Qik note

On my way back to Grinnell, I saw
-A place called "Qik N EZ".
-A truck that had skidded partially off the road and was blocking one lane.
-A truck from the Batesville Casket Company that said on the back, "Please drive safely - Heaven can wait". I wanted to take a picture, but I couldn't get to my camera from up in the front.

Bowing, Arrowing

Today I overslept, and then I picked up Aaron's brother Jeremy to go make bows and arrows with Mr Lorenz. Jeremy is still at Finneytown Secondary Campus - the poor fellow - as a senior. Mr Lorenz is the sole French teacher and the coach of the academic team, and in his spare time he makes bows, arrows, trebuchets, and other assorted awesome stuff. If you'd like to picture him, he's the tallest person on the Finneytown Secondary Campus, and he has light brown hair, and no one I know has ever seen him in a mode other than happy. I drove us to his house, although I managed to take us many miles in the wrong direction first. I've got the driving thing fine; the next hurdle is navigation. I actually don't think I'm that bad at navigation, it's just that Cincinnati is complicated in places. I do take the blame for going west instead of east. Anyhow.
-We got to his house, and went into his small backyard, where he had a table full of tools, a garage full of wood, and a few rock benches with more wood. He has a lot of stuff. He picked out a long stick of yew for Jeremy, who apparently had discussed earlier with him what kind of bow he'd like to make. Then he picked up a piece of walnut that he'd vaguely started working with, and showed me what to do with it. I started working on it with a planer, shaving it down to the right shape. With the planer it was some painfully slow going. Then he gave me a drawknife he had, and the work magically disappeared. I had the general shape of the bow fleshed out pretty soon after that, and then I spent a while fine-tuning it with the planer. Meanwhile, Jeremy sat on a Schnitzelbank and hacked away at his yew stick with a machete. Interspersed into all this bow-making action, though, we had fun. For example, we got to meet all the little Lorenzes. I think they're 11, 6, and 5. The 11-year-old was Seth, who was working on a bow of his own. The others were his two daughters, who are pretty darn cute (and like to talk a lot). Also, he got pizza for everyone for lunch, and we ate that. Also, when I went to use his bathroom, I discovered that he has the old style of toilet with the tank up above and a pull cord to flush it. Basically, he's awesome. We also made a few arrows today. I gave him one of the arrowheads I've been making on Fridays when I'm not too exhausted to go knap flint, and I used another to make an arrow for myself.
-Unfortunately, there were too few hours in the day, and we didn't get to the end of any bows. But we're going to go back next Saturday and finish the job. We didn't finish the arrows, either, because the glue holding on the flights (feathers) would've taken too long to set. Instead, Mr Lorenz is just going to fletch them all himself (he's making a few with regular metal points), and they'll be ready when we come back. Hopefully next Saturday will be enough time to finish these bows, because I do look forward to having a self-made bow. How awesome will that be?
-That's about all I've got for this post. Before you go, I want to mention this: Mom's been feeling pretty poorly lately. Mom, I hope you feel better as soon as physically possible, and everyone else, wellwishes are appreciated.

Everybody, we need to start blogging again.

And it has been a while, too. It's been a busy few weeks, the last ones before spring break, resulting in oogobs of work piling up. Actually, it wasn't all that bad, because most of my professors seemed to think we were probably being overloaded by our other professors, and so they compensated by giving me a lightish workload. There was only one class that had a whole bunch due - my sociology class, for which I had to do a 4-page paper and a take-home exam within a week of each other. So there was only one night where I stayed up really late. I ended up going to bed at 6:15 AM that night. So I got about one REM cycle, which is better than zero. The good thing is that I get two weeks of spring break, but the bad thing is that I have a 7-page paper to write sometime before I get back in town. I'm going to make a sincere effort to get that done before this weekend, so I don't have to think about it later.
-What other stuff happened before I left? Oh, here's one. I got accepted to live in EcoHouse for my second semester next year. EcoHouse is a college-owned project house whose residents strive to make as little impact on the environment as they can while being college students also. This isn't Trendy Green stuff, like "Put in compact fluorescents!" and "Recycle a little more!". It's well-considered actions that do more than just make the residents look Green. For example, EcoHouse is big about buying local foods to as great an extent as possible. A couple people last year actually went on a 100-mile diet, where everything they ate came from within a 100-mile radius (except for a few little things like coffee and sugar). I don't know what they ate (corn, corn byproducts, corn derivatives, corn extracts), but they didn't ship in every meal from halfway across the globe. Relatedly, there's a garden out back, which we're expanding 44% for next year, and which will grow tomatoes, squash, various spices, pumpkins, lettuce, carrots, cabbage, and all sortsa other good stuff. The garden is fed with compost from the house's meals, which the EcoHouse people cook themselves a good deal. There's one meal every week, Sunday evenings, where the whole house gets together and cooks a meal and then has a meeting to talk about how the week went for everyone, and what chores still need to be done, and what debts need to be settled, and so on. The house has been renovated to be more water- and energy-efficient: low-flow toilets, sinks, and showerheads; an energy monitoring system and soon some window quilts to keep warm (or cold) air in. I think I'm really going to like living there.
-Press has started working on its projects for this semester. We have three: a set of postcards from around the college, a book of photography of subtropical animals (the photographer went to Costa Rica and Florida for a college thing), and a fantasy novel that takes place in the land of Insanity, and whose protagonists are two kids who were a little bit too crazy for Reason, so the elves snatched them away. I'll be sure to bring everyone copies. They're all fun.
-I visited the Amana Colonies with my intentional communities class. Our professor is pretty much the premier scholar on the Amanas - in one of the pieces he gave us to read, a guy wrote about them, and cited Professor Andelson almost exclusively, except for a newspaper columnist from the 1800s. So we had a good and informative tour, especially since Professor Andelson teamed up with Lanny Watts of the Amana Heritage Society. (I just looked up how to spell Watts, and in the Amana Heritage Society I only found references to Lanny Haldy, so I don't know exactly Watts up with that.) I bought some Millstream root beer, and it was very tasty. At first I didn't think it was all that great, but it grew on me. I like that it uses real sugar, not corn syrup.
-I worked at CERA a few times. Once, our manager Larissa ("our" being mine and Jacob's - he's an EcoHouse guy who works there too this semester with me) had an owlet with her, because someone she knew had found it on his farm, injured. Larissa was keeping it at CERA for a while because it was closer to where she was going to take it eventually, a raptor rehabilitation place. It was a very cute owlet. Owlet! If you're ever depressed, Google for pictures of owlets. I just did it, and I think they're even cuter than kittens.
-I also worked at Bob's. One night, there was a big party in the lounge next door. One very drunk guy came in while I was playing 碁* with a friend in the dining area, and he asked if he could get some water from the tap. I said sure, so he went over to the sink. After a few moments, he called over to me, "It's not working." "You're maybe turning it the wrong way?" I told him, and went over to look. It transpired that he had been trying to use the soap dispenser.
-I've also started training to be a leader for GOOP next year. You may recall that I applied to be a GOOP leader last year, but I didn't get in. This year they kind of couldn't refuse me, since I worked at Manito-wish last summer. It looks like it'll be fun. I'm definitely looking forward to it. We've only had one training session so far, where we talked about blisters and sunburn and CPR and such. Unfortunately for my Spain trip, the two don't look like they can both happen next year, and I have to say that I'm probably going to side with GOOP. However, Aunt Irene, I did appreciate you sending me that letter that you wrote for Leah. I do hope to go overseas sometime, but it looks like I might not do it for a college semester. I guess that'll leave me room to do something a little more unstructured, which may well give me a better opportunity to experience the culture anyhow. Maybe I'll even do the stereotypical college-student thing and go backpacking around Europe for a while after I graduate - who knows.
-And, I'm going to be turning twenty in six days. That, to me, is really weird. I wrote something about it in my journal a couple days ago:

Speaking of which, that's something it's hard for me to reconcile myself with. In eight days, I'm going to be twenty. Teenagedness will be behind me forever. I suppose I won't have actually changed, since life is continuous and not broken up into discrete decades - "The Growing Up Decade", "The Rebellion Decade", and now "The Forming-Your-Life-and-Career Decade"** - but it still feels mighty weird to be coming up on a new tens-place digit. Twenty! I know I'm not allowed to yet, but I feel old! If all goes typically, I've already lived a quarter, maybe a fifth of my life! Holy hell, I only get to do this three or four more times before I keel over and croak! I should probably stop that now, all the morbidity, since I'm only turning twenty. But it feels really weird, and I wanted that on the record. It feels alarming, too. That's a word I needed.

I haven't done much with my spring break yet. I'll put up bulletins as it goes by. A few fun things are definitely going to happen. Meanwhile, since I was looking at my journal, I'll put out something else I found in there:
-I dreamt that I was going to do something dangerous on my bike, and that I knew I might lose a leg doing it, but I did it anyhow. I did lose a leg, the right one. So did a woman named Ida Mose, and a guy I didn't know. We commiserated.

*That's "go", but I like to use the Japanese character, because it's hard to confuse it with the verb "go".

**Followed by "The Parenthood Decade", "The Mid-Life Crisis Decade", "The Working a Lot Decade", "The End-of-Work and Free-Time Decade", "The Last Hurrah Decade", "The Rest Home Decade", the "Extra Innings Decade", and any following decades would be part of "The Your-Days-Are-Numbered Era". This is purposely a very pessimistic classification system. I'm sure things look much better from down the road a ways.