Newt Serif

Sorry I haven't been around. For a while there it was pretty busy.
-So, I finished my semester. And that was a relief. It was a rough semester, but at the end I pulled stuff together. And I checked my grades yesterday - all different flavors of B's. For one class that was better than I hoped, and for two it was worse - but not a whole lot worse. So I'm not complaining too much. Next semester I'll know that I have to budget my time pretty far in advance.
-I packed stuff up and washed my hands of the state of Iowa. I had to bring the snake home, and that was an interesting proposition. What I ended up doing was putting him in a cardboard box wth some of those little air-activated hand-warmer things. For a passenger I had Hugh, the other barefoot guy from campus. Unfortunately, the only food stop we did was at a Subway with one of those signs that requires shoes in the store, and we decided not to argue the point, depriving us of the opportunity to perplex some people.
-So then Christmas happened. I did all my shopping on Christmas Eve, but I didn't have much to do, so it was okay. I don't need to write a whole lot about Christmas here, because most of you who read this were with me and experienced it yourself. I like Christmas. Alas, it's over.
-A week later, then, it became 2009, marking the last year for several decades that partiers will be able to wear those glasses that have eyeholes in the zeroes and two other digits sticking out the sides. They've been able to make those since 1980. I imagine some company that's been making these the whole time, and now they're clearing out all the office furniture. "Well, folks, we knew this day would come, but that doesn't make it any less sad. I've had a great thirty years with you all. Maybe if we're alive we can get the business running again in 2060." I rang in the year in the living room with Mom, Dad, and Karl. It was a pretty tame party.
-The big story for this January is that my font is finally on the market! It sure has been a long journey. It's here, on Veer. I'm excited. I finally feel like a real font designer!

-Now I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to do with myself for the rest of this break. So far I've been reading a lot, and stuffing my CD collection onto my laptop with the iTunes I recently downloaded. And biking around when it gets too oppressing to be in the house all the time. Also I've been going to bed far too late and waking up halfway through daylight. I'm trying to change that. I've been driving a lot, which annoys me a little; I drove my bike to the bike shop for repairs, and I've driven to visit my friend Aaron a couple times.
-So, the thing I'm thinking will take up some of my time is that I might go to Nana & Papaw's house. Mom has been the motive force behind this idea, but I think it's a good one too. Nana & Papaw can teach me how to hunt well, and what to do after I succeed. So I'm probably going to call them up today and ask if it'd be possible for me to do that - whether it works with whatever they're doing and with the hunting laws. Because Mom makes a good point: I should learn from people I know who have been doing this stuff for decades before I decide to go spend good money in order to learn skills from an outdoor school that has lots of people who may or may not be legit.
UPDATED I talked to Dad to see what he thought of the plan. He thinks a better idea would be for us two to take a week during my spring break and hunt groundhogs (or, whistle pigs) out where he grew up. I'd need a pricy out-of-state hunting license to hunt in WV, and some other stuff that I don't have. Dad says he would do lots of hunting and selling pelts when he was a kid. So he's qualified.
-Stuff I've read:
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A little bit of a history of the Plains Indians
A book about trains
-A book I want to read:
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett. It's about the very odd Pirahã tribe that lives somewhere in the Amazon basin. Their language has no numbers in it, and the tribe members can't reliably distinguish between a group of four things and a similarly arranged group of five things. I learned about them in linguistics or something, but I had heard about them in Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent. He had heard them called the Janamanos somewhere, but what he said about them was pretty accurate. He was talking about disc jockeys, because they were getting on his nerves during the infinite boredom of driving across the West: "Can there anywhere be a breed of people more irritating and imbecilic than disc jockeys? In South America there is a tribe of Indians called the Janamanos, who are so backward they cannot even count to three. Their counting system goes, 'One, two … oh, gosh, a whole bunch.' Obviously disc jockeys have a better dress sense and possess a little more in the way of social skills, but I think we are looking at a similar level of mental acuity."
-Okay, so until next time, remember: Never end a sentence with a comma,