∞

I've decided rapid changes in humidity are the cause of my stuffedness. It dropped down to about 30% humidity the day before i got sickish, then i got better, and it just went back 80ish and now i'm stuffed up again. Luckily, in 3 days i'm going somewhere with no humidity, so i can expect my sinuses to defenestrate themselves.

So, other than being sick (again), life moves on. I went bowling yesterday, so now my hand is all sore from how i spin it, i imagine with poor form. I went to Baton Rouge with my dad today and helped clean out some people's yard. It wasn't as rewarding as the katrina removal, because it didn't seem to need it nearly as much, but it was still nice.

I'm going to kill this blog on monday, or at least close it, cus i don't want portuguese people who i'm trying to teach the gospel read about how i hate catholics. I really don't hate catholics at all, but i'm sure somewhere in my blog there's something that someone would take offense to. Plus, it has nice symbolism of me putting my life on hold and stepping back from my normal stuff.

So, i figure now's as good a time as any to point out my other blog. Just stick 'elderammon' where 'ammonsblog' usually goes, and you'll be there in no time. It's your one stop source for mission updates. I don't really know what it'll be like, but i'm sure it will be interesting.

Well, i guess that's about all. The air conditioner is dead so it's absurdly hot and humid in our house. I'm looking forward to utah, where it is never absurdly hot, or humid. This might be the last post on this blog for two years. So soak it all in.

blech

I feel like crap. I hate being sick, and i'm not even really that sick, but i still hate it. I don't quite have my dad's ability to suck it up and not talk about it (obviously). I can mostly suck it up, but talking about it is the best part. It feels like the front half of my face is going to pop any second. It really came out of nowhere, i was fine all day tuesday, and then before soccer i started feeling a bit nauseous, and then after i got back i started feeling dead and went to sleep and woke up with a sore throat. Hopefully i'm getting all the sick out of the way in the next few days so that i'll be healthy all throughout the Mission.

I got to play soccer yesterday in my spiffy new indoor soccer shoes. They're nice, but i still played really poorly. I'm going to blame it on being sick, i was just kinda off. Plus, now i have a gnarly blister where my foot would usually have a nice callous but for the fact that i've only played soccer a few times over the past year.

Other news: Crime and punishment has gotten a lot better over the past few hundred pages. Now i'm blazing through it. I also have a bunch of other books to read before i go, i'm definitely not going to be able to finish them all, but that's ok.

Well, that's about all. I think i actually might go to sleep before 11, having already slept 7 hours and then had a 3 hours nap (or however long it took for my cell phone to charge). If i go to sleep at 11, I'll officially be going to sleep earlier than i will have to at the MTC (if you count the time change) so if i manage to wake up at 7:30 (hah) i'll be all set. So that's about all that's happening here. One week from now I'll be getting ready for my first night in the MTC. How trippy is that?

Oh p.s. - the reality of the fact that i'm about to leave is starting to sink in. On monday we talked about how i'm going to keep in touch, and it was the first time i really grasped that i'm only going to talk to my family four times in the next two years. (We get two phone calls, on Christmas and Mother's day, otherwise it's letters). I'm also realizing that i really don't know what the logistics will be for keeping my blog going, so i'm glad i've sub-contracted by sister and that she's up to the task. It might be a lot easier for her to just transcribe some of my letters.

boa noite

An Epic Loss for Words

Update update update update update update

Now that word has no meaning, hooray.

Anyway, life continues, my departure is getting to be absurdly close. A week from tomorrow is my last day. i feel like i should have so much to write about right now, what with the impending leaving my family for two years, but i don't have much to say. I've realized that i generally don't have much to say about life changing events, it's the little things i can ramble on about for forever. But yeah, with the epic things, i always end up at a loss for words.

In other news, i'm getting pretty close to being ready to go, logistically at least. I got my contacts, and my motor history report (they charged me $11 dollars to print off an un-certified online document, plus a $2 'service' fee. That's highway robbery), i got a new driver's license (with my current address and the obligatory terrible picture of me.), registered to vote...it's been a comparably busy week. I need a hair cut sometime this week, and i need to buy some cheap clothes that will last a while (jeans, sneakers, that sort of thing). Also, posting is going to fall off quite a bit after next sunday, but i'm starting up another blog to chronicle my mission life. Sometime this week i'll finish up this blog for a couple years, maybe with some final, reminiscent post to wrap things up, and post a link to my other blog, which is currently under construction.

hm, anything else? I have to give a talk in church next week, it'll be pretty short though, so that'll be cool. Every time i do something now i'm like, "this will be the last time i do this." I'm reading Crime and Punishment still, i'm going to have to start reading faster if i want to finish before i leave. I'm only slightly motivated to do that.

Well that's about all that's going down here. I'll post once or twice more and then i guess i'll be signing off. Madness.

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony

I can't stand elections. I really can't. I hate that campaigns will lie and squabble about the tiniest things. I hate it even more that our idiot citizens just accept these lies and vote accordingly. Calling anyone who criticizes Palin sexist is so stupid, and in itself is a result of obvious sexism on the part of the Republicans. They assume that women will vote for a candidate just because she's a woman, make a huge deal out of the fact that she's a women, and then lampoon anyone who doesn't give said woman a free pass without making her answer for any of her policies, because to not do so would be 'sexist'. It's just aggravating, the obvious hypocrisy in politics. If McCain wins this election, i'm going to give serious thought to staying in Portugal, or maybe migrating up to the England for a couple years. I could get in touch with my roots. I realize this looks like obvious partisanship, whiny Ammon doesn't want another republican, but it's really not that. I had so much respect for McCain the last time he campaigned, i thought he was everything that is right with politics, but it turns out he's just another man willing to sell his principles for votes, and do whatever it takes to become president. In doing so, he's offered himself up as a tool of the Republican party leaders and Karls of the world, and lost pretty much all my respect (i'm sure my respect mattered a lot to him.) I wonder if he ever is ashamed of his campaign. I would be.

P.S. - I think the lipstick on a pig comment was extremely clever, and yes, it was an obvious insult on Palin and McCain, but it wasn't sexist, unless any mention of lipstick is sexist, and it wasn't calling her a pig. In this metaphor, she's obviously the lipstick and, by extension, a pit bull.

P.P.S. - I'm also disappointed with how willing the Obama camp has been to go back on his decisions when it's in the best interesting of the campaign. Campaign finance and off shore drilling come to mind. Don't say I'm holding one campaign accountable and ignoring the others rhetoric, because every time Obama engages in standard politics (i.e. deceiving americans) I die a little inside. However, the McCain campaign continually cheapens this election by its increasingly negative tactics and empty attacks. It's a shame that democracy ensures that the person most able to lead will always lose to the person most able to campaign. I can understand why the founding fathers didn't trust the huddled masses enough to leave them full control over who leads the country.

In this time of Introspection, on the eve of my election:

So first, my blog has become super popular over the last week. Not really, but four separate people commented, which is about even with the comments by people i actually know. I dunno what that means, but it's probably something big.

Anyway, i did manage to pull myself out of the wallow of inaction (evidenced by 3 blog posts in 3 days) and accomplish something. So that felt good, i went swimming, i read most of Ender's Shadow (not quite as good as Ender's Game, because i don't like Bean as much, he's too cold and calculating, but still a fun read) and started reading Crime and Punishment again. I only got to the Crime when i was reading it in highschool. It's still a punishingly slow book, and i can't read more than a chapter unless i've had more than adequate sleep the night before. I've started waking up at 9 in an effort to shift towards the 6:30 alarm i'm looking forward to in 2 weeks (holy crap, 2 weeks). As soon as i manage to work that out (not staying up to blog at 1am will be key) i'll push it back to 8. There's no reason to push any farther than that since with the time zone change i'll be getting up at 7:30 central.

My biggest difficulty with swimming for exercise is my attention span. I have neither the patience nor the personality to swim freestyle slowly for miles (except when it's a race and i'm pacing myself). The best part about swim teams (or any athletic teams really) is you have friends and coaches to motivate you and keep otherwise boring exercise interesting. So i've been swimming 100m I.M.'s to keep things short and interesting. I've been switching the Butterfly out for other strokes some of the time because i'm still really out of shape and don't want to throw up in the nice people's bathroom again. But i figure over the next couple of weeks i'll be able to build it up to 200m IMs, butterfly included, just in time to swear off swimming for two years. I guess in the MTC i'll have to go back to weights. Maybe do a bike machine or something. I have a feeling running would take it out of my legs really fast, my knee still gives me trouble sometime, and my shin feels like it did back when i got shin splints.

Mild pain aside, life continues hurtling forward at a crawl. 2 weeks from now i'll be packed. I don't know how to deal with that. I am sort of accepting the idea of myself going into the MTC. It feels a lot like me going to college. I still have no idea how to feel about it, can't believe i'm really old enough to be doing this, but am expecting it sort of. I don't quite know how to describe it. I never do.

Music is so amazing. Seriously. (I'm listening to The Killers again, Read My Mind to be specific.) Just the way music can not only convey emotions, but actually produce them. What is it that makes songs like this so beautifully perfect? (I originally phrased that as comparison to crap music, but even Brittney Spears, 'nsync, and Creed, the groups that came to mind for crappy music, aren't really that bad, they're just shallow. I can't think of any bands that are really pointless, just a lot of bands i don't like) Music is powerful stuff, more so maybe than any other art form, at least in it's directness. Art can make you think, and sometimes visualize the abstract, theater has a lot of potential for conveying ideas and even draw you in to the emotion of the characters, but music can, within about 5 seconds, create completely real feelings and emotions. (I didn't mention dance. Dance has never done much for me, yeah it's beautiful and impressive, but it always seems that when it comes to conveying things, which i think is what all Art is at it's core, conveying the inexpressible, it's a very convoluted method with definite limitations, and it almost always depends a lot on music. Music can make you want to do stuff, dance, cry, go to war, etc. I have yet to get anything like that from dance, but maybe i've just been going to all the wrong places. In a lot of ways it seems like dance is a combination of music, art, and theater, but without some of the best parts of each. I didn't mention poetry either, but that's good stuff.) Someone should make really really good music for missionaries. My problem with religious music, mainstream Christian music especially is that the thought is good, but the Music and the Lyrics suck. Maybe they don't fit, i dunno. My impression is that most Christian songs are created by picking a absurdly simple thought (God is Good), jazzing it up with a couple of adjectives (God is SO good) and repeat until the song is long enough. Then grab an acoustic guitar, pick three chords, and go nuts! Too much Christian music tries to survive on the fact that it's Christian music alone. It ought to be music first, that just happens to be about Religious themes. I think the real power of music is also drastically under utilized. Religion is full of deep and difficult to express things. Why waste a song on something that can be explained in a sentence? I'm sure there's decent religious music out there, there are a whole bunch of hymns i like a lot, so there's no reason people haven't managed to make decent music about God that isn't in SATB chord structure.

I totally forgot to mention that i played piano for a Funeral last week. Happily, that went a lot better than some of my wedding exploits. (Can a funeral really ever go 'well'? Do you go home saying, that was a great funeral!) It also made me give a lot of thought to being cremated. The thought of being embalmed, sitting in a box slowly rotting, being paraded before all my relatives, and then dropped in the ground where i'll gradually decombone*, not romantically back into the earth, but covered in my own compost, into a zombie like wraith due to the box and all the poison pumped into me. No, fire has a very nice romanticism and purity to it. I think if i could pull it off, floating into the ocean on a pyre that's lit by flaming arrows would be pretty rockin, but i imagine they frown on that these days. Also the whole scattering of the ashes thing is way cool. I would still want a tombstone though, but someplace cool. Cemeteries are nice, but it's a little scary how many dead bodies are below you, and they are very necessarily public places. I want a little tombstone at the top of a mountain or something. It would be nice for it to be somewhere accessible though, so maybe at the lip of a valley. Another problem with having a tombstone above your corpse is that it's hard not to go and imagine what their body must look like at that very moment, whereas if you're cremated you can only be remembered as you were. On top of that, ground space is bound to get harder and harder to come by as time passes. I dunno if the Church has any policy on Cremation, I know we have standard procedures for funerals, but i've never heard anyone say cremation was frowned upon, I can't imagine why it would be, the end result is the same, time is the only differential (and the amount of poison the dirt around your body will soak up). One thing i don't like is the thought of Cremation itself. Because that is almost necessarily unceremonious, which is a shame really, given how ceremonious it can be. My imagination is them tossing your possibly naked corpse into a furnace. I'll have to scope out some cremators sometime in my life. Someplace with a pyre.

Wow, this post has drifted towards the macabre, but now you know, just incase there's a freak vespa accident while i'm in portugal.

So, that's the news from Biloxi Bay, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.



*I obviously meant to say decompose, but i think decombone is a hilarious word that conveys what's happening quite well

The stars are blazing like rebel diamonds

Things i'm going to miss more than Biloxi:

Swimming - One of my first and most prolonged loves, and something i've just recently rediscovered. Swimming is so incredibly relaxing and feels so good. Every time i swim after i haven't for a long time i can't imagine why i would ever have stopped. It's not hard to imagine two years without swimming, i've nearly done it before, but i will definitely miss the ability to just dive into the ocean for kicks, and there are only a few forms of exercise i enjoy more.

Music - So much. I was listening to The Killers today, and it's just so perfect. I can't believe that the Killers have been around for so long without me listening to them. I really only discovered them this last year, and that was mostly due to Guitar Hero. I almost bought their original CD, but decided it wasn't quite worth having it for only three weeks. But it really almost was. There's good Mission appropriate music out there, but nothing like the bands I've discovered over the past year or so. (Sufjan Stevens is also amazing)

Google - I'm not going to miss the internet. Having something to constantly waste my time on is not actually something i enjoy. The instant communication is handy, but it somehow cheapens conversation. And Facebook saps productivity like nothing else. I am, however, going to miss Google. I am so used to being able to instantly find whatever i want to know. Soon i'm going to have a question and have no immediate way to have it be answered, i suppose i could ask people, but that's never very reliable.

My Family - It would be insulting if i didn't mention them. This is going to be the first time that I'll be in a place that really doesn't have any family. In Utah i could always fall back on Cami when there were no friends to be had. Even after i had made friends, hanging out with her was generally more fun, but it seems important to make friends. For all the crap i give Isaac, i'm sure i'll miss him. It's also a shame that i'll be missing the 2010 family reunion, i bet this one will be absurdly awesome to reverse the trend. What if it's the last family reunion? Our family is getting too big for these massive weekend getaways to remain feasible.

I've already been missing my friends, but i'm going to miss them in Portugal too. Two years is a long time to go without seeing people. In the last two years though i've already gone at least one year without seeing any given friend, so i think i'll deal.

I don't think other things will be a problem, movies and tv are cool, but i can survive pretty well without them. Sleeping late isn't really something i enjoy, and staying up late doesn't work when there's no computers or tv. So yeah, i think that covers most things. I'm not too worried about going two years without girls, although it will be weird to go two years without close friends that are girls. I've historically become close friends with girls before i've made friends with guys (other than in elementary school). I'm sure that has something to do with having three older sisters but i'm not going to worry about it to much. Normal clothes will be a bit of a bummer to lose, but i'll get to look forward to getting an entire new wardrobe when i come back, so that's exciting.

Speaking of new wardrobe, I got a new face! At least it feels sort of like that. I picked up my two pairs of glasses today.

Retro!

From This way to infinity

And, more normal glasses. I call this one Engineer Ammon (at 1 a.m.)

From This way to infinity

So, it's taken me a little while to get used to them, but i've decided they'll pass. Hopefully my loyal readers will approve, since i care a lot more about what you think about them than what i think (i spend a lot less time looking at myself, contrary to popular belief.) so yeah, feedback away.

Oh, there's also this picture from our stint in the church house, i think it's awesome.

From This way to infinity

One last glasses picture. It was unavoidable:

From This way to infinity

Things I Don't Get, Part 2

Or, in other words, Criticizing Everything

So, i hadn't planned on making this a multi-volume thing, but I was thinking about hurricanes today, and i just don't get the appeal of the Coast. I really don't know why anyone would choose to live here who could live somewhere else. I get that my Dad works here and gets a lot of fulfillment from that, but for people working at Walmart, or really any occupation that doesn't require the presence of a hurricane swept landscape, why would you stay?

First of all, there's the hurricanes. Having to board up your windows and leave your house with all your most valuable possessions is ridiculous. And there's always the chance that everything you own will be destroyed. Katrina was a bit of a fluke, but there are the average, run of the mill hurricanes that tear up the coast without generating quite as much media. So from a catastrophic point of view, the coast is one of the worst places to live, along there with at the base of a volcano or beneath a large and precariously placed boulder.

Now, i would understand living here in spite of the hurricane if this was a spectacular paradise. But this isn't the bahamas, it isn't even florida. The beaches crappy and fake. The water is brown and stinky. The waves are non-existent. At this very moment there's a cockroach roughly the size of a walnut climbing up my wall. There are these sand gnats everywhere that are even worse than mosquitoes (though on the plus side, there aren't so many mosquitoes as there are in jackson). The summers are hot, humid, and unpleasant, the winters are cold, rainy, and grey. Spring and Fall are ok, but they come and go without any of the spectacular colors of New England and other places. As far as the natural beauty goes, the trees are quite lovely, but there's aren't many things that can really impress upon you the magnificence and the magnitude of Earth. You can't even see the stars.

Then there's life itself. There's no great urban scene, or music scene, or college scene, or many things that are entertaining at all. I've realized, in making friends and hanging out, that there's just not that much to do here. And everything to do is so corporate. Sure, out in the boonies and around some places, you can a few quirky local restaurants or shops, but in biloxi proper, it's all chains, casinos, and shopping centers.

So, redeeming qualities: Sunsets are beautiful and there are lots of thunderstorms. Those were two things i missed in Utah. Utah just doesn't know how to do sunsets, and your average Utahn doesn't even know what real rain looks like. (the drops are really big). For those with a ruddier complexion of the nape, there's lots of good fishing and hunting, and you're never more than 5 minutes from a walmart. You can wade through the dingy water with lights spearing flounder and night, that's a manly thing to do, yeah? It's never gets too cold, so you need not fear the winter just because you don't want to invest in a decent coat. Life is quiet, so if you're the kind of person that just wants to sit on your porch and sweat all day, it's easy to do that here without interruption. If you've got lots of family here, which it seems most people do, you're always close to a bunch of people you love but don't especially want to see every day. There are lots and lots of churches and the people are nice. It's a great place to write a stirring coming of age novella, or make a quaint postcard, or get good barbecue, i just have never felt those were good parameters for a place to live.

Now, i'm certainly jaded by my family's preference to live in an Urban place. I cannot grasp what possesses people to live in a place that's truly in the middle of nowhere, so it shouldn't be a surprise that i don't want to live somewhere that's sort of backwater. Obviously not everybody wants to live in the city and that's fine and good (although i do think suburbs are contributing to the decline of our civilization), but there are thousands of small cities and towns around the country so much nicer than here. I think people wind up here by mistake, either their born here, move here for a job or get stuck here by the military, and they forget what it's like anywhere else. They make friends and form connections and seep so far into life here that they can't imagine moving somewhere else.

I guess what i'm trying to say is i'm not going to miss biloxi much. Which is good. In 3 short weeks i'll be in provo, and in 3 short months i'll be in Portugal. Maybe i'll write a letter about all the crappy things about Portugal. I think it will be rather short.

So, in less critical news, i read Ender's Game and Speaker of the Dead over the past couple days. They were both good, Ender's Game was lots of fun to read, but Speaker of the Dead left me with a sort of empty feeling. It was filled with portuguese, which was unexpected and interesting. It's weird that in around 6 months i'll be quasi-proficient in another language. I also read the whole Artemis Fowl series. Those were all good, although the 2nd and 3rd were a bit dull. I think after i read some more of the Orson Card books, i'll try to find some more mature lit to read between now and my mission. Something i can't read in a day. I ought to read crime and punishment for reals. So we'll see if that happens. Infinity is getting awfully close.

Those of weak constitutions may want to turn away

I spent the last two days sleeping at the church house, which was a little surreal. As a shelter, it works pretty great for us, quiet, cool, not too crouded, comfortable, and filled with people i don't mind spending several hours around. It gave me lots of time to read and play risk and do all sorts of fun things. At one point, while playing risk, someone brought up politics and was slamming Obama, not on any relevent issues or attributes or policies (well, they called him a Marxist, but whatever) and it got me thinking. I really don't understand people. Not at all.

A quick aside: I don't talk about politics generally, because I don't feel a need to alienate myself from people who might hold idiotic political beliefs. It doesn't help that i call their beliefs idiotic, so it's generally best for me to avoid stuff like that, however, this is my blog (oh, and a quick shout out to my Uncle Ken, who might be joining the ranks of people vaguely interested in what's up with me), so prepare yourself for:
RANDOM POLITICAL RANT 2008!!!


Anyway, back to the point, i don't get people. I don't see how people don't recognize how terrible the Bush administration have been, and that it isn't just them. It's not like Bush is this crazy rogue republican that has somehow betrayed the party into going somewhere it didn't want to go. It seems as though the Republican party molded him into what they wanted him to be. I don't understand how people don't see through the lies and half truths that are our election process. Factcheck.org should be required reading for anyone wishing to vote.

There was this girl I knew whose family firmly believed that Obama was the antichrist, or at least a antichrist. First of all, how absurdly melodramatic is that? Secondly, as someone who thinks Obama has a good chance of changing our country from the embarrassing, hypocritical joke it has become in international and domestic affairs, the idea that he's conspiring with the armies of evil is a bit far fetched.

But i'm not talking about them really, i'm talking average, decent people who i generally respect but who still firmly believe that voting republican is not only the best thing to do, but the only morally correct thing to do. A party whose two basic principles are legislating morality and helping the rich to become richer at the expense of the poor. A party who has lied without blushing in order to start a unjustifiable war. A party who has somehow managed to claim my religion as theirs. I really just don't get it.

I should say now, that i don't think voting republican is somehow morally wrong, and i don't think all republican politicans are bad people, i'm sure most of them are great people. I just don't see how the idea that those born into poverty deserve it, and those given a free ride should be helped along, became synonymous with conservative moral values. It bugs me, especially, that Mormons vote so unanimously Republican.

This seems a good a place as any to tackle morality (heh, attacking morality, i must be a democrat). I share a lot of beliefs with the conservative demographic. I'm generally opposed to drinking, smoking, pre-marital sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, homosexuality, all manner of lasciviousness, and most types of fun. That said, i strongly support personal choice and accountability. I don't think that our government ought to be in the business of creating laws to enforce my, or anyone else's religious beliefs. I think morality and religion have to come from somewhere other than the government.

By the way: Whats the deal with capital punishment? A book i read had a long discussion of the obvious contradiction in supporting the death penalty and opposing abortion. I don't think we, as a country, should be killing people generally. And trying to make a distinctions to say when it's ok to kill people and when it's not is pretty slippery, as far as slopes go. Whatever happened to loving our enemy, turning the other cheek, and judging not. Preventing crime is important, but the death penalty has always seemed a little too much like revenge to me.

These are the types of things i would say if i didn't care about offending people, or if i had a few political vertebra. Most of this came out of reading a some political discussions on my family's website, and an overabundance of free time over the past couple days. Maybe later i'll make a more autobiographical post, but i think i've vented enough uninformed teenage angst for one post.

~Ovaltine <- (this isn't actually completely random, gold star to anyone who understands why)

P.S. - I found out today that the republican vice-president lady has an unmarried teenager who is pregnant. Now i'm not saying that that will have any major effect on her merits as vice-president. i do think her own 4 month child will. A lot of people are talking about how great she is because she knows what it's like to raise children, especially one with disabilities. But if she's planning on moving across the country to take on one of the most important offices in the world, all i see her knowing how to do is being prepared to leave her a child in the care of someone else for her own career. hm, that's pretty cold. I almost took it back, but then i found out she doesn't believe global warming is man made, and supports aerial hunting of wolves (so that there will be more mooses for hunting, duh). I don't think all this prying into candidates personal lives is necessary or healthy, but i think a lot of people do. I also think she was a terrible choice for McCain and seems to be almost construed to undercut his message in every way possible. If he needed a woman to pander to whiny Clinton die-hards, it seems like he could have chosen someone who was qualified for the job, and who had a little less baggage. Bonus points would have been awarded for picking a woman who wasn't the ideological opposite of Clinton, but why should that make any difference? Silly people.

The Next Exciting Installment of Safe Objects Injuring Ammon

So, today we look at playground equipment. A relic of past times, good playground equipment was great simply because of how absurdly dangerous it was. Rusty Metal Hinges, crumbling wood primed for splintering, and the See-Saws.

Oh See-saws. Perhaps only Merry-go-Rounds could rival the See-Saw in inherent danger. There was the chance of crushing your legs beneath the seat, you could slam your head into the bar, and there was no way to escape flying into the ground at multiple G's, making sitting an ordeal for the foreseeable future.

You don't see see-saws, or their northern counterpart the Teeter-Totter, much anymore. Like so many good things, Mr. Potato Head, Easy bake Ovens, Lawn Darts, repeated injuries and worried parents have been the end them. However, imagine my joy when we wound up a playground that still had classic See-saws. Not those pointless, spring loaded bouncy nonsense. Legitimate simple mechanics playground fun.

So last night we were playing on the See-Saws, and i was lighter than my friend (always an issue on See-Saws) so i was able to sit back without actually kicking off at all. So we were winding down, and i was essentially reclining, with my legs across the bars (there were two parallel bars) and my feet in between to keep me from falling.

When suddenly, one unfortunate bounce from the other side of the see-saw and a momentary loss of balance, and i found myself hanging from the see-saw, my calf wedged between the two bars and my weight crushing my shin. My friend on the other side tried to get me down, but panicking leaned back, holding me away just above the ground. I finally made it to the ground and checked myself out, and finding myself intact, was quite satisfied. That said, it feels like someone hit me in the shin with a 2x4, and then bashed the other side with a bar for good measure. So yeah, it's sort of hard to walk today.

In other news, today i learned how to change a car battery. Learned is maybe an exaggeration, it's pretty intuitive, so it's a bit like learning to change the batteries in anything, positive to positive and lefty-loosey. This did, however, have the added bonus of being filled with sulfuric acid, and the old battery had leaked acid all over the place where the battery goes. So after we had put it in to get the car back from the stake center i had to take the battery out, and clean out the case with liberal amounts of baking soda and water. It reminded me of Mr. Teske's science project back in the day, where we had to figure out how to deal with an acid spill in the reservoir. I also learned that when your wrench is the same length as the distance between the two terminals there are going to be problems if you're not careful.

So yeah, a pretty productive morning so far, i just found out that there's a mandatory evacuation order for us. We don't necessarily have to go all the way to jackson, we could just go to the other side of the interstate, but we'll see how it turns out. Anyway, i need breakfast. Ate Logo

2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits, a dollap

I think shopping for glasses is one of the most unpleasant experiences possible. I know that's a weighty statement, given the possibility of torture, slow painful deaths, etc, however, shopping for glasses combine my two least favorite activities:

Shopping when i don't already know exactly what i want, and Making decisions that are going affect me for a long time.

This is what sisters and girl friends are for (either girlfriends or friends who are girls, it doesn't matter. Some one really needs to come up for a solid term for female friends who aren't romantically involved. maybe just Girls would cover it. I digress.) The was a cool girl my age to give me feedback on glasses at one of the places we went, but their glasses were unreasonably expensive. The lady at sears was really bad at helping making choices. It didn't help that she kept handing me glasses that were meant for 6 year olds either. Devoid of any helpful feedback, i did manage to get two pairs of glasses, one that are pretty standard and basically the glasses i had before they got all bent and lost, and another that are hip and retro and doctor who-esc. We'll see how they fair.

We had a coupon that basically got us free lenses, but it was only supposed to apply to glasses that cost less than 50 dollars, but the lady gave us free lenses for the nice glasses, so we ended up saving around two hundred dollars, which is pretty radtastic. So yeah, if the sears doesn't get destroyed by the übercane, maybe i'll post some pictures of me wearing a collared shirt with some skinny jeans when i pick up my glasses. I could also post pictures of my new contacts, but those probably won't be as interesting.

I want to go as the tenth Doctor for halloween. I think i'll have to wait two years, since i dunno what the policy is on Trick-or-Treating as elders.

"Trick Or Treat?!! Have you ever wondered why you're here?"

Stay cool soda pop

I should really be sleeping, and therefore i think i'll update my blog. I don't know what it is about 2 in the morning that makes me feel like not going to sleep. Maybe it's the recurring, guy smiley nightmares.

So, the last couple of days have been fairly eventful. I went swimming tuedsday, and played soccer with the spanish speaking members and missionaries. That was way fun, it's been too long since i've played legitimate soccer, and it was nice to see that i can still hold my own. I scored two goals, blocked a bunch, and even managed not to injure myself. So that was an accomplishment and a half. I still can't dribble worth anything, but dribbling is for babies and international soccer phenom. Real men pass the ball.

Today i helped some ward members move several hundred pounds of food storage across biloxi, lifting mostly with my back. My philosophy is that if i lift enough with my back, it'll be so strong that it won't get injured. Most people just don't lift enough with their back. There's their problem.

So apparently hurricane Gustav might come our way, brining with it impending, katrina-esc DOOM. Incidentally, Katrina hit almost exactly 3 years ago. We should have had a party. Anyway, so there's talk of evacuation, all our stuff getting destroyed, scary things like that. On the plus side, i might end up going to jackson again. Starkville looks more likely, but we'll see. If i'm going to be spending 2 weeks someplace while waters recede, i'd like to be somewhere i've been in the last 10 years. Either way, this is probably one of the more threatening things anything named Gustav has done. I really hope it won't be on the scale of katrina, it'll ruin the funniness of Gustav forever.

Tomorrow i'm getting my eyes checked and backing up the hard drives (maybe) and going on exchanges with the elders, and going to institute, and then probably doing fun stuff afterwards. It's just a packed day. So i'm going to go to sleep, and hopefully the next time i update this thing, i will have shifted my sleep 5 hours back, or at least a few, so that waking up at 6:30 doesn't kill me.

Until then, i'll be defeating evil, one idiot bike thief at a time
(oh yeah, my little brother's bike got stolen. That's messed up. What's even more messed up is that it'll cost around 3x the price of the bike to fix the car window. Who breaks into a car to steal a 8 year olds bike and then leaves everything else in the car of value? Maybe some guy really needed to teach his son to ride a bike.)

You know, i've noticed something. In the midst of tv's witty repartee (ala psych, veronica mars, firefly, all the other shows i watch, etc) nobody ever laughs at their really quite clever jokes. I mean, not laughing at your own jokes is pretty key, but it seems like people around would catch the cleverness and laugh. But then i guess it wouldn't be witty repartee. It just seems weird. I still prefer it to laugh-tracks. I'm glad no one really uses those anymore.

~So 90's

28 Days

It's a sad state of affairs when my greatest accomplishment recently has been not throwing up.

other than that, i've been watching a lot of Veronica Mars lately. That is a good show. I never got into it when it was on, i think it was on at the same time as Smallville, but it's just so well done.

Except duncan, i can't stand Duncan.

That is all.

Because it looked just like a dream.

Last night i had a dream that i was on a soccer team with George Takei, among other people. I got a great assist to him, and he put it in the net, but when i went to celebrate, he asked me not to touch him. It was really awkward.

I also had a dream that logan came to town, in our jackson house, and gave me this stuff that looked like pocki, but it was super minty. He gave me something else that was a lot less awesome, but i can't remember what it was. It was really pretty lame... like a pine cone or something.

I wish i could always remember my dreams, then i could write a big book of them that would be awesome.

Guatemala plays really dirty, too bad they got beat.

Today i learned how the world cup qualification works, and i decided that i want to go to the 2014 World Cup in Brasil. I figure with 4 non-missionary years to think about it, it shouldn't be too hard to scrounge up the necessary funds and convince as many people as possible to join me (i'm looking at you Logan, imagine how much a six year old Søren would love a world cup.). At South Africa, early games are only 20 bucks for the nosebleeds, so that's pretty reasonable (a nice seat at the final is $900, I can just save a few Euro from my mission and the way the dollar is headed, they'll cover it). But i'm thinking that would be extremely awesome, plus i hear Brasil is a pretty nice place, and it'd be fun to break out my not yet new found bilingualism. So yeah, i think i should do that. I generally don't make plans more than a couple days in advance, so making plans for something that'll happen when i'm 25 is a bit ambitious. I don't have a lot of plans carrying over from when i was 13, but i've been planning on a mission for at least that long, so i think this is plausible.

In present news, today was ok, i went swimming which felt great until i threw up all over the bathroom. I don't think swimming has ever made me throw up before. It was the 200IM that did it. Still, I managed to swim a solid kilometer,and i'll be going back tomorrow, maybe going a little easier.

Anyway, i'm supposed to be sleeping, so sweet dreams everybody.

"One part ice cream, two parts awesome! "

Wow, it has been nearly two weeks since i wrote anything. Now there's only five weeks between me and the next two years of my life.

I went to jackson over the weekend, and it was pretty great. I actually managed to see everyone, if only for a few minutes. Friday night i drove up to jackson. It was a pretty nice drive, nothing crazy, not like the drive home, but i'm getting ahead of myself. I had this genius plan to call in a take-out order with a fake voice (under the name Dr. Payne) and give johnny all sorts of hard times, but then my phone died on the way up. That also meant i couldn't call ahead and figure out what was what, but luckily everyone in the known universe works at Sal and Mookie's now, so I headed there first. I talked to caitlin and johnny for a bit and found out that everybody was over at Jerusalem Cafe, so i went over there and got to hang out with a bunch of people for a while. After that we went over to the McCrazies house, for a weird party with a bunch of high schoolers. It ended up with all the people over 18 hanging out on the steps where it was cool and mature or something, so that was fun. After that we hung out at emmett's for a while while johnny and emmett decided what their tattoos were going to look like.

The next day I had planned to set up ultimate, and it looked promising, the McIntyre's were in, as were kyle, mcnally, spencer, michael, me, maybe ian, and whoever else happened to show up. Unfortunately, i was the only one who showed up, but i ran into Mrs. Van Uden at the park, and talked to her for a while, so that was way cool. After that i bought a tooth brush (i had left mine in biloxi and was feeling pretty gross) and some breakfast and found McNally and tried to figure out what to do. We ended up going to Sal and Mookie's for a while and then met up with Johnny, Caitlin, and Emmett and headed downtown to where Emmett was getting his tattoo. From the outside, the place looked like a good place to get shot, but inside it was pretty urban and awesome. Hopefully jackson's downtown can keep getting hip businesses where old rundown buildings are so that downtown isn't just a place to go to work and/or get mugged.

Somehow, i ended up responsible for giving emmett a ride home, and apparently when a tattoo artist says 45 minutes, what he really means is two and a half hours. So that was sort of frustrating. After that though we did...something. I think maybe we went to spencer's house and played video games. We also watched Michael Phelps be incredibly awesome, so that was pretty impressive. After that we played some more video games and went to sleep.

Sunday, i went to church in madison, that was way cool. I got to see a whole bunch of people i haven't seen in a long long time. After that i went to caitlin's and ate lunch and eventually johnny came over and watched psych. Then we went and had birthday festivities at Johnny's house, they got presents and we got cake and dinner courtesy of the Breauxs. (i've never pluralized breaux before, it looks wrong) Then we went back to caitlin's and hung out for a while and i learned how to open a butterfly knife awesomely, but then the awesome was too much for it and screws started coming loose, so i had to stop. I watched mythbusters and actually managed to get an indecent amount of sleep, having gotten around 5 hours the last two nights. Monday was my last day in town, so after sleeping in until noon, i got some breakfast and i then went to Murrah to visit teachers. I ran into melissa on her way out of murrah, so that was cool. I saw Ms' Williams, D, Lamb, and Van Uden. Ms. Brierly was out on maternity leave, so i didn't get to talk to her, but i think it was still a pretty good run. Michael and Spencer met up with me at murrah, and then we went to his house for a while and then met up with a bunch of people at Kiefer's. That was pretty delicious. Then we went to Emmett's and partied the night away. It being my last night, i had to say goodbye to people every time they left, it was sad. We took a bunch of pictures though, and had generally good times. I slept at emmett's that night, and headed out the next morning, today, saying Adeus to Spencer on my way out.

All in all it was a pretty great Jackson Trip. The drive home was probably one of the more exciting drives of my life. The first half was pretty smooth, i made great time (which is always tricky on 49). At some point i got stuck behind a truck carrying these giant bridge looking things. It was taking up both lanes completely, and the escort guys were going a terrible job. The truck was just small enough that it would probably be possible to get around it if you went on the shoulder just a little, and it was driving sort of to the right so this little suv kept trying to get around it but the little escort car kept cutting him off. Had the truck just driven in the middle of the road it wouldn't have been a problem. So i had been stuck behind this truck for about five minutes, but we were cruising along in the upper sixties, so i wasn't too upset, when suddenly the truck just plowed through a sign on the side of the road. It wasn't like a mile marker sign either, this was a substantial, six foot wide sign with two bars behind it, but it was completely destroyed. So at that point i lost a lot of respect for this guy who before was just doing his job, but now was doing his job really badly and if things had gone a little differently could have caused a pretty serious collision. Anyway, eventually the lanes widened a little and we got a better shoulder and i managed to squeeze by him (which seemed a little dangerous and is the sort of the escort guy is there to prevent from happening, but after he blew up a sign, i decided i was getting far away from him.)

Things smoothened out for a while, but then it got really rainy, and i experienced my first high-speed hydroplaning. That was exciting. I started drifting off the road as the road was turning a little and completely covered in water. But like a good driver a eased off the gas and steered very gently. Happily i didn't run off the road, and i got back to biloxi without any further incident, so that was cool.

So yeah, all in all, a good trip to jackson. I think this entry is long enough without any further comments.

~Something clever

This pretty much sums up my summer.

"We wait. We are bored."

August. I go into the MTC in September. I am just a little incredulous that this is actually my life, clearly, I am in the future.

Anyhow, the past week has been considerably entertaining, despite titular evidence to the contrary. On thursday i totally forgot about institute, but got a call on friday that there would be an okatoma trip on saturday, so that had promise. At about 6a.m. saturday i got a call saying that the trip was cancelled, but then my dad and I went kayaking on the Wolf River (which was longer and less exciting than promised, but still cool).

Friday I made the first real progress in teaching Isaac to ride his bike. Rather than keep trying to power through it on the road, which forced us to stop every time a car drove by or isaac cried from chronic falling into the ground, we went down to isaac's school, which has a big, soft, grassy hill with a slight decline. There i could just balance him and push. It was pretty effective, and hilarious to boot. We managed to get to the point where Isaac could get about 50 yards, so that was cool. Monday we went back and managed to get him riding on the concrete without falling too much. he still can't purposely turn, or stop without falling, but if there's a straight line without any obstacles or distractions he can go for days. I spent an hour or so adjusting his seat, fixing up his brakes (they're still essentially useless, but I blame Walmart for that), and taking off the completely pointless pegs (lucky). Now that he can actually reach the ground, i think we'll start making some headway with stopping, and hopefully he won't have to turn often. As proof of this accomplishment, documentation:

there was a lot of this

and a fair amount of this

but eventually he got the hang of it.


So yeah, that's cool. What else?

I go through waves of disbelief that i'm actually going to be on a mission soon, and then the occasional surge of overwhelming shock at how soon it is and how completely unprepared i feel, but generally i'm excited and ready leave. It's weird to think that people are revving up to go back to the U soon, and i'm not. I feel sort of left out, luckily i'm going to Portugal, which, in my book, trumps Salt Lake almost every time. Isaac goes back to school tomorrow, that's a bit of a surprise (the best sort of prize), i'm glad my summer isn't 2.5 months long, although nearly 5 months is a while.

So i think that's about all that's going on down here, at least all the comes to mind.

Random Thought of the Day: I wonder what ever happened to Peter Johnson. He's probably off somewhere on a mission. Weird.



Tchau

Strung from the moon, and the world your balloon. Peeping tom for the motherstation

So. Life: it's pretty standard. I almost went up to jackson and canoed the okatoma, but that fell through in record time. Katie has been in town for a week, she leaves in a few hours, but it was cool have her here, and Søren is too cute to handle (2c2h).

Yesterday i jumped a fence with my bike. I didn't go on a ramp and ride over a fence, that would be way too extreme. I climbed over a fence with bike in hand. I really don't like backtracking.

In related news, word got out that i don't wear my helmet while riding a bike. Wait to go, Katie. So now i have to wear a helmet. Weak. Safety concerns and justifications aside, it's substantially more enjoyable without a helmet, so i might need to find a new method of exercise. Also, living on a peninsula substantially limits (oh) the places you'll go (and the things you can think).

We have satellite now, with DVR, so we get 200 channels and recording capabilities, so now i can watch The Daily Show and Mythbusters and Ace of Cakes and all the other great cable shows that i've had to scrounge around for online. No Fox Soccer Channel, oh well. Dish network really sucks, by the way. If you're thinking about getting Dish Network i'd advise against it. Dish costs a little less, but i think common sense is worth the addition cost. Anyway, it took like a week and a half to get it installed, but now it's up and running and i have no immediate complaints, which is saying something.

I guess that's about all that been going down. I went and saw Batman again last night, it was just as great, though a little predictable. I need to read Charlie and the Chocolate factory. maybe i'll work on that today. Até logo.

That reminds me, i want to watch a Portuguese movie or something like that to get a feel for how the language actually sounds. It's hard not to turn all romance languages into latin.

fin

Round here we stay up very, very, very, very late.

I just got back from Dark Knight. It was pretty spectacular. Heath Ledger is without a doubt the best joker ever, past or future, and made the joker live up to his status as best villain of all time. I'm super good at giving away things without meaning to, so i'll just say this: Batman dies. That's all i'm going to say, so hopefully that won't ruin anything.

But yeah, it was really great. I hope Christopher Nolan continues making Batman movies, he does such a better job than the late 90's garbage or even (dare i say it) Tim Burton. It doesn't hurt that i have a giant man-crush on Christian Bale. I saw Rescue Dawn last night, which was intense and intensely good. I have a hard time imagining many more of the villains in Nolan's grungy, realistic style. Mr. Freeze couldn't cut it, the penguin is definitely a no-go. At least they're not as hopeless as the spiderman movies. They've killed off every good villain, and didn't even give the greatest villain, Venom, a full movie to be awesome in.

So, i have this theory that most coincidences aren't that big a deal. If you think about all the times that the perfect thing didn't happen at the perfect moment, the amount of non-coincidental happening are pretty overwhelming. That being said, as i was walking up the steps after getting home from batman, a bat flew right in front of me, only a couple feet away. That was pretty unexpected, and it just made the night even cooler.

So, in summation: See Batman, it will change your life, or at least a couple hours of your life.

oh, p.s.- This is definitely a PG-13 batman, it was very dark, and more than a little gruesome. Not the sort of thing i would want to subject an 8 year old to.

My mom is getting satelite, the apocolypse is come.

Today I got my passport. As such, i can, and must, now be referred to as intrepid. It is cool though, and it makes me feel awesome and global and all that stuff. I've never actually seen a passport before, except in movies, so they've got this aura in my mind similar to that of hovercraft and laser cats.

So yesterday i got back from my extreme utah adventure, and i must say it was pretty fun. The drive out was one of the most pleasant 30 hour drives i've experienced, not the most fun, but probably the smoothest and one of the more comfortable ones. So anyway, we got into salt lake saturday night and stayed at cami's. Somehow, i managed to convince my mom to let me stay in salt lake for a few days, so that was fun. I guess i've talked a bit about that already, but yeah, it was cool.

After my independent friend time ended, the family time started up in full force. Tuesday i picked up my dad and we grabbed some lunch at Hires (which is great by the way, and i plan to start eating there often when i get back to town) and then went to Mr. Mac for some suits. I am now the proud owner of two suits, as well as a whole bunch of shirts, pants, and even some new shoes and socks. We got a sweet insider deal on account of knowing Mrs. Mac's mom, so that was cool. Saving large quantities of money is always fun. After that we drove up to cache valley. The days sort of blend together, but here's the gist of what i did:

Ate dinner with some family and my cousin tyson, who just got back from a mission. Played games with the vail side of the family, including a pretty extensive game of werewolf. Went on a hike up to and past white pine with my dad. That was pretty awesome, and was another instace of the worst possible time to not have my camera. Anyway, cool stuff. Swam a little bit in Tony Grove. That covers everything before the reunion i think.

The reunion was pretty fun. The first day was not great, a lot of people were gone, and the bird refuge was weak. The rocket garden thing was pretty sweet though. I saw promontory point for the first time in my life, and probably one of the last times. The next day we went up to Heber for the Reunion camp. That was pretty cool. It was a girl's camp most of the time, so lots of things that make a lot of sense for girls camp really suck for normal camp. But whatevs, that night we played some more mafia, and the next day we went on a hike and did this climbing thing, that was pretty often, and just a little scary. After that we did those object lesson games they always do at youth conference and stuff.

Lets see, then we drove back, and the next day we we went to Tyson's homecoming thing, and then went to the lions lodge for a dinner deal thing. Then we went back to lisa's for another family dinner, after which we played yet more werewolf. Then we had a talent show thing, which was nice. I played a crappy rendition of Claire de lune, on account of not having practiced in a rather long time, but it was ok.

That night we drove back to cami's and headed off at around 10 the next morning. the drive back was ok, it was kind of hard, but we eventually made it back. So now i'm here. There'll be pictures once i manage to work out this uploading thing, or when i get my computer back in action. I dunno how well the uploading directly off SD card works.

Ciao.

Forsooooooth

I generally don't post videos and the like, but this is probably one of the funniest things i've seen all day, and having been to the dentist and walked around salt lake for a while, that set's the bar extremely high.



So other than that, i'm sort of wandering around, my day's being rather slow with everbody busy, and my nights taken up with reunions and such, i'm having to finagle ways to spend time with friends. My biggest challenge is going to be finding a way to be in salt lake wednesday night to go bowling, but i think i may have figured out a way to make that work. We shall see.

~Who

"It was like going home"

So I'm back in Utah. It's pretty exciting. It feels rather like coming home, even if i'm not going to live here for another two years. Somehow I managed to convince my mom to stay in salt lake for a while so that i could go to church and hang out with friends and such. The past couple of days i've been driving across the country, which has been alright. I like driving. This post sucks, i'm watching the doctor who season finale. It's far too intense.

Glitter is the Herpes of Craft Supplies; Sand is the Glitter of the Earth

I'm posting really a lot lately, but i figure i won't post much for the next two weeks, so it's alright. By the way, two weeks from now i'll be walking out of The Dark Knight fully satisfied and with a renewed man-crush on Christian Bale. Seriously though, isn't he just the coolest? i digress.

Tomorrow, or rather, in 4 hours, we're supposedly leaving for Utah. Realistically it'll be lucky if we leave before noon, but my goal is to be completely ready for 6 so that i can sleep in the car. The hours of 5-10 aren't something i generally experience these days, and i anticipate it will be painful.

Today i mowed the lawn, nearly ruining the lawn mower in the process. No one has ever explained to me the vital importance of not-over filling the oil, or how easy it is to do this. Anyway, forty-five minutes of siphoning and adding new oil later, the lawn mower was running great and finished the lawn with flying colors, mostly green.

I went to Institute which was alright, and then tried to go to some rope swing in D'Iberville, but there ended up being a mess, a gaggle if you will, of trashed teenagers, which took away from the awesome just a little. We spent a lot of time driving around and ended up at the beech, which was boring because the beeches here blow. Then we went to Denny's, which never disappoints. Brinner is the best.

Reading through the first half of my journal last night (which covers essentially all of 11th and 12th grade) was more than a little depressing. I'm glad i've matured a little since back then. Hopefully my 19 year old self won't be as much of an embarrassment to my 22 year old self as my 16 year old self is to me.

So now i'm waiting for my laundry to finish. I still have 1.5 runs in the dryer to get through before i can finish packing, so i figure i'll start on that and be ready for my clothes when they're done. I've got an exciting 3 days of driving ahead of me, and on Sunday i'll be in Utah. Hoorah.

In case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.

Oh, P.S.- Happy Birthday USA. Just because I'm super excited about leaving you for two years, and have toyed with the idea of just leaving forever because of how screwed up people have made you, doesn't mean i love you any less. The last eight years were hard and a little embarrassing for me as well, but now that we're out of that awkward stage, we can learn from our mistakes and move forward, make new friends keep our best friends around, and find our place in the world. Happy 232nd, and many more.

Clever title goes here

I was reading in my journal (the corporeal one) when i came across this little beauty. I think it sums up my life:

August 12 - Last Full Day in Jackson

I always find it interesting that real life's moments are never quite perfect, but almost. I just said goodbye to Roberta, X&Y was in the car, and The Hardest Part was playing. But I really had to pee, and I got home and my pee smelled like Asparagus.

Tonight, Instutute; tomorrow, the world!

~Witty reference goes here.

yeah, i post twice a day. What of it?

I think i need to keep one of those mini mead notebooks on me at all times to write down clever facebook statuses (stati?) and the little tilde signatures i do at the end of these. It's not like i think the random thoughts i come up with are genius, or even noteworthy, but every once in a while i'll think of something that makes me chuckle, and want to spread the joy of chuckling to everyone, but my previous status still applies (for example, 6 hours ago i celebrated spain's victory with a chorus of ole's, and i've already had like 3 other statuses for today, so i don't want to put another one). By the time the moment arises i have forgotten, and, put on the spot, i panic and just say the first thing i think of. beef...stew.

In this instance, i'll explain the train of thought. I saw someone make the common mistake of leaving out 'is' on their facebook status when it's necessary, in this case describing a girl who's at the pool with her friend. So i decided it would be kinda cool to have my status be

Ammon Perkes in the conservatory with the lead pipe

The lead pipe has always been my favorite clue weapon, by the way. It's such a silly weapon. Where did they get it? Why is it bent like that? Did the murderer use the wrench in order to acquire the lead pipe? Why is it made of lead, when lead's use in plumbing had mostly stopped by the early 20th century. Had it been used for water or sewage?

I am of the opinion that the makers of Cluedo came up with the lead pipe last.

2 days ago I killed a pizza.

true story.

I actually did something yesterday. Realizing that 3 months is far too long to go without knowing anybody in biloxi I've started going to institute and singles activities. So yesterday there was this dinner thing that i went to, and afterwards we drove up to Hattiesburg for a singles dance. That was pretty fun, especially because i got to see all the jackson stake girls (all the guys i know from there are either on missions, married, or are not yet 18) and got to know some gulfport stake people to boot. So that was cool, hopefully i'll have legitimate friends sometime soon, not having any friends is boring.

It's amazing how quickly i've become used to the idea of going to portugal, and now i can't imagine going anywhere else. I am a little worried about learning a new language, but i'm way excited about being proficient in another language. There are two people i've met down here that speak portuguese, one from brasil, on a return missionary, so that's cool.

So i think it's ridiculous that we change the names that countries choose for themselves. In some cases, like when it's really hard to pronounce or i guess if the spelling doesn't sound look the pronunciation to english people, it makes a bit of sense, but there's no reason to call Italia italy, and spell Brasil brazil, so from now on, in the interest of Globalization, i'm going to follow Google Maps' lead and try to call countries by their actual name. We'll see how that turns out.

By the way, here's the address for sending me stuff in portugal. There'll be a different one when i actually get there, but that one will still work. Eventually i'm going to turn this blog over to a responsible adult who will be able to add my MTC address (which i don't know yet) and my real address, and keep this blog updated with letters and stuff so that you guys can keep updated at the speed of the interweb.

Elder Ammon David Perkes
Portugal Lisbon Mission
Apartado 40054
1500 Lisbon
Portugal











~Here, Dear, alone with all your letters

brevity is the soul of what?

I have lost my chapstick. This is no surprise, i lose it about once a day, it's probably in my shorts; the bigger surprise is that i find myself in mississippi actually needing chapstick. People who have spent all their time in the south or somewhere similarly humid and warm, (i'm looking at you carter) will never understand the vital necessity of chaptstick in the west.

Initially i was making a long post, but about half way in i just stopped caring, so, in summation: passport, cardhouses, dentist office, toasted ham, scripture mastery, institute, silly videos, beach.

~Not marked for individual sale

3 a.m. is no place for a mighty warrior

Cool story:
So last week i went with the missionaries to visit a couple people, since they don't have a car. Unfortunately both the appointments fell through, and so we just ended up driving about for half an hour (be patient, the story gets better). On our way to one of the appointments however, we noticed that this cop was following me. Now, i like to think that i'm a fairly safe driver, and i generally don't speed too much, but it's certain that a cop in a bad mood could pull me over for any number of things, mild speeding, rolling stops, etc. So I was a little concerned when i saw a cop behind me, but i figured, "no biggie, he's just headed the same direction". So then we turn off onto the smaller road, and the cop is still behind us. We drive for like 3 miles on this windy road and the cop is still right behind us. We turn into this neighborhood, and he turns off to. He continues to follow us at ever turn we make until we pull over at the house. It turns out that the cop lived a few doors down, but that was enough to make me thoroughly freaked out for the entirety of a fifteen minute drive. Cops are scary.

Less scary but much more disappointing are old ladies that tell you that your investigators are going to their daughters ballet. A likely story. but whatev's, i've done splits before, it wasn't the first time that several appointments fell through, and considering i have two years of that to enjoy, i figure it's just as well.

In other news, i'm super excited about portugal. Tomorrow i'm applying for my passport, i feel so international. I found this blog of a girl currently serving in my mission. It's cool to read about missionary life out there. So yeah, that's about all that's been going on. I just remembered that story and wanted to write it down. It's not everyday a cop follows you for 15 minutes.

Hereby Called to Serve:

I got my mission call! It seems sort of silly to write this as an announcement, since by now everyone who reads my blog probably already knows, but nonetheless, it's pretty exciting. I've been called to the Portugal Lisbon mission. I'll speak Portuguese and be generally awesome. I don't have to report until september 24th, so i think i'll try to find a job and maybe be productive for parts of this summer.

I'm pretty happy about going to Portugal, i'd be happy about anywhere, but last night, in lieu of the impending mission call, i spent a bit of time thinking about my ideal mission. I decided that i would prefer to learn one of the romance languages, minus romanian, and decided I'd rather go to europe than south or central america. Happily, Portugal fulfills these criteria with ease. It also fulfills the desire to go somewhere they play soccer, and somewhere that i can gain loyalty to a soccer team. (an aside: I already feel silly and ignorantly american calling it soccer, i figure a solid couple of years saying futebol will be enough to work it out of my lexicon. It's a shame throwball somehow ganked that word over here.) I imagine it also covers the 'challenging mission' requirement suggested by my stake president, as i imagine, given that Europeans and catholics are both notoriously difficult to convert, a nation of catholic europeans speaking a foreign language will probably be tricky. But i like challenges, they make life engaging.

eeny-way, fun stuff. Other News:
I can never remember the last time i make these, and by extension, how much i've already talked about. Wow, it would appear it's been a while.

So, wrapping up the trip in jackson was good, i managed to see everyone i wanted to, and then some. I even managed to see hunter and melissa, who i completely missed last time i was in town. Both of these were at restaurants (Bravo and Cups, respectively), and it made me feel so posh. Oh, by the way, i've been watching rather absurd amounts of doctor who and a bit of topgear lately, so i may tend to british wordage from time to time, things like daft, farce, brilliant, some unnecessary u's, that sort of thing. I should really just annotate these blogs, it would make them much easier to read with all the asides and digressions. Back on track: I managed to say goodbye to caitlin this time around (something i apparently didn't do last time. I don't remember, but it does sound like the sort of thing I would neglect), and even gave spencer rabies, along with a clever assassination attempt in the form of pop rocks and coke. Given the fact that he hasn't updated his blog since i gave him them, i'm assuming they worked.

Driving home from jackson was an adventure, or rather, it was so far from an adventure that i had to pull off to clean the car for 40 minutes to keep myself from passing out from boredom. It was a pretty uneventful drive, but that's ok. I got to the airport with time to spare, and managed to get Cami back to biloxi in spite of traffic and shoddy windshield wipers. The Wangsgard gang (i wish i had a group name that started with W, i'll work on that) was all asleep, but eventually we talked to them, and the Wade's and grandparents came a bit later. I was surprised by how well our house held that many people. So lets see, we went to dauphin island, which was nice. At the time it seemed the drive was longer than necessary but when we went to the closer beeches later we were attacked by a fleet of jellyfish, which made the hour drive seem more reasonably. We went to the naturito...naturitum...arboretum, yeah, and saw lots of trees and turtles and many things not starting with t. It's safe to assume we played some games, video and otherwise, and had generally fun times.

Sunday (the 15th) I gave a talk in church which was nice. I felt like i sort of lacked focus in the talk. In my defense, i wasn't given a topic, and, although it was father's day, my father asked me not to give a talk entirely on fathers, so i didn't. In addition i was somewhat unprepared, but i think it went over ok, except that part where i made it seem like i had to postpone my mission because of serious transgressions, instead of serious lack of coordination. Monday was Isaac's baptism, which i was able to do, which was cool. After that we went and got food at this little pizza place, which was good.

Tuesday i went through the temple, which was awesome, (perhaps even brimming with awe, any more awe and it would have been aweful) and it was cool to have my whole family there (unfortunately minus those stuck with baby-sitting, although katie and cami still drove all the way to baton rouge just to watch kids in a hotel) We got burger king on the way home. I got a chicken sandwich, which i will say, without qualification, was the worst chicken sandwich i've had in my life. The drive back was pretty chill and Logan and I talked about mission type things and such, which is especially pertinent now that I'm serving in the same place he did...hm, i hadn't mentioned that yet. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Now we'll will be able to have secret Portuguese conversations, it will be glorious.

The next day people started leaving, so where were lots of goodbye's. Amy and Dylan stayed longer, so we went to a water park and that was fairly fun. I think Water Parks would be about the funnest thing ever if there were no people and no rules. rules and people ruin everything, but it was still a good time. It was no Rapids on the Reservoir, but what can you do?

So that pretty much brings me to to now. Yesterday I had to talk a bit in Stake Conference, but that was nothing major. Today i went to see the Incredible Hulk, which was really good, and then came home to find my mission call and my security deposit waiting for me. I was planning to watch Iron Monkey (my netflix) before going to bed, but i've spent about an hour on this post due to various distractions and such.

Fyi, Pork and Beans by Weezer is one of my favorite songs and without a doubt the most magnificent music video i've ever seen. It just makes me feel good.

~Short on Money but Long on Time

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

So, i'm in jackson. I've actually been here since friday, but being without a house or a large amount of spare time, blogging hasn't been my main priority, but i figure i could update while i'm waiting for spencer to drag himself out of bed.

This jackson trip has been quite a bit more fun. The drive up was nice, although i got a gnarly sun burn on my left arm, including a nice t-shirt line and a stripe where my wristband was. Friday i came in and, after running some errands, swung by Sal and Mookie's and got to see a whole bunch of people who I'd worked with, and a lot of new people that i haven't. After that i went over to spencer's and hung out for a few hours, and then went over to Emmett's for a party where i saw lots of other people i hadn't seen for a long time, so that was fun.

Saturday i got up pretty late, on account of the party, and then...did...something. It was awesome. Oh right, we went bowling eventually, and that was way fun. I ended up bowling six games, one of which i did pretty good, but that was the one i was really trying, so that's all that counts. That night i slept at caitlin's, and had planned to watch Doctor Who that night, but i realized at 2 a.m. if i wanted to wake up for church i should probably get some sleep.

Sunday i went to church in jackson, and that was cool, lots more people i hadn't seen in a while. After that i went back to spencer's and ate lunch/breakfast, and then we watched Doctor Who, which was cool, although not one of my favorites. It was a little more dramatic and less witty than some of them, but i'm ok with plot development. That night we played risk which, despite some unpleasantnesses, was pretty fun.

Monday we went to the lake, and that was cool. We swam/floated across to the lake house again, and hung out there for a while. At some point this old lady wanted to kick us out. After that, and some confusion, we got papa john's and watched TV at caitlin's until it was bed time.

So now it's today. I'm thinking i need to talk to Melissa and Hunter before i go back to the coast, so i think i might go to Broad St, because that stuff's delicious.

Challah back.

Question: Which Bear is Best?

Fact: China's liberal policy on copyright infringement allows for a near limitless supply of television episodes, just a button press away.
Fact: Over 1/5 of the population of the earth, around 1.3 billion people, live in China.
Fact: Because of a time difference, China's peak internet usage occurs from about 10pm to 11 am central time.

As i'm sitting here, reflecting on these and other facts and waiting for an episode of mythbusters to load from a website being slowed to a crawl by the traffic of a billion asians, it occurs to me that i could make a blog to kill some time.

Today was a good day. I read The Phantom Tollbooth, the book by which my blog is named. I cleaned my dad's car, and although the carpet shampoo-er thing seemed to do very little, the car is dramatically cleaner; immaculate even. I also fixed up my dad's bike, although this is for me. I've been sort of lethargic of late, and i've been wanting to exercise but i don't really like the gym and the pool is too busy and i'm good at finding excuses for not being productive. But no longer. Four hours, 3 discarded inner tubes, a trip to the bike store, and inordinate amounts of WD-40 later, i have what will very soon be a working bike. In all actuality, i could have done just patched a couple inner tubes and been done with it, but the innertubes were mismatched, the wrong sized, and some had some pretty considerable holes so i washed my hands of the whole business (metaphorically, literally my hands got extremely dirty) and bought some new tubes. I also generally cleaned the bike up, and removed a truly shocking amount of caked on grease. In one case, what i thought was the axle of the sprocket was actually a solid, 2 inch deep mass of old grease. Some people would probably have found this somewhat disgusting, but having worked at Backyard burger, i am fully aware of the extents to which old grease can be disgusting. 3 rags (one of which turned out to be one of my mom's best washcloths.) took care of that fairly well. Now the bike is by all accounts spic, some might even go so far as to call it span. Somehow my parents don't have a tire gauge anywhere in their house or in either of the cars. This seems like a pretty serious oversight, and not wanting to test my powers of detecting psi through sense of smell, i decided it would be worth waiting one night to get a tire gauge. It also needs some adjustment to the gear shift, which seems pretty insistent on staying in first gear, and that's just not going to ride. But yeah, all in all it looks much less like something that is completely past it's prime and suffering from a history of traumatic injury and more like a ridable bike. I found a small medal spike embedded in the tire, which seems like the kind of thing that would pop an inner tube, so i'm glad i stumbled upon it.

So that took up the majority of my day, it's always fun to work on things, get my hands dirty and such. I think it'd be fun to take a mechanics class when i get back from the mission. I'm thinking i might audit some engineering classes when i get back to get a sense of what type of engineering interests me. Telling someone you're thinking about getting into engineering doesn't mean a whole lot, since engineering encompasses about a kabillion careers. That should be fun.

So i guess that's about all that's going on down here. I'm going to be heading up to jackson soon, so that'll be fun and a half. My mom has stuff to do up there anyway, and then she's decided that she can survive without the car for a bit and is going to take the bus back, so i will have the car up there and i won't have to spend 80 dollars on a bus ticket, which is something i'm pretty happy about. I guess it makes sense that high gas prices mean that bus tickets are a lot more expensive, but it's still shocking.

I wonder how long i can go in my life without owning a car, i don't expect gas will go down in the next two years, having roughly doubled in the last two years, so i'm pretty sure i won't be able to afford a car for quite some time. Maybe i'll get a bike, bikes are pretty much the best form of transportation as long as you don't need to take a lot of stuff with you, and i've never been one to carry a lot of baggage.

That's all for now,i have a full episode of mythbusters waiting for me, so i'm going to find out what putting sugar in someones gas tank does.

Adieu.

Genealogy and other adventures in real and cyber-space

Yesterday my dad's brother Brent visited, which was cool. My dad gave him the tour of biloxi, and i went too since i hadn't gone yet. There were a lot of really cool houses, and there was a map that showed all the houses that my dad's program had built or are building or helped rebuild and it was a pretty shocking amount, maybe over 100. It's cool that biloxi is going to have this mark left on it by my dad with all these really good houses on stilts. One of the houses was amazing, it was built right around the branches of a tree so as you walked up to it it felt very much like a tree house. Live oak trees, by the way, are amazing. I think they might be some of the coolest trees i've seen, and i've seen lots and lots of trees.

We also ate at The Shed, probably the most southern place i've ever eaten at. It's definitely a place that needs to get featured on that food network show where they go to all those little restaurants...i can't remember what it's called, something, drive in's and dives maybe. Something like that, anyway, it was good stuff. After that we went down to the beach and me and isaac swam. It wasn't really swimming, since after walking out about a hundred yards it was still only 3 feet deep, and i started scaring isaac by talking about sharks so he didn't want to go farther, but it did feel good.

Today, we said goodbye to Brent (the tour was actually today too, somehow it seems like it was a long time ago) and then i've just been meandering about the rest of the day. At some point i posted mission pools on facebook and my family.com, so go one of those places and guess where you think i'm going on my mission. At some point today i googled 'perkes' and found all sorts of cool things. For instance:
According to this site Perkes descend from the Norman noble Perahgoz "lands in Kent by Duke William of Normandy, their liege Lord, for their distinguished assistance at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 A.D." I'm very skeptical of this, since it's a website trying to sell you medieval-esc pictures (they charge you 17 dollars for a digital image) of family crests and the like, but i dunno. According to them our motto is Semper Paratus, making us the boy scouts of the turn of the millenia. I have trouble trusting that would charge anything, let alone 17 dollars, for something with no inherent value or even existance (in this case, a digital image), it also conflicts with the known genealogy of Perkes, which i discovered after that.

I found a website wholly devoted to the name Perkes, specifically the descendants of James Perkes (of which i am part) who left England and Established Hyde Park in Utah and had lots of kids. He was the son of John Perkes, and seems to be the only son who carried the name on (there were lots of daughters, and one guy who's name seems to die off. This could, however, be because that Perkes doesn't have a small army of Mormon Perkes' trying to learn about their genealogy). It is cool though to look at stuff about people you're descended from. Apparently the Perkes heralded from Worcester (which is tricky to say, and can make you appear really stupid to those who know how to say it right), which still has a decent little LDS population. It also has some pretty impressive population density (90,000 people across 12 square miles), but i guess that's somewhat typical of england. So yeah, cool beans. I'd still like to know where the name Perkes actually comes from (i don't buy into that purchase crap) but i'll survive i'm sure.

Things Fall Apart

Time passes in the worst way down here. Day's trod on with no real distinction, but already it's been 4 weeks since i said goodbye to everything i had found over the past year. I am such a bum.

I wrote in my real journal last night (always a good decision) and realized i haven't really accomplished anything while here. I mean i've gotten some interviews that have moved me forward on the path to exciting adventures in mission life, i've become immune to hepatitis (originally i was going to try to do that through sheer force of will, but it turned out the vaccines are cheap), and today i discovered that i can make uncrustables. Is it sad that the highlight of my day is making little pb&j crepes? perhaps. For a second there i was worried my spacebar had stopped working. That would have been disastrous.

Lets see, i may have given up reading The End of Nature. It's a sad book about how climate change has fundamentally altered nature, not just the climate, but the innate independence and immutability of earth's environment has been lost. Probably the scariest part is it's nearly 30 years old and the climate change discussion hasn't really changed: the majority of scientists are calling for change while the majority of status quo is hoping some deus ex machina will come alone to make in a non-issue. Maybe it will, with any (i.e. absurd amounts of) luck the next president will be able to fundamentally alter the nature of American politics, since anything short of that isn't going to change much.

I started to read this book that my mom said was really good. The book itself said that it could change my life by discovering my true attributes. I just couldn't take it seriously though. It started by comparing humans to flowers and how we need to bloom and transcend our trepidatious ways and discover blissful...so that's about that point i stopped reading. Any book that could change my life would read better than a self help book for little girls. And, as a rule, i try to avoid Oprah's book club.

So with one book depressing and one extremely dull, i've opted for reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy again. While it does, admittedly, leave you with a certain emptiness, it is a happy emptiness, akin to video games, or general anesthesia. I figure between intensive temple and mission preperations, i'll be able to find enough meaning in my life even without motivational oprah books.

My Jackson trip has been pushed back and shortened due to the dual requirements of a Stake President interview next thursday and family coming a week after that. It'll be cool to have family around, even if 14 people, two of whom are still card carrying babies, will make this house feel a bit Oliver Twist. I don't even know where we're all going to sit, but i'm sure we'll manage.

That's about the extent of what's going on down here. Yesterday we saw the new indiana jones. My main complaint is an overabundance of silliness. Swinging through trees with monkeys is ok if you're Tarzan, but not if you're Shia Labeouf. CGI is spectacular and all, but it really takes away from that grittiness that the old indiana jones movies had. One shock is how spry Harrison Ford still is. Apparently he worked out 3 hours a day and did a lot of his own stunts. That is one hardcore old man. Other than the over all silliness, the plot was weak, and a lot of things weren't explained properly. A good movie, but not a great one. Lucas should be limited to no more than three movies of the same title. Or maybe he just shouldn't be allowed to make movies after the 1980's. Either way, there's a threshold he's crossed into the place where great movies lose their magic.

Digital TV is good stuff, the picture is as promised, and our current technical difficulties stem from an antenna that long ago became trash. The bigger issue is the total lack of good tv on network. I never realized what i was missing, but USA, BBC America, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, and others are all pretty good stuff. and, lest we forget, FX has the movies. All in all, it's difficult to enjoy idleness (idle-atry). Naps remain highly enjoyable however.

Today i played ball in the house. I'm a rebel.

And I'll form the Head!

I've been reading a lot lately. Today i finished the Tipping Point, and yesterday i finished The President of Good and Evil. Both were good, although the latter was really depressing and made me sad that America is going to crap. It's also sad that politicians running for office are unable to criticize the country without seeming anti-patriotic. I think real patriotism requires working to make the country better. So i'm hoping that the next president will be willing and able to make hard unpopular decisions and convince Americans that the rest of the world matters to and we can't just ignore treaties that we don't find advantageous. So after reading a book about the inconsistencies and hypocrisies it felt good to read a book that was more cheery.

Hillary Clinton is in no way photogenic. I think this is a serious flaw on the part of her campaign staff. Maybe part of it is personal and media bias, but it seems like every picture of her she's on the verge of a psychotic killing spree. She just doesn't have a very nice looking smile.

Look at that baby, it's terrified. And how could it not be? That face is scary.

by the way, this made me laugh, the caption is good too.

Last night i had a dream that i was batman. But i was also billionaire playboy ammon perkes, or actually just normal guy ammon perkes, and there was some sort of snaffoo going on, it seemed like maybe a concert or something. At first there was that rubber fence stuff all around it, but then they let everybody in, and there were lots of people i know there, and they were all playing baseball, but i'd come late so i didn't get to play, but i did distract alex long enough to make him get an error, which was recorded for some reason. Meghan was also there. Also most of the soccer team. I tried to find some food. It was an exciting dream, but then i got to the more superhero-ish part of it, with me in my bat cave, but i had lost all my strength or something, and i needed to break out my prototype armored robo-batsuit that allowed me to fight without requiring me to actually be in good physical shape. At somepoint in here, n'sync came and they were all super heroes. I really don't know what happened there, i remember thinking at the time that they were really lame. I think i might have been robin actually, or else i was taking over for some older batman, but for some reason or another i didn't know the password to the bat suit, luckily there was another way in. For some reason it was stored in a tiny hole. Anyway, just as i was about to break out the batsuit and start fighting crime, i woke up.

I dunno what this dream means, except that i have weird dreams when i sit in bed for a long time in the morning, and apparently said dreams are prone to being disappointing in many ways.

In other news, life down here continues in much the same way. My Mom's back from Cambridge, which is nice. My papers should get submitted sometime soon, i'm a bit tired of waiting to start waiting for my call, so i'm glad it's finally getting moving. Otherwise not a whole lot is going on, my netflix finally got here, so i think i'm going to break out the Eureka. I watched television for the first time in a long time a couple days ago (i've been watching dvd's and online). I was shocked when the commercial lasted more that 15 seconds. One of these days i'll get a hair cut, it's starting to get a little silly.

Scantron Armor, ASSEMBLE!

~More likely to succeed.

these pretzels are making me thirsty

The neighbors down here have a weird affinity for crappy music with crappy baselines. Usually i don't care about the musical tastes of people i don't know, but when i have to listen to the same baseline for 20 minutes, it gets a little old (f#bf#bebeb, etc). Oh wait, it modulated down a half step. Those are the neighbors to the right, on the left they like to sit on the porch and be loud when i'm trying to sleep at 10am. I really don't like this house. There are just so many things about it that don't work the way they're supposed to, and for some reason flies like to hang out in here. It just gets to be a little much.

In other news, i'm having a hard time staying productive. I've started going to the gym, and that's a plus, and i'm making dinner and doing dishes from time to time, but i'm spending half my day sleeping and half the time i'm awake i'm watching tv online. I'm sure this is about to change since i may have caught up with all the tv shows i watch. Scrubs, Chuck, and Smallville are all done for the season. I've run out of Psych dvd's (which is probably my favorite show on the air, by the way). Monday Bones and House will be done, i've watched all the firefly episodes (the best show of all time and one more reason to hate fox) so yeah.

We went to see Prince Caspian last night. I've never seen a movie less faithful to the book, but that's ok. Had they stuck to the book, it would have been a pretty boring movie. They added a whole new battle sequence and found ways to stretch conflicts that were resolved in about a page into long-term story arcs. They also added random unnecessary romance for some reason. Anyway, it was a good movie with pretty decent battle scenes and good acting, although Prince Caspian's acting left something to be desired, such as a good actor to play prince caspian. He had a really weird accent that i couldn't quite pin down. It was vaguely spanish. It was like someone with an already heavy accent trying to put on a spanish accent and not doing it very well. I also find it odd that battles in this movie only took like fifteen minutes. That just seems weird. And the giant water Jesus at the end was sort of odd, i dunno where that came from. It was a silly movie, but definitely worth seeing.

We (me johnny and caitlin) Kayaked the okatoma on monday, and that was fun. They stuck us on the crappy part of the okatoma, something i realize was happening at the time. So i'm thinking i need to go back and do it again, this time on the fun part. After that we got some food, and hung out outside a movie theater since there wasn't anything we wanted to see. Driving hope at 1am in mississippi is really creapy. It feels sort of claustrophobic, with the trees and the lack of people. Also because there are deer all over the place, it's not so safe to zone out and just drive, which is what i usually like to do. I also saw a bunch of cops, and so i couldn't really speed. One of them pulled out after i passed him, but i didn't after i crossed the next hill i didn't see him, so that was sort of scary. I was only going about 10 over (in a 75), and it would have taken him around 10 minutes of serious speeding to catch up to me. Ultimately i got home without losing any kayaks so all went well.

If i ever find myself in some ethnic minority somewhere, i have decided i will not eat only ethnic food and listen to ethnic music at 100 decibels. This isn't really a problem for me since as Americans we have very few things that are uniquely american. Most things that we call american are just cheap knock-offs of other people's culture. I guess i could crank up the Mo-Tab and break out the jell-o casserole, but i don't think people would quite get it.

So that's what's going on right now. I'm getting a bit concerned that i'm going to have to wait longer for my mission than i want to, both because my papers still haven't gone in (i need to call the bishop about that today) and i'm going to have to get a hepatitis A booster in november, and i don't quite know how that works. Oh well, with no scholarship being put on hold, it doesn't matter much, i really just don't want to stay here until novermber. I think i'd be really very bored. Anyway, that's all for now. Probably one of my less interesting posts to read, and i apologize, i'll try to make my life more exciting from here on out.