YMCA. Promptly our neighbor, Mr. Boyd, walked up to our door and probably didn't even bother knocking before he came in. Mr. Boyd is 61 years old, has completely white hair, and weighs about three hundred pounds. Lately the controversy has been that he found a hole in one of his screens and his wife blamed Micah. She says he wantonly threw a rock at it, in her full view. Now, Micah's pretty brain dead, but he wouldn't do something as moronic as that. It's much more likely that it was a ricochet from one of our slingshots. But Mr. Boyd wouldn't hear it. At first he was fairly calm, but he gradually crescendoed into a towering rage, yelling at everyone who tried to say any kind of word to him at all. He brought out past occurences that Micah definitely had nothing to do with, like Mrs. Boyd's "gazing balls". Mrs. Boyd rabidly claims that Micah stole some kind of big purple glass ball from her garden and smashed it to smithereens somewhere. She won't see the logical solution, i.e. that the ball was stolen by some other idiot kid, or just rolled away maybe.
-Likewise with the screen. Mr. Boyd backs her wholeheartedly, to the point that when I tried to make him realize he was acting like a twit, he yelled that "I DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO YOUR SMART MOUTH! I AM A 61-YEAR-OLD MAN!" I pointed out that he was in our house, but he couldn't hear it over the sound of his own yelling. He then seriously threatened that he would take Micah to juvenile court over this. Micah put forth that he would gladly go and prove Mr. Boyd to be the idiot he was (and even calls himself), but Dad yelled that our position in the matter was completely untenable and we would lose so fast we couldn't even say hi to the judge first. Micah has a previous record. When he was six he kicked a bunch of holes in the walls of a condominium being built near our house with his friend Joey. The builders had him tried and convicted, but he did cleanup work so well on the first few days that they let him go free. He still has that hanging over his head, though.
-At about this time I went outside. Though eventually I did come back to the house and listen to things through the storm door, nothing else of real import was said. Once things had cooled down a bit, I came back inside and listened to Micah's Weird Al Yankoviĉ CD and read some Calvin and Hobbes and then decided I'd better make sure everyone out there in Internetland knew I was still alive. Now you know.

A Beginning

-Since my Mom's been bugging me to for so long, I've just gotten around to creating my own "blog", which sounds like something that you would cough out of the back of your throat. And in a way, it is. This will be the projection of how I see things, for all to enjoy. I can't promise exact accuracy. Nor can I promise frequency of posts, because I already have something rather like this that takes up a lot of my time. It's called my journal. I write in it for upwards of fifteen minutes every day, so I won't always be in the mood to write yet more things here.
-Okay, let's get a few things straight. Rule Number A: There aren't any real rules around here. Mainly this is because I wouldn't be able to enforce them even if I could come up with any. You're allowed to disagree with me, even though you're probably wrong if you do; you're discouraged from swearing at me, though I can't do anything much about it, so you're technically allowed to do that too; you're allowed to talk in Swedish or Czech, though if you speak either of those I probably don't know you and can't fathom how you got here; you're allowed to throw Twinkies or whatever your snack of choice is at your screen when you read something that you particularly don't like, because it's not my screen... In short, you have pretty much a blank Czech. So toss away. Let's get things started.
-Today I got back from Gilboa Rock Quarry, where I had previously SCUBA'd and climbed the on-site rock wall. Then I ate some cereal, and visited several websites. Then, for no particular reason while watching my mom check her blog, I felt the urge to have one of my own. I think it's so I can show her how it's done. Hers is so boring you can hear your computer falling asleep. I get bored sitting in the other room when I hear her typing. So I'm going to show her up. Which brings us to here. I'm sitting here at my computer typing words that I hope, in some way, will amuse you, or at least not be fatal to you. And that's all a person can ask to have, isn't it: a page with a bunch of amusing, non-fatal words.
-I've got to go create a profile of some sort. I can't say for sure when I'll write next. It's impossible to be sure of anything. Like, what proof do we have that the yogurt in the fridge won't sprout legs and stage an uprising? It's wildly improbable, yes, but nothing's impossible. To that end, I'll say that I'm fairly sure that I'll write again tomorrow, but not completely certain. I have to go now, though. The yogurt is throwing Twinkies at me.