Deep Thoughts

I wish I had a sand box.

Diary Entry...

Still no candied corned beef in sight... The men are beginning to lose hope and have resorted to rationing meals so that we might push on further, although I somehow fear a mutiny may be in store if we do not find what we're looking for in the next few months. The length of day has grown lean and the dogs are fighting more often now. One can only hope that we will find more resources, and especially the coloring books that the men are so desperately attached to...the thin pages can only hold so many months of crayon markings depicting colours of the deeply needful soul...
-Joe

Chinese Wonderland

I now know there is an Asian restaurant in northern Idaho (next to a very nice lake) that has a koi pond inside the bottom floor. There are chinese lanterns hanging everywhere and all the furniture and woodwork in the room are bamboo. Awesome atmosphere. The koi pond is a wide circular ribbon like a lazy river and the middle island contains room for several more tables, accessed by a little bridge. It was really neat! I got to sit next to the fattest part of the pond/stagnant river and a turtle sat next to me on a rock with big koi and some little goldfish swimming all around him. If I ever build a generic Asian cuisine restaurant, it will look just like this. The only difference is that I'll serve regular clumpy rice instead of the dry fluffy American stuff that you can't eat with chopsticks. The fluffy stuff was actually a menu item, which is really bizzare for asian cuisine.

I guess that was the "Hey! We're in Idaho!" part.

I'd probably pump the water in a circle really fast and over some rocks and a little waterfall so people could watch the koi jump like salmon. That would probably be neat during supper.






Either that or they'd just kinda tumble over the falls as they're whisked around the river... "Mommy! What's THAT?"

The Saga Continues

Eh....they dumped the trash.

Ice Cream Leftovers

Okay, get this. Last night I got an icecream-based dessert to go from a restaraunt I ate at. Just before I went to bed I ate the thing. There's no fridge in my room, so in order to keep it cold I ingeniously used my ice bucket, filled halfway, to attempt to chill the dessert (peanut butter ice cream on an oreo crust...eh...it was alright). It didn't work all that well. A little mushy, but it was still cold and could be eaten with the fork I got from room service ;)

So I'm done with the thing. I don't want to throw it in the trash can because the waxy cardboard box it came in will probably soak through and leave ice cream nastiness all over the unbagged (no clue) trash can. So, I dump out the ice from the bucket and just put the trash in there. Its sitting in the top of the container, open and visibly empty except for a few oreo crumbs and a bunch of chocolate mush...and the fork sticking out of it.

I get back to my room today and found room service done with their duties. I eat, come back, then get ready to head off to work again at 9pm PST. I know, not fun. Anyhow, I come out of the bathroom only to see my friend Mr. Icecream container still in its little bucket. "What the crap?" I'm thinking. "Didn't they see this thing? It takes up half of the sink countertop." Then I notice that its sitting a little higher in the bucket than it was when it was yesterday's trash.

They put ice in the bucket underneath it to keep my garbage cold. Chilled chocotrash ala fork.

Is that service or what?

No, really. Its a legitimate question...please comment...I'll be laughing for several days about this one.

Pure Swank

Alrighty, my trip to Seattle was awesome last week. Ate in the space needle during a sunset, etc. Found out that the cascade mountains (washington state) are every bit as awesome (if not moreso) than the rockies. They're just as tall and a lot rockier. Mount Raineer looks a WHOLE lot like mount Fuji. Its 14 thousand feet tall (like colorado's mountains) and it sits on the opposite end of a county that starts at sea level on the west end. 0 feet to 14K feet is WAY more than anything colorado can do. Essentially, its pretty cool. Oh yeah...I spent the weekend in the RAINFOREST on the west coast of the cascades. Didn't know it was there, but its the coolest place I've EVER SEEN! Here's the lodge: http://www.visitlakequinault.com/ I was gonna post a link to pics of the rainforest, but none of them were nearly as cool as what I experienced. I mean...it was a real rainforest, mind you it was temperate climate, but every square inch of everything was covered with green stuff and slugs and bugs and a whole lot more green stuff (bugs weren't bad at all). Saw the farthest northwest point in the continental US and stood on the 80-foot cliff there. Pounding waves, cold blue water, sea otters rolling around, the whole bit. I met a town named Sequim (squim).

I'm in Spokane this week and its like a trip back to the wild west. I ate in a place called the catacombs. Yuck. Food was good but the whole thing about booth seating with bodies behind you was REALLY weird.

i was kidding. it was a good restaraunt and I didn't see any dead bodies. rotkraut (antithesis of sauerkraut) is weird.

So I get to town, right? And I see this thing thats a giant mormon temple about 1/4 mile away from my hotel. Turns out that its actually the county courthouse and they do VERY LITTLE baptising for the dead there...the talking with demons thing is still suspect. Some county courthouse. The health department next door looks like an islamic mosque. No kidding. This is a weird place.

Why Swank in the title? The place I'm working at put me up in a 4+ star hotel (nothing to back that up, but it's GOT to be) a few blocks away from the office. People come to my room in the evening just to turn down the sheets on my insanely soft bed, leave cookies, put down the lights, close the drapes, open the tv cabinet, and turn on some soft jazz music for me. Some room service dude today brought me up a FORK to the 10th floor. I walk around in a bath robe in the evenings after my soothing hot shower, drinking water from a champaign glass and looking at myself in the mirror with a sly grin. (all true) Last night I took a hot bath (in the giant bathtub next to my massive walk-in shower) just because I could! If you check out http://www.thedavenporthotel.com and check out 'guest rooms', look at the deluxe room. I'm in one and mine looks a lot better than that rattly little picture :) That swank room on the main page is just the lobby... HOLY COW!!!!!!!!

The Real Philosophical Underpinning of OU

DROP OUT NOW.

Life Lessons

Ready for a test? Get this.

'NOT changing brake pads as a part of general preventative vehiclular maintenance' is to 'your checkbook' as:

A. "placing your hand in a great white's mouth" is to "your baseball career."
B. "jumping from tall trees" is to "learning to fly."
C. "petting kittens with a live 220 wire" is to "friz control."
D. "many other bad things" are to "things that are good."
E. "Zero or more of the previous answers."

Mr. T says: "I pity tha foo that don't change his brakes! Stay in school!"

Stealing OU BSU Girls

As per Holly's comment on the previous thread I will recommend the following course of action to my fellow BSU men...

Gentlemen: Steal them while you can!!!! Only by a sheer act of God will you find anyone close to these types of girls in the outside world...well...its only by a sheer act of God that you're breathing right now anyways, or can even tie your shoes in the morning, or put on matching clothes for that matter :) , but you get my point.

Never Ceasing Amazement: 2K Flushes Part 3

I come back from my first week away with baby flushes in the tank, right? I do the flush thing and the placid blue water turned a violent dark brown. Here's the lowdown on the phenom:

1. 2KF will please the eye upon installation, delivering consistent blue peacefulness with every flush.

2. On the first morning, you wake up and the blue is gone. I don't know if the bleach tablet cancels out the blue in the bowl or what...it was just gone. One flush and its back.

3. Go away for a week and the water in the bowl is blue again. ??? Don't ask. Flush once and be amazed. The blue turns to dark chocolate brown out of nowhere, flushes out, and replaces itself with blue again.

Hey, just thought...do they make a gag version of 2KF? I want a dark yellow tablet to toss in somebody's tank when you go over to their house. Every time they flush it'll just look gross! Some of you chemical people get on that one! This stuff is important! Oh yeah...maybe one that makes the water stink, too.

Charlotte Motor Speedway and Me

This guy I met on the airplane was from Alaska. He works 8 weeks straight, then gets 2 weeks off hauling pieces of the Alaskan Oil Pipeline in Alaska and Canada. Not a bad gig if you like working 2 straight months of 12 hour days, 7 days a week. I'm all over it. He tells me about the Charlotte Motor Speedway and that I ought to check it out. I thought it might be cool if we (my female travel partner and I) had time during our business trip.

Little did I know, the Charlotte Motor Speedway would pick me up at the airport.

We dodged traffic like we were fleeing a comet-induced Tidal Wave only inches on our heels, tailgated as if we were to try to pick out what brand of gas the car underneath us was running, and consistently arrived at the TV station intact. I am utterly amazed.

Gentlemen...if you travel with a woman and she drives, ask to see her papers and credentials. Make sure her shots are up to date and that she's not certifiable...and that she's not closely related to Jeff Gordon, the patron Saint of Carolina.

This topic should generate sufficient hate mail.

No Pizza, No Brakes, No Problem

In case you were wondering, the day when the Pizza Man would risk all peril to deliver that oh-so-tasty goodness to your front door are behind us, my friend...part of the Golden Age of Man that abandoned Earth about the same time resonable gas prices did. I wish I could tell you a tale of a Pizza Man whose brakes went out, had a horrific accident, survived perfectly, and still delivered my pizza in its adolescent warm conglomerate phase...alas I cannot.

On to the next topic...okay, I'll finish my pizza story. No accidents. They banged on the door to my complex, rang my bell a bunch of times, etc, but then left 'cause nobody answered the door. My bell never rang. I did hear somebody honk from the parking lot, but hey...people do that sometimes. Thought nothing of it. The brakes are part of my next story.

Next Story: Arranging imperative car maintenance during/around incessant travel is quite difficult. My brakes locked up the other day. I managed to get the car to a shop I was recommended to. The price was WAY super high, but now I have to somehow get this stupid car from one place to another to get a "second opinion." If only I had life insurance on the thing I may just arrange some type of 'mishap,' so I could collect the damages. Anyway, this leaves me with at least a mile walk to the place where it is currently sleeping (on a fresh oil change, mind you) and I have to find some new place to go in this big city of rich kids. I wish I may, I wish I might, find an honest mechanic tonight...or at least some time tomorrow.

Story 3: Hey, it has been a while. This is the full dose. I was in Charlotte, NC for the last two weeks. Absolutely beautiful city with an amazing downtown. If you have to stay there for some reason, I will feel very badly. Not because you have to go, but because I cannot. The Dr.Pepper is fresh, the iced tea is toxically sweet, and everybody has more money than you. 2 out of 3 ain't bad.