"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

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.