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.