This is a collection of thank you notes that I haven't written, or I'm not sure if I've written. If you've given me something or done something for me, and I've failed to thank you, I hope it's covered here.
+++
Dear Aunt Ellen and Uncle Chuck,
I don't remember if I ever thanked you for the book you sent me for Christmas. I really enjoyed reading it, especially because it was real. I could see the people behind the story, not to forget the deer it revolves around. Thanks also for thinking of me at Christmas. Hope to see you sometime again!
[Chuck]
+++
Dear Nana and Papaw,
Thanks for the card. I got it a few days ago, and I've been meaning to write you and say thanks. I guess I don't communicate by post all that often, and you don't seem to be all that crazy about e-mail, so it's kind of an odd mixed correspondence. Actually, I think I'm going to start writing letters by post more often - a lot of personality is lost in the electronic medium. I don't know if I'll send a letter to you any time in the near future, but it's a possibility. Hmm - I'll have to ask Dad what your birthdays are, and maybe send you cards.
[Chuck]
+++
Dear Vinny,
You found my blog all on accident, and then stuck around to give me encouragement during the dark holiday season I had. You didn't have to do that at all, but you did, and I want to thank you for that. It makes me happy to think that someone who was a complete stranger before could be that friendly and sympathetic.
Chuck
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Dear Grandma and Grandpa,
I actually already thanked you a couple hours ago, but thanks again for the birthday party and the ribs. They were delicious. As was the cake. Ahh, overeating: as long as it's delicious. I'm realizing now that I have fully half a semester of Grinnell Dining to look forward to - that makes me wish I had savored tonight's dinner just a little more.
[Chuck]
+++
I realize posting these all as open letters seems a bit impersonal. I assure you that I wrote each of these with as much gratitude as if I had written it directly to you. In the future, I'm going to try much harder to keep track and make sure I write thank yous right after the fact. But today I realized I had a backlog, and decided to just get them all done at once.
P.S. Cave pictures still forthcoming.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The bowels of Kentucky
We took a vacation to Mammoth Caves. This account is lifted from my journal.
We got up early and had breakfast at Frisch's. Then we drove. I slept in the car. We had breakfast at "Aunt Bee' Country Restaurant". Then things got more interesting.
-We found Diamond Cavern, and bought tickets for the next tour, which left in about five minutes, so we had to hurry a little. Our tour guide was Jimmy; he had a southern drawl, but despite that he didn't live up to the stereotype and was actually pretty smart. He showed us all sorts of pretty awesome formations as we descended into the bowels of Kentucky. The floor was slick and we weren't allowed to touch anything, but it was still a pretty excellent tour. Everything was brown. The air was moist and the temperature stayed normalized at 58°. The owners had strung lights not just for lighting, but to really emphasize the structures. One light hung behind a strip of "cave bacon", which is a translucent sheet of calcite with streaks of different colors to it. Other lights stuck onto the ceiling next to stalactites bigger than our tour group and collections of infinitely detailed filigree. Flowstones jutted out of the walls and onto our isolated, concrete-paved path. Jimmy turned out the lights for us and showed us what the cave was like when there was no electric lighting - they used candles, and it was pretty darn bland. We walked by a now-defunct altar made out of broken-off stalactites and stalagmites and such (salvaged after people from the area's rivaling caves had broken them off). The trail was sometimes cramped and constricted, and sometimes huge and open. Things you'd never expect hung from the ceiling. In fact, there were three structures - dripstones, I think Jimmy called them - that geologists say cannot grow above one another, and they were all stacked right on top of each other. "What happens in the cave stays in the cave," he said.
-Eventually, past all the frozen waterfalls and illogical rock forms, we hit the end of the line, and turned around. At the time I was a bit unsatisfied, but now I realize - there's not much else I could ask rocks to do for me. It's a pretty special cave all-around.
-I bought some magnetic hematite rocks at the gift shop, and we found a hotel: the Mammoth Cave Hotel, located I think in the middle of Mammoth Cave National Park. On entering the room, I found a sheet of paper detailing a walking trail next to the hotel, so I suggested it. Only Dad and I went; Mom and Micah stayed in the hotel instead and watched Family Guy. We drive two hundred miles and they stay inside not a hundred feet from the edge of what Dad and I think may be a real old-growth forest, at the onset of spring. It boggles the mind.
-The first thing Dad and I did was get good and lost, because that's the only way to have a proper hike. This we did by forsaking the trail and skipping down a scattering of boulders slicked down a steep hillside until we found a brand new trail. We took that one past a few pretty capacious sinkholes. One was probably fifteen feet deep. I think they all drain to a series of caves below, or something. I was barefoot, and the sharp gravel woke up nerves that had been hibernating all winter. We found a little out-of-order cottage, and then picked one of two trails at random at a forking, heading to the Echo River Spring. The forest was pine and cedar, Dad guesses, and really wide and spacious. I could feel its health, even though trees aren't budding yet.
-The Echo River is green and wells up from a spring at the bottom of a deep, green pool. The pool sloshes ever so slowly and silently and we couldn't figure out why at all. There are dead trees growing in the middle of it. Why? We approached it from two different angles but neither offered answers.
-We took a trail that promised to take us to the CAMPGROUND. It ascended the hill we'd descended, through a series of switchback and oxbows. We saw some standoffish deer. "They're Ohio deer," Dad said. "They've got an O on the license tag." At the top of the hill, the trail diverged with no clues, both ways leading off into scenic nowheres. We picked the one that seemed right; it petered out, and we found another one nearby. That one took us through a huge bowl where no roads came, and not even any road noise. Beautiful - but when you're trying to find civilization again, unnerving. Daylight was fading fast. We kept following the trail, and it led us up a hillside to some lights that proved to be our hotel. Mom and Micah were both inside watching the Griffins evade Y2K.
-We spent the rest of the night playing a long, distracted game of Scrabble. Then it was TV until bedtime. My feet are still tingling.
[I haven't written this part in my journal yet, so this is all on the fly.]
We woke up today and packed up our stuff into the truck. We walked to breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, and from there we walked across a bridge to the Visitors' Center. I was taken aback - it was teeming. We found the information desk and the guy told us that the 4-hour tour of Mammoth Cave was sold out until sometime in April, and the longest tour still available for today was the 2-hour New Entrance tour. So we bought tickets for that at noon, and kind of waited around until then. I read a few books in the bookstore part. Mom did crossstitch in the truck, and Dad sat on a bench outside enjoying the fresh air. I think Micah kind of wandered. The tour bus smelled of urine.
-This tour group was 119 people, said the tour guide. As such, it wasn't as personal as the Diamond Cavern one. We got into a line, and all descended one after another down a steep and cramped stainless steel staircase into a shaft about a hundred feet deep. The staircase spiraled around perplexingly, so that we were frequently walking above or below another section of the line. Water trickled through the ground into our giant hole, and through all the dark cavities on its sides. There were stalactites and stalagmites, but not as numerous as they were in Diamond Cavern. This cave had an altogether different character. Or rather, several different characters. After we came out of the shaft, we kept descending through other passages until we came to a huge auditorium - wooden benches set in the rock floor, fifteen-foot rock ceiling. The tour guides gave a little presentation there, showing us the total darkness like Jimmy had, and then we all got up and kept moving. The next section was a dry, open one with no stalactites or anything, a section that had stopped growing. Here, huge rocks balanced precariously over us. There was more maneuvering room in general. One chamber had a big, flat ceiling. The tour guide answered questions from some people there, about mummies found in the cave, and things like that. And we kept walking through the huge, dark, light-brown chambers. Rock tumbles stretched out below us into black depths, and the ceiling was a jumble too, which was different from any other ceiling I've been under before. From time to time we saw things that people had left there. One pile of rocks had an old lantern on it.
-Finally, we came to the last chamber we would visit, another one full of structures. There was the Frozen Niagara, thirty-foot flowstone. There was a ceiling that consisted entirely of glistening stalactites. There was a pillar in progress that, when it comes together sometime in the next few millennia, will be about fifty feet high probably. I enjoyed it all. I breathed the cool damp cave air. Then, abruptly, I found that the trail had led me back out to the bright outdoors. So I waited for the rest of the family, and we got on the buses and rode back to the Visitors' Center.
Pictures to follow sometime.
We got up early and had breakfast at Frisch's. Then we drove. I slept in the car. We had breakfast at "Aunt Bee' Country Restaurant". Then things got more interesting.
-We found Diamond Cavern, and bought tickets for the next tour, which left in about five minutes, so we had to hurry a little. Our tour guide was Jimmy; he had a southern drawl, but despite that he didn't live up to the stereotype and was actually pretty smart. He showed us all sorts of pretty awesome formations as we descended into the bowels of Kentucky. The floor was slick and we weren't allowed to touch anything, but it was still a pretty excellent tour. Everything was brown. The air was moist and the temperature stayed normalized at 58°. The owners had strung lights not just for lighting, but to really emphasize the structures. One light hung behind a strip of "cave bacon", which is a translucent sheet of calcite with streaks of different colors to it. Other lights stuck onto the ceiling next to stalactites bigger than our tour group and collections of infinitely detailed filigree. Flowstones jutted out of the walls and onto our isolated, concrete-paved path. Jimmy turned out the lights for us and showed us what the cave was like when there was no electric lighting - they used candles, and it was pretty darn bland. We walked by a now-defunct altar made out of broken-off stalactites and stalagmites and such (salvaged after people from the area's rivaling caves had broken them off). The trail was sometimes cramped and constricted, and sometimes huge and open. Things you'd never expect hung from the ceiling. In fact, there were three structures - dripstones, I think Jimmy called them - that geologists say cannot grow above one another, and they were all stacked right on top of each other. "What happens in the cave stays in the cave," he said.
-Eventually, past all the frozen waterfalls and illogical rock forms, we hit the end of the line, and turned around. At the time I was a bit unsatisfied, but now I realize - there's not much else I could ask rocks to do for me. It's a pretty special cave all-around.
-I bought some magnetic hematite rocks at the gift shop, and we found a hotel: the Mammoth Cave Hotel, located I think in the middle of Mammoth Cave National Park. On entering the room, I found a sheet of paper detailing a walking trail next to the hotel, so I suggested it. Only Dad and I went; Mom and Micah stayed in the hotel instead and watched Family Guy. We drive two hundred miles and they stay inside not a hundred feet from the edge of what Dad and I think may be a real old-growth forest, at the onset of spring. It boggles the mind.
-The first thing Dad and I did was get good and lost, because that's the only way to have a proper hike. This we did by forsaking the trail and skipping down a scattering of boulders slicked down a steep hillside until we found a brand new trail. We took that one past a few pretty capacious sinkholes. One was probably fifteen feet deep. I think they all drain to a series of caves below, or something. I was barefoot, and the sharp gravel woke up nerves that had been hibernating all winter. We found a little out-of-order cottage, and then picked one of two trails at random at a forking, heading to the Echo River Spring. The forest was pine and cedar, Dad guesses, and really wide and spacious. I could feel its health, even though trees aren't budding yet.
-The Echo River is green and wells up from a spring at the bottom of a deep, green pool. The pool sloshes ever so slowly and silently and we couldn't figure out why at all. There are dead trees growing in the middle of it. Why? We approached it from two different angles but neither offered answers.
-We took a trail that promised to take us to the CAMPGROUND. It ascended the hill we'd descended, through a series of switchback and oxbows. We saw some standoffish deer. "They're Ohio deer," Dad said. "They've got an O on the license tag." At the top of the hill, the trail diverged with no clues, both ways leading off into scenic nowheres. We picked the one that seemed right; it petered out, and we found another one nearby. That one took us through a huge bowl where no roads came, and not even any road noise. Beautiful - but when you're trying to find civilization again, unnerving. Daylight was fading fast. We kept following the trail, and it led us up a hillside to some lights that proved to be our hotel. Mom and Micah were both inside watching the Griffins evade Y2K.
-We spent the rest of the night playing a long, distracted game of Scrabble. Then it was TV until bedtime. My feet are still tingling.
[I haven't written this part in my journal yet, so this is all on the fly.]
We woke up today and packed up our stuff into the truck. We walked to breakfast in the hotel's restaurant, and from there we walked across a bridge to the Visitors' Center. I was taken aback - it was teeming. We found the information desk and the guy told us that the 4-hour tour of Mammoth Cave was sold out until sometime in April, and the longest tour still available for today was the 2-hour New Entrance tour. So we bought tickets for that at noon, and kind of waited around until then. I read a few books in the bookstore part. Mom did crossstitch in the truck, and Dad sat on a bench outside enjoying the fresh air. I think Micah kind of wandered. The tour bus smelled of urine.
-This tour group was 119 people, said the tour guide. As such, it wasn't as personal as the Diamond Cavern one. We got into a line, and all descended one after another down a steep and cramped stainless steel staircase into a shaft about a hundred feet deep. The staircase spiraled around perplexingly, so that we were frequently walking above or below another section of the line. Water trickled through the ground into our giant hole, and through all the dark cavities on its sides. There were stalactites and stalagmites, but not as numerous as they were in Diamond Cavern. This cave had an altogether different character. Or rather, several different characters. After we came out of the shaft, we kept descending through other passages until we came to a huge auditorium - wooden benches set in the rock floor, fifteen-foot rock ceiling. The tour guides gave a little presentation there, showing us the total darkness like Jimmy had, and then we all got up and kept moving. The next section was a dry, open one with no stalactites or anything, a section that had stopped growing. Here, huge rocks balanced precariously over us. There was more maneuvering room in general. One chamber had a big, flat ceiling. The tour guide answered questions from some people there, about mummies found in the cave, and things like that. And we kept walking through the huge, dark, light-brown chambers. Rock tumbles stretched out below us into black depths, and the ceiling was a jumble too, which was different from any other ceiling I've been under before. From time to time we saw things that people had left there. One pile of rocks had an old lantern on it.
-Finally, we came to the last chamber we would visit, another one full of structures. There was the Frozen Niagara, thirty-foot flowstone. There was a ceiling that consisted entirely of glistening stalactites. There was a pillar in progress that, when it comes together sometime in the next few millennia, will be about fifty feet high probably. I enjoyed it all. I breathed the cool damp cave air. Then, abruptly, I found that the trail had led me back out to the bright outdoors. So I waited for the rest of the family, and we got on the buses and rode back to the Visitors' Center.
Pictures to follow sometime.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Train Travel
I've always loved trains. It's kind of puzzling, actually. Even long after I should have become jaded to them, by living not two hundred yards from a track on which two or three go by every day, they still make me happy. So I decided someday I ought to take one to get between Cincinnati and Grinnell.
-I couldn't find a ride who would take me to Cincinnati for spring break, so instead I looked for a ride to Chicago, so I could take the Amtrak from there back home. Looking for this ride coincided with midsems week, so it took some effort to do both at the same time. I ended up sending out an APB to all the students from Chicago in the directory, and asking everyone I knew if they knew anyone riding to Chicago on Saturday morning. My search turned up two cars. Upon trading e-mails, I discovered both were completely full. It would be tmpossible for me to get to Chicago on Saturday morning, and I didn't want to spend the night there. Luckily, I also came across a shuttle going to Ottumwa, Iowa, on Saturday morning, from where an Amtrak could take me to Chicago and transfer me to the Cincinnati-bound train. So I did that instead.
-The shuttle was a small bus driven by a nice old lady; including the two Latina girls who set up the shuttle, there were just three of us. We got to Ottumwa in plenty of time for the 10:09 California Zephyr, and the guy at the desk informed us that the Zephyr would be arriving sometime around 12:40 due to delays.
-I was expecting that. The impression that I've gotten from online recountings is that, these days, Amtrak is pretty much always late. Ben, who lives across the hall from me, had told me he figued the train took about eleven hours to do a ten-hour schedule, and so on accordingly. The Zephyr had come from California, so it was bound to be a good deal late. It'd be nice if the trains could always be on time, but I recognize that that's improbable, giwen how marginalized Amtrak is by all the freight companies. Freight trains are way more numerous, so Amtrak has to yield to them all the time. Additionally, trains have had a sharp decrease in popularity as a means of transportation, so there are fewer and fewer, and delays have to build up instead of being overflowed into the nekt scheduled train, because it would be too long a wait. And then fewer people want to ride, because the train gets a reputation for being late. It's a vicious cycle, and a shame. But I wasn't in any hurry. I wanted to ride almost as much for the experience as I did to actually get somewhere. Lateness didn't bother me. It gave me and Laura and Viri some time to eat breakfast at the 2nd Street Café.
-We came back to the station and waited. Viri slept; Laura and I played some cards, and then she braided my hair, which was pretty nice. As she finished, it was getting time for the train to come. Everyone waiting in the station stepped out into the bright, cloudy morning - it had recently snowed, but all melted - and stood under the concrete canopy watching for the Zephyr to arrive. It came about when the old guy in the booth had said it would.
-I had to take a little stuff out of my huge backpack to fit it into the overhead stowage, but then I settled down no problem. A girl named Alisa was sitting next to me; she and a few friends were coming from Omaha, where they were in grad school. We were on the top floor of the double-decker car. It was pretty special. The first thing that impressed me was the legroom. On a bus, I'm never comfortable. On the train, I was really comfortable. The seats didn't suck; in fact, they were a pleasure to sit in. For a while, I just watched out the window. The first thing I saw from a moving train was a flagpole with waving US and Iowa flags. The scenery was typical midwest fields, mostly - I've heard people complain about ut, but I mean, really Amtrak can't help what the scenery looks like. Actually, I liked getting to see an aspect of cities that a lot of people don't get to see - namely, the area around the railroad. There are all sorts of buildings and other structures there that you just don't see elsewhere. Another thing is that it's nice and uncrowded. The only company you're bound to get is a freight train, passing by on the parallel track. When both trains are traveling at a pretty good clip, this results in a combined relative speed of approximately race car. So about three freight cars a second go by your window, probably less than two fet away from it. That's another thing I like: everything fits really closely around the trains. So as we were crossing the Mississippi River, the big iron bridge support beams rose up close enough to us that, if we could open the windows, we'd be able to reach out and touch them and get our hands messily chopped off, which is why the windows aren't openable, but coming back to my point, it's pretty cool how it's all so precise. It also meant that I could look almost straight down into the brown Mississippi water.
-But I wasn't staring out the window all the time. Mostly I read the books that I've been meaning to read all semester, but haven't found time for. I finished House of Leaves during the trip, and also How We Are Hungry. Until the train ride, all the reading was very piecemeal, taking what I could get. By the way, House of Leaves is definitely something to look for if you want something different. It's also really freaky and pretty unnerving as well. How We Are Hungry is more normal but still not quite normal. It's a collection of short stories, the strangest of which is "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself". It's five blank pages. The rest are real stories, and (incidentally) good ones. I spent most of my time finishing these, not getting done until the middle of the night somewhere in Indiana, after transferring in Chicago.
-When we got to Chicago, we slipped under the city into Union Station, which is a nicely spooky place full of brown-colored light and chamber echoes of trains shifting around. We were late getting there, of course, but the connecting Cardinal train had been held up for us, so we were all able to get onto it if we needed to. When the Cardinal started moving after we got on, the passengers who'd been waiting since 17:45 (it was now 18:15) there started cheering. We traveled about five minutes out, and then waited for freight trains. We did a great deal of waiting. Amtrak really gets the shaft when it comes to right-of-way on the tracks, and it's hard not to get a bit of a sour taste in your mouth. We finally got moving properly fr the night at 19:45. But, as I say, I wasn't in a hurry, so I just read.
-Once I finished the books, it was about 01:00 or 02:00, so I decided to get some sleep and wait for Cincinnati. A couple times I woke up worried that we may have passed it already, but we hadn't. The train was scheduled to get to Cincinnati at 03:17; delayed in Connersville, Indiana, it pulled in finally at about 06:00 and let me off. And Mom picked me up, and we had IHOP for breakfast.
-I couldn't find a ride who would take me to Cincinnati for spring break, so instead I looked for a ride to Chicago, so I could take the Amtrak from there back home. Looking for this ride coincided with midsems week, so it took some effort to do both at the same time. I ended up sending out an APB to all the students from Chicago in the directory, and asking everyone I knew if they knew anyone riding to Chicago on Saturday morning. My search turned up two cars. Upon trading e-mails, I discovered both were completely full. It would be tmpossible for me to get to Chicago on Saturday morning, and I didn't want to spend the night there. Luckily, I also came across a shuttle going to Ottumwa, Iowa, on Saturday morning, from where an Amtrak could take me to Chicago and transfer me to the Cincinnati-bound train. So I did that instead.
-The shuttle was a small bus driven by a nice old lady; including the two Latina girls who set up the shuttle, there were just three of us. We got to Ottumwa in plenty of time for the 10:09 California Zephyr, and the guy at the desk informed us that the Zephyr would be arriving sometime around 12:40 due to delays.
-I was expecting that. The impression that I've gotten from online recountings is that, these days, Amtrak is pretty much always late. Ben, who lives across the hall from me, had told me he figued the train took about eleven hours to do a ten-hour schedule, and so on accordingly. The Zephyr had come from California, so it was bound to be a good deal late. It'd be nice if the trains could always be on time, but I recognize that that's improbable, giwen how marginalized Amtrak is by all the freight companies. Freight trains are way more numerous, so Amtrak has to yield to them all the time. Additionally, trains have had a sharp decrease in popularity as a means of transportation, so there are fewer and fewer, and delays have to build up instead of being overflowed into the nekt scheduled train, because it would be too long a wait. And then fewer people want to ride, because the train gets a reputation for being late. It's a vicious cycle, and a shame. But I wasn't in any hurry. I wanted to ride almost as much for the experience as I did to actually get somewhere. Lateness didn't bother me. It gave me and Laura and Viri some time to eat breakfast at the 2nd Street Café.
-We came back to the station and waited. Viri slept; Laura and I played some cards, and then she braided my hair, which was pretty nice. As she finished, it was getting time for the train to come. Everyone waiting in the station stepped out into the bright, cloudy morning - it had recently snowed, but all melted - and stood under the concrete canopy watching for the Zephyr to arrive. It came about when the old guy in the booth had said it would.
-I had to take a little stuff out of my huge backpack to fit it into the overhead stowage, but then I settled down no problem. A girl named Alisa was sitting next to me; she and a few friends were coming from Omaha, where they were in grad school. We were on the top floor of the double-decker car. It was pretty special. The first thing that impressed me was the legroom. On a bus, I'm never comfortable. On the train, I was really comfortable. The seats didn't suck; in fact, they were a pleasure to sit in. For a while, I just watched out the window. The first thing I saw from a moving train was a flagpole with waving US and Iowa flags. The scenery was typical midwest fields, mostly - I've heard people complain about ut, but I mean, really Amtrak can't help what the scenery looks like. Actually, I liked getting to see an aspect of cities that a lot of people don't get to see - namely, the area around the railroad. There are all sorts of buildings and other structures there that you just don't see elsewhere. Another thing is that it's nice and uncrowded. The only company you're bound to get is a freight train, passing by on the parallel track. When both trains are traveling at a pretty good clip, this results in a combined relative speed of approximately race car. So about three freight cars a second go by your window, probably less than two fet away from it. That's another thing I like: everything fits really closely around the trains. So as we were crossing the Mississippi River, the big iron bridge support beams rose up close enough to us that, if we could open the windows, we'd be able to reach out and touch them and get our hands messily chopped off, which is why the windows aren't openable, but coming back to my point, it's pretty cool how it's all so precise. It also meant that I could look almost straight down into the brown Mississippi water.
-But I wasn't staring out the window all the time. Mostly I read the books that I've been meaning to read all semester, but haven't found time for. I finished House of Leaves during the trip, and also How We Are Hungry. Until the train ride, all the reading was very piecemeal, taking what I could get. By the way, House of Leaves is definitely something to look for if you want something different. It's also really freaky and pretty unnerving as well. How We Are Hungry is more normal but still not quite normal. It's a collection of short stories, the strangest of which is "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself". It's five blank pages. The rest are real stories, and (incidentally) good ones. I spent most of my time finishing these, not getting done until the middle of the night somewhere in Indiana, after transferring in Chicago.
-When we got to Chicago, we slipped under the city into Union Station, which is a nicely spooky place full of brown-colored light and chamber echoes of trains shifting around. We were late getting there, of course, but the connecting Cardinal train had been held up for us, so we were all able to get onto it if we needed to. When the Cardinal started moving after we got on, the passengers who'd been waiting since 17:45 (it was now 18:15) there started cheering. We traveled about five minutes out, and then waited for freight trains. We did a great deal of waiting. Amtrak really gets the shaft when it comes to right-of-way on the tracks, and it's hard not to get a bit of a sour taste in your mouth. We finally got moving properly fr the night at 19:45. But, as I say, I wasn't in a hurry, so I just read.
-Once I finished the books, it was about 01:00 or 02:00, so I decided to get some sleep and wait for Cincinnati. A couple times I woke up worried that we may have passed it already, but we hadn't. The train was scheduled to get to Cincinnati at 03:17; delayed in Connersville, Indiana, it pulled in finally at about 06:00 and let me off. And Mom picked me up, and we had IHOP for breakfast.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Soup Opera
That's my new neologism. I have no idea what it means, but it sounds intriguingly demeaning and funny. Anyone have ideas?
What's been going on? Well, classes, mostly. I've been trying to talk to more real people, also. That's something I've been poor at recently. There's a girl who invited me to watch Jeopardy! with her on weeknights sometimes, but then I went at 7:30 and discovered that she was three but watching America's Next Top Model. Turns out Jeopardy! isn't on at 7:30 here. It's Central Time, one hour behind, so naturally it's on at 4:30. "Wha?" I realized just tonight that, though I thought I was going to have a pretty easy midterm week, it's actually going to be a ridiculous amount of work. Maybe not ridiculous. Maybe so. It's because I'm in Press. That means I have a meeting to prepare for, which is going to happen on Tuesday. I also have to write a story or write something for craft of fiction and distribute it by tomorrow night. And I also have to become good at playing cadences for my keyboard lab on Tuesday. And I have to become good at sight singing, for my aural skills test on Tuesday. Yeah: it's a lot of work. But after Tuesday, I'm mostly free. Linguistics midsem on Wednesday, which will be a breeze (let's hope that doesn't become a jinx, but I don't think it will). All this basically means that tomorrow and Monday are solid work, and Tuesday is a culmination, and then I'm just waiting for spring break. For which I'm frustrated that no one has offered me a ride yet, despite requests both active and passive. I'm still looking, though.
-I watched a couple movies on the College's dime. No Country for Old Men was pretty awesome, and so was Into the Wild. Except for the dying young and alone part, Alexander Supertramp's looks like an excellent life. Llewelyn Moss's looks a bit less so, what with the being chased and executed by a madman who kills people with a cattle-slaughtering gun. On a vaguely related note, I had Imaginary Week in my journal, and in it I ran off and hopped a train to somewhere in Minnesota (that's where Imaginary Week always seems to end up). I camped in the snow, and later stumbled upon the camp of a girl who did the same thing, though she was in high school and so did it while still going to school each day. We camped together a few nights, but I refrained from taking the plot very deep in the relationship, because it just seems wrong to have my first significant relationship be one I completely made up.
-And, I've been working on Newt (the font), but because school has kept me so busy, I'm still not done. After Tuesday, I should be able to get through with it. After all, in various bits of free time, I've gotten to the last of the eight styles I needed to upgrade. So, once I'm done with that, I'll save it and take it home, or if I have time, I'll fix it up good here, and then I'll put the foreign stuff up on the Typophile Critique page, and then I'll sell it. Huzzah for making money! It seems this process is interminable, but it really is coming close to an end now. After it does, I'll be able to start working on Cyril, and then sell that. It should go for a good amount, since it has such extensive language support. I'm making a Greek for it, and the Greek looks really cool. I also made chess pieces for it. Here, I'll show you.
Edited: I don't know why, but the link only wants to show a picture I have of a guy holding an egg. It might work now.
What's been going on? Well, classes, mostly. I've been trying to talk to more real people, also. That's something I've been poor at recently. There's a girl who invited me to watch Jeopardy! with her on weeknights sometimes, but then I went at 7:30 and discovered that she was three but watching America's Next Top Model. Turns out Jeopardy! isn't on at 7:30 here. It's Central Time, one hour behind, so naturally it's on at 4:30. "Wha?" I realized just tonight that, though I thought I was going to have a pretty easy midterm week, it's actually going to be a ridiculous amount of work. Maybe not ridiculous. Maybe so. It's because I'm in Press. That means I have a meeting to prepare for, which is going to happen on Tuesday. I also have to write a story or write something for craft of fiction and distribute it by tomorrow night. And I also have to become good at playing cadences for my keyboard lab on Tuesday. And I have to become good at sight singing, for my aural skills test on Tuesday. Yeah: it's a lot of work. But after Tuesday, I'm mostly free. Linguistics midsem on Wednesday, which will be a breeze (let's hope that doesn't become a jinx, but I don't think it will). All this basically means that tomorrow and Monday are solid work, and Tuesday is a culmination, and then I'm just waiting for spring break. For which I'm frustrated that no one has offered me a ride yet, despite requests both active and passive. I'm still looking, though.
-I watched a couple movies on the College's dime. No Country for Old Men was pretty awesome, and so was Into the Wild. Except for the dying young and alone part, Alexander Supertramp's looks like an excellent life. Llewelyn Moss's looks a bit less so, what with the being chased and executed by a madman who kills people with a cattle-slaughtering gun. On a vaguely related note, I had Imaginary Week in my journal, and in it I ran off and hopped a train to somewhere in Minnesota (that's where Imaginary Week always seems to end up). I camped in the snow, and later stumbled upon the camp of a girl who did the same thing, though she was in high school and so did it while still going to school each day. We camped together a few nights, but I refrained from taking the plot very deep in the relationship, because it just seems wrong to have my first significant relationship be one I completely made up.
-And, I've been working on Newt (the font), but because school has kept me so busy, I'm still not done. After Tuesday, I should be able to get through with it. After all, in various bits of free time, I've gotten to the last of the eight styles I needed to upgrade. So, once I'm done with that, I'll save it and take it home, or if I have time, I'll fix it up good here, and then I'll put the foreign stuff up on the Typophile Critique page, and then I'll sell it. Huzzah for making money! It seems this process is interminable, but it really is coming close to an end now. After it does, I'll be able to start working on Cyril, and then sell that. It should go for a good amount, since it has such extensive language support. I'm making a Greek for it, and the Greek looks really cool. I also made chess pieces for it. Here, I'll show you.
Edited: I don't know why, but the link only wants to show a picture I have of a guy holding an egg. It might work now.
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