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travelling through january 2001 |
1/29/2001: The word for today's weather is crappy. What it is is pissin' down rain on top of what appears to be a big dirt slurpee. Friday we had more snow, something like three inches of it in about as many hours. It was good packing snow and it covered up the remaining crusts of ice from December. Then beginning Sunday we had some kinda heat wave and it's all been slowly melting off while at the same time raining. We were supposed to get up to 45F today but that didn't end up happening (so far, at least) - we're only at 37F and now it's dark.
Unrelated to the snow, on Friday there was a big power outage caused by an explosion and fire in the Abbott Power Plant. There was an arc on a 138KV switching circuit, cause unknown. This happened around 8:30 AM, no one was hurt, and the resulting fire was put out by around 9:45 AM. However, the switchboard was totally ruined, and in order to start fixing things, all the power had to be turned completely off. Now, Abbott Power plant powers about 80% of UIUC (the older parts, basically) and is responsible for all the steam in the steam tunnels. As I was walking to work (right at the peak of the three inches of snowfall) a neighbor came out and yelled that UIUC was without power so I should call in and see if my office was open, since most offices were being closed down. I called, but no one answered. I wasn't sure if that just meant the secretary wasn't in yet, and I thought I might as well go get some coffee and see what was up anyways, so I went on in. When I came into work, the entire Armory was pitch black. I stumbled to the door of my office, but no one was there, and there were no notes or anything. I decided to leave, and on the way out of the building I saw a big sign saying "All classes cancelled by order of the provost" so I decided to just bag it. Turns out people had gotten to my office about five minutes before me and went to get coffee, without leaving any sort of note, and we just missed each other, but as there was no work we could do (computer programmers, in offices with no power AND no windows) no one was working anyways. Around 2:00 PM I came back in and the power was back on but the campus DNS and all the internet connections were still hosed, so I still couldn't do work. So, we sat around watching "A Bug's Life" on DVD on one of our computers. How come all the bugs have four legs only???
As a result of the classes being cancelled and the snow, there are some truly large and impressive snowmen around the campus area. There is also a big snow penis out by the viaduct at Green and Neil, but probably by now it's, umm... shriveled.
I'm still working on the vacation pictures page. Soon. Soon.
This Saturday I started the WEFT training so that I can be qualified to be on the radio. It involved lots of FCC regulations talk and discussion about how WEFT is organized and then we scheduled to have in-booth training. I get to do the in-booth stuff on February 10th and February 21st. The last date I get to actually do part of a show so I should start preparing odd things.
In other news, I got a set of pots this weekend. The idea was to (1) get more pots so I can cook more things at once and streamline multi-step recipes and (2) get pots that heat more evenly. Turns out that single pots, good ones, are like $80!!! That's crazy! But, there was a sale on a set of the same pots that was $140 for the whole thing, and I got that. Farberware. So far they are working out great. I've gotten some good vegan soup/stew recipes off the net, and come across some truly wonderfully tasty stuff.
1/23/2001: I got vacation pictures from Bill. I've made a page for them, halfway, so no time for editing here this afternoon. The page of pics should be up tomorrow, hopefully.
1/19/2001: Today is the opening of the indymedia center space at 218 W. Main, Urbana starting at 8:00 PM. There will be some music by Paul Kotheimer and some poetry from Newspoetry.com, and food, and other fun happenings. There will also be some art on the wall and generally interesting conversation going on.
This weekend I hope to get my picture moldings up, or if that doesn't happen due to people's busyness, trim in the kitchen painted. We'll see how it goes. Now that the place is all in disarray, the motivation to finish stuff up is there - the main hard part is getting up the gumption to actually rip the place apart to do work in the first place. Things always have to get completely disordered before they can get reordered. Currently my cats are living in their bedroom only, so that they don't eat things they shouldn't and generally get themselves in trouble. At night though I take them out and put them in my room instead.
1/17/2001: The software I'm thinking of for a digital camera is here. Supposedly it compiles with 2.2.16 kernel and glibc 2.1.3, both of which I have, and supports a Canon Power Shot S-100 (the digital elph). If that's true, I might go get the elph. Woo. You also might want to read some general information about linux and USB support. USB backport for 2.2 kernel is at http://www.suse.cz/development/usb-backport/, it should be modularizable.
1/16/2001: So I painted a room highway sign yellow this weekend. Actually, I painted my dining room that color, and the living room "moth grey". Yep, I finally got off my butt and restarted the big living room/dining home reconfiguration. I want to just power through it and finally get the place feeling welcoming and the way I want, and put the pile o' painting stuff AWAY and really feel moved in, after all this time. That means, painting and shelves, more or less.
This weekend both rooms were painted, and we (big huge thanks to Sascha and Sarah, here) cut and painted white one room's worth of picture moldings. Those will be really important soon.
Both rooms started out white, they've been white since I moved in what, 2 years ago now? So we started out painting the dining room yellow, and painting the living room... green. Yep, green. I gotta say, paint sure looks different in the store under those fluorescent lights than it does at home. People were saying the green looked okay, and I guess it did - for green. Problem was, when I put the stuff back into the room partially, that I wanted in the room, the green clashed. I'd wanted more of a neutral tan or grey color, maybe a bit greenish even, but mainly grey, that I could freely change the accent colors in the room, possibly to dark colors even, and they'd all go. I pondered this all evening, and finally just came to the conclusion that I'd have to repaint the room again, the next day. No sense living with something I really didn't want... so we went back to the store, got more paint, and painted it grey. I'm happy now.
So now one room is really calm, and the other room is shocking wild. The yellow is truly, way, way intense. That's where the picture moldings come in. I need picture moldings because I need to hang a lot of art and I have plaster walls. Why do I need to hang a lot of art? Well, I just like to have art up, but more than that... the idea is to blend the yellow and grey rooms together, as one is really bright and one is really calm. When you sit in the chair in the grey room, you can see into the yellow room, and vice versa. I don't want to change the yellow color to be pale, because I know I don't like pale yellow. Plus, the yellow I have now goes GREAT with the kitchen, because it matches exactly one of the yellow colors in the floor tile, and the kitchen too is shocking wild (it's got bright blue/purple walls and a shocking yellow table). Looking back from the yellow room into the kitchen, underneath the noren (which looks really awesome in the yellow room - and it's off white, black, various greys, and some red) looks way awesome 'cuz you can see the floor there, under the noren, and with the yellow walls next to it. Woo. The kitchen itself has the bright walls, bright floor, and a bright table, but my appliances and my dishes that are out are pretty much black and white, and that too looks really cool (in my opinion, of course. I'm sure many people are screaming and running away from this page at the mention of it!). So, the idea is... I intend to hang large things in that room so I can have the yellow, and have the wonderful warmth in there, but not so much that it makes the head hurt. But in particular, I intend to hang a large piece of "printed" style art, done in black, grey, tan, those kind of colors pulled more from the living room type colors, in the place where your eyes hit when you gaze in from the living room. In the living room, I want to hang a piece of bright art (or put some bright object) in the place where your eyes hit when you gaze over there from the bright yellow room. Now the trick is to find some nice big paper. I have ideas for the art, I'm in a good art mood today. I got a notebook of drawing paper and I'm wanting to paint colors in there and get ideas. I also am going to paint up a chair the same color as my kitchen walls and leave it in there. It's gonna be awesome, trust me. :)
The other kinda neat thing is, I happened to read some article on wacky furniture in the New York Times magazine today and they showed an awesome apartment that has some grey walls and some really bright yellow walls. Kinda neat, as I'd not read anything of the sort before picking those colors.
I also think I want to make a quilt from grey/brown/green corduroy. I need to go to the Salvation Army and buy up some old pants to cut up for material.
1/11/2001: The high today is forecast to hit 36F.
Yesterday and today I got sucked into this huge thread on Salon.com talking about adults rereading the "Little House on the Prairie" books. Man, it was great reading about other people also reading those books, again, and talking about the real lives of the people, etc. As a kid it was definitely one of my absolutely favorite things, and all the other people in the thread felt similarly (and many of them thought they were the only one). There are several biographies of the real people out there, and I'll need to stop by the library once it gets checked back in. I remember always wondering why the books were in the fiction section, since at the time I didn't realize that stuff was rearranged, stuff was left out, edited, etc to make it into a coherent series of kids' books that wouldn't be overly disturbing in parts. This summer I went to a theme park called Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO and got some small biographical pamphlets and what not there, those were fascinating too. I still have a sunbonnet, getting that present was just the most absolutely best thing. I remember before I had one, a friend of mine's grandmother had made her one, and oh how we used to fight over that thing! This was the same kid who had one pair of tap shoes and one pair of ballet shoes, I always ended up wearing the ballet shoes, and one time I was running around in the rain and slipped wearing 'em and skinned up my elbows something awful. We also saw "the Rescuers" together and thereafter used to pretend that we had to do all sorts of work for one "Madamadusa" (we didn't realize that was two words) and spent all sorts of time scrubbing down the front porch of her house.
At any rate, the thread eventually started talking about kids' books in general, including Beverly Cleary (the Ramona Quimby books, among others - I always liked the ones illustrated by Louis Darling the best), Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, all those... plus The Great Brain series by Scott Fitzgerald, All of a Kind Family by Sidney Taylor, and the Betsy books... plus the saddest book I think I have ever read, Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson (her Jacob Have I Loved is also great). I still can't read that thing without crying. Anyways the library has all of these, and I have got to go down there and have a MAJOR reading binge.
Tonight at 7PM there is another informational meeting about the IP tree trimming stuff with Laura Huth at the new Strawberry Fields Cafe.
This Saturday I'll be making the huge run to Menards to pick up stuff for the living room terraforming that will be happening starting on Sunday. Finally it's gonna happen - picture moldings, painting, shelf building, and lots of food making to feed the helpers. In exchange for help I'll do some data massaging for the helpers too. Should be good.
1/10/2001: Today it made it up to 36F. I hear tomorrow we should see 40F. Woo hoo, less pants. It should also be a prime time to haul the mountains of crappy building debris out of the basement. Oooh, fun. Luckily I've got a few good hours of taped radio to keep what's left of the brain occupied during.
At the moment I'm off to the library, as I came across a website mentioning the Great Brain books by one Scott Fitzgerald this afternoon and decided I want to reread them.
Thanks to people who sent me mail recently. I should get to replies soon. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some film back and be able to scan some newer pictures too, including some Bad Haircut pics that jen requested.
1/8/2001: So it looks like we'll see forties on Wednesday. Woo hoo!
I spent all of Saturday painting it up at the new home of the Independent Media Center, at 218 W. Main St, Urbana. This is, of course, Chub Conner's old campaign space. Turns out he left a photo album in there, and it has great pictures in it, including some of him in younger days grinning hugely in aviator frames holding up a huge bunch of pot plants ripped fresh from a field, with a large bonfire of same burning merrily behind him, and other sherrif-esque people standing around it. Some kinda drug bust, I guess. Breathe deep, now... The horrid pink color is gone, as are some of the cheesier non-structural walls. I guess the amazing thing is that Chub and the gang were actually using that office in its previous rather skanky state. I guess you do what you gotta do for short term campaigns, but still. Ew. It looks much better now.
The Amazing Dream Dimension Movie, Scene 417: Sitting on a blanket in a field, surrounded by forest, looking into the forest and there were eyes, simian eyes, they were another species of almost-human, but sentient. I was a bit afraid of them. Left the blanket, was flying by flapping "wings" but after a while I switched to the more usual "treading water" sort of flying that usually happens in dreams. I was at UCSD, somewhere near the bus stop, and it was FFOG time. Hooked up with someone else, not sure who (Rosemary?) and flew to Malaysia in a small plane. We arrived there and went into some gift shop sort of what you'd find in a museum. I wanted to look around there, and then go to China afterward if we had time, but I started to realize we might not have time. We decided to go upstairs to view other floors. Walking by the stairs near the elevator, saw some young kid Boy Scouts and some old woman Girl Scouts, and the Boy Scouts were being rather disrespectful, and I pondered whether younger should be deferential to older, or if in this universe it was boy trumps girl, regardless of age. It seemed to be the latter, and I remarked how bratty they were being. We got into the elevator, hit a button for the 3rd floor, 5th floor, etc, but the elevator refused to stop there, kept going up. Hit 12. Finally the elevator stopped, we got out, but into a PLANE, and it was already taking off! Plane was thickly painted off white metal inside, I was in the driver's seat, got up in the air and managed to fly around, radioed for help, said we were in Jakarta (?) but the person on the other side was confused and said he was in India so he couldn't do anything. By that time the plane was landed, sort of landed itself. It seems that the plane trip was preprogrammed as part of getting to the 12th floor. We go into a building (the 12th floor) and that's the ground floor for another sort of place, a woman sitting with an afghan in a living room, we go upstairs, the upstairs is open, there's a railing you can look down into the living room. Up there is like an attic, all kinds of stuff belonging to the family. We start rooting through it, there's old school books, and diaries. The woman kept a diary of sorts in the flypapers and the inside covers of all her school books, and we were reading those, and I was thinking maybe we shouldn't 'cuz she might come UP at any minute! But she didn't, and I decided we should put the stuff away, we crammed it into some sorta metal bookbag, with newsprint diaries too. Standing up I noticed there was an issue of AERA magazine sitting on the table, in a plastic bag like never been opened, and the date on it was 10/30, and the cover had a baby, Japanese baby, sitting up wearing only a diaper, but on his midsection it was written in thick black grease paint "NATO no ziyuu" (Freedom of NATO). I was wondering why I'd never gotten that issue.
1/5/2001: The high has reached 36F today, which means that the snow is melting. There's a lot of snow but it's turning to slush on the sidewalks, making those immense lakes of viscous muddy water with floating ice bits around all the corners in town (oh how fun for pedestrians like myself), and sort of pulling back from the edges where it's been plowed to show scraped up dirt and grass where the plows have turned it up. There's plenty of snow, though, and we're headed back under the freezing mark, so now I suppose it'll just cover slightly less area and be nice'n'crunchy on top. I must say, though, the weather felt so WARM this noon.
About the evil melons: I got home and checked the ones in the fridge, and they were FINE. Taste great. The tupperware holding the evil ones, though, I'd rinsed it out but not really well (there's no warm water in this building's bathroom, for starters, so it's not fun to wash in the wintertime) and then sealed it back up, and when I opened it to wash it for real at home, it was clear that the stuff inside had fermented. It smelled like really bad wine. That explained the gas too. Interesting thing there is, in order to have stuff ferment instead of just going over rotten, I think you need to have some kinda yeast. Now I'm thinking maybe the tupperware in question hadn't been washed properly before I packed the melons in it. Either way, it reminded me of a tasteless article I read a while back about how people get drunk in prison, particularly on death row in Florida. They get orange juice for breakfast, and they also get bread. So, they save part of the orange juice aside, in a cup, and then they tear of just a wee bit of bread and drop that in, and let it sit, covered, just for a few days. That's all it takes (and after these melons, I believe it!) to make it completely alcoholic, although according to the guy being interviewed it's the nastiest tasting thing you could possibly want to be drinking. Interesting.
1/4/2001: Today's high made it up to 27F, in the midst of mist and fog. Snow is still around, therefore, but it wasn't squeaky today. Where the sun was hitting the sidewalk some of the ice was melting, leaving huge bogs of Prime Illinois Dirt behind. Supposedly tomorrow we'll hit 32F and partially melt, just in time for refreezing and more snow. Whee!
So possibly it's the weather, possibly it's the food (more on that below, warning to the squeamish), or possibly it's just the general atmosphere, but I've gotten several crazy ideas of late. The first of these is that I'm seriously considering residing my house. See, here's the deal. It's got cedar shingles on it now, which are covered with layers of peach colored paint which is (1) now peeling, and (2) just not a color I'm fond of. Thing is, you're not really supposed to paint cedar shingles, because of oils they give off - you're supposed to stain them. But, once they're painted, you gotta just paint 'em, unless you're willing to really scrape all the paint completely off. For that matter, to put new paint on and have it not be all lamely lumpy, I still need to scrape most of it off. It's a Pain In The Ass, which translates into $$$. At any rate, scraping and painting nicely will be the fallback plan. BUT! Several people have suggested that if I'm going to have to spend $$$ anyway, I could spend a bit more $$$ and just have the shingles torn off, and new wood siding put on (not cedar this time though, probably). Long time readers might recall that I replaced an interior wall and found a window when I was working in the mud room. Well, when I did that, I saw that underneath the shingles are thin wooden clapboards. Now, usually one covers up old siding for a reason, so I don't hardly believe I'd be able to use those, so probably those would also come off. But, I think I rather prefer the look of clapboards since the house is small, and if I ripped it all off and put new siding on, I would have an opportunity to wrap the house in insulation, which would probably be a Good Idea. At any rate, it's certainly worth asking about. I will ask the guy who wants to paint the house, if he knows or knows who I should ask.
The second crazy idea is, I'm pondering getting a digital camera. I'd like to have more pictures up here, and right now getting pictures involves waiting a week for film development (it all goes to Chicago) and paying for the film, including when the pictures don't turn out, which they often don't when I'm the one taking them. Plus, the IMC doesn't yet have a digicam, and so they'd be able to use it too. Sooo... the question becomes, what kinda digicam can I get that works in Linux as well as NT? I have NT at work now, sure, but I'd prefer to get something that's a bit more flexible. Turns out there's some kinda article describing installation of gphoto2 which looks promising. Apparently gphoto2 is a new development version of a camera driver and interface for linux called gphoto. The old gphoto, 0.4, supports lots of cameras, but, it also turns out there's a really tiny camera "Canon S100" which is just like my regular camera but it's digital, so it's really tiny. Tiny is good in cameras for me, 'cuz I like to carry them around in my pocket so they're always handy. The current gphoto 0.4 doesn't support that camera. So, if I wanted that one I'd have to install the new thing, which involves a kernel patch to get USB support, but at least it's not a big kernel upgrade, so I might go for it. If nothing else, I can use the NT box until the other stuff is more stable, dunno. So, just thinking about it. But it's tempting. I could put up even more random stuff, but with images. Or of course I could get a different camera. I dunno, I'll probably talk to my hacker neighbors.
Lately I've been doing a lot of reading of Japanese pages online, and I got a Japanese input system so I can type in Japanese into blanks in web browsers and what not. This is particularly helpful when looking up books on the new amazon.co.jp web site. Yep, that's right, there's Amazon in Japan now. That is hella seriously good news for people like myself. Imagine! I can browse books without having to go all the way to Los Angeles (or Tokyo, for that matter). Shipping is rather pricey (flat fee of $12 for 2-5 weeks shipping, fee is $27 for 2-5 days shipping - yeah, it's in yen, I'm just ballparking 100yen/$1) plus $3 per item, BUT, considering how much I spent shipping books back from Japan last summer, it's not all that horrid, and it sure beats the heck out of the fake inflated "exchange rates" at the big J-bookstores in LA. I saved up a buncha books and ordered, we'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I also subscribed to AERA magazine at a subscription place on line called Sasuga Bookstore in Massachussetts, and I can read the Asahi Newspaper every day on the net. So yeah, I've been reading a lot lately. Reading the paper in particular, it always has "tomorrow's date" on it, due to the time zone difference. I listen to the BBC on the radio too every day, and it has the same thing happening, so I am constantly wandering around with my internal clock one day off.
The Amazing Dream Dimension Movie, Scene 23: I was with Mike Stone, one of my neighbors, in some large cathedral-esque building that was supposed to be at Cambridge, and there was a high point where people dive into a pool of water that's really, really deep and for some reason sinks you really fast. I did this, and the idea is, you dive in there and sink fast to the bottom like 2 or three stories, but the water is perfectly clear, and you can look up and see the mosaic dome above the pool, with some sort of better magical vision. It worked, and I was out of air, and then I had to swim down more, and through a U-trap, essentially (but square, like a hallway full of water down there) and then came out on the other side into a dormitory lobby. I am currently finding it hard to breathe (yesterday and today) which I think has something to do with it.
Oh yeah, Evil Melons. I got a canteloupe half a few days ago, and cut it up and put it in some tupperware. I've been doling out some for lunches this week. Tuesday's lunch, I had melon, it was good, it was refreshing, yummy. Then Wednesday I brought more in, but I didn't eat it. I took it out of the fridge (which was recently cleaned, thank goodness, 'cuz it had seriously evil Fridge Pong caused by tubs of leftover Mexican food from the Xmas party back on 12/11 that wasn't fully closed) and put it on the shelf by the microwave but then I forgot it there overnight. I came in this morning to put Thursday's lunch (today's) in the fridge, and oh, there's those melons, ok, lemme cool those off in the fridge, I like the melons better cold. Notice, I never opened the lid of the melons since they left my house on Wednesday morning. So, come lunchtime, I get the melons out and take them to lunch. I ate my lunch, I opened the melons, hmm, more liquidy than I recall. Do they smell? Well, not really, but the problem I think is I have a cold. So I ate one square. Whoo, was it nasty. Somehow it completely transmogrified from just one night out. It was tangy, which is not what you want melons to taste like, NOOOOO. It was almost carbonated, and tasted way off. I was at coffee and the place was crowded and I wasn't near the trash so I just swallowed that one piece (hopefully I'm not gonna be hurling later tonight) and closed the rest back up. I came back to the office and I put the CLOSED tupperware on the shelf behind my desk. We don't have a real kitchen in here (no sink - just a room with a microwave and a fridge in it), and I thought I'd take them down the hall and to the bathroom in a while. So, I got involved in programming, in the zone, when all of a sudden around 4:30 PM there was a loud POP. Some kinda noxious gas had built up in there enough to blow the lid off. I kid you not. Plus, now the reek was strong enough for me smell clear across my cube. I am just VERY thankful that didn't happen inside my backpack. VERY thankful. I ran the evilness down to the bathroom and chucked it in the trash. Man. I will have to check the Control Melons in the fridge at home and see if they're all rotten too or if it was just these ones at work.
1/3/2001: 新年明けましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願いいたします！ In other words, Happy New Year! It is now Heisei 13 which is really a rather sobering thought, as I remember the era changing over from Syowa back in 1989. Yow. Can it really have been thirteen years ago that I was standing in the UCSD Central Library (yeah, it was just "Central" then) reading that headline? Man. Anyways, it's the year of the snake this year, and I hope it's a happy one full of lots of learning.
People might be happy to know that one of my New Year resolutions this year is to get back on the particular wagon of updating this page on a regular basis. Mea culpa for the lack of recent updates, but bear with me while I explain a bit.
Faithful readers might recall that I changed jobs back in August 2000, not that long after going on vacation to Japan in July. I'm still working at UIUC, still programming, still doing largely the same SORT of work, but for a new and improved office. At any rate, this means that (1) I was out of the country a bit, then upon my return, I was (2) not really pleased with my work situation, and worrying about that sort of sucked up lots of energy, but then probably most importantly, moving jobs meant that I (3) got entirely new computers in my entirely new office. I don't have a computer at home, and so I generally do the updates on this page at my office (OFF the clock, don't worry!). At the previous gig, I actually stored the page on my work machine ("wocket") which was tacitly okay - all the users had personal pages up there. But, it wasn't really the best idea, not only because of possible Misuse of State Storage, but also because, as you've seen, the URL is then subject to change without notice. Therefore, I decided to put my page back on tcp.com, where it was originally originally. That's great, no conflicts of interest, and not likely to change involuntarily (though I am planning to move things into a redesigned site still on tcp.com but using a new domain soon), but there's one peeve - editing this page on tcp.com, using telnet from my local machines, is slow. Way slow. I type some letters, and see them appear with an appreciable delay. This is very annoying, to put it mildly. Therefore, what I do now is ftp the page I'm editing to the staff cluster (personal space for UIUC employees, but no way big enough for this heapa stuff), edit away, check it locally and all while I'm editing, but then ftp it back to tcp.com when I'm done. It works great, but takes a bit more doing than simply editing a local page on my work machine and leaving it there all the time. So, I got lazy, and wasn't doing it. Shouldn't happen in the future, and all that, if it does, feel free to drop me a yell via e-mail.
The high today was around 24F. In general it's been cold, which isn't too surprising. We got snow back in mid-December and it's been a white Xmas and white New Year and a white everything else since then, as it hasn't seen fit to go above freezing in the interim. We have around a foot on the ground right now. Supposedly the temperature will edge above freezing on Friday, but it's still iffy, and if it does, it's not likely to get that much over 32F, and so the snow will just start to melt and then refreeze when things cool back off on the weekend. We should have one of those really foggy soupy days when warm air parks itself over snow. I know the warm air was up in the atmosphere this morning because it did flurry just a bit, and it was those long needle like flakes that happen when the air is near freezing, but the ground temperature was still only around 5F. Highs in general have been around 15F or so for a while.
UIUC students are on winter break so things are nicely empty. Last week, however, the huge IVCF Christian college kids missionary conference that comes to Urbana every 3 years was here, complete with 20,000 people, so it was almost like school being on except that most of those people were wandering around slowly with maps. The dealer's room (or whatever you'd call its equivalent at a conference of this sort - it had booths with books and stuff for sale and people offering programs) was in the main track area of the Armory, which just happens to be the building I work in. This meant long lines for the loo all week, but at least I wasn't dishwarshing this time.
For New Year I went to the big newspoetry.com neighborhood party where we actually sang all of the verses to "Auld Lang Syne" at midnight.
This Saturday I will be helping to do painting and other random work on the new Champaign-Urbana Independent Media Center space in downtown Urbana, on main street (Chub Conner's old campaign office, for you locals).
Yow, it's time for the bus. Ta.
The Amazing Dream Dimension Movie, Scene 175: I was with Sehvilla, supposedly looking after her while her parents were out but we were in some huge house in the woods with lots of staircases and what not. We sat on this huge king size bed with a brown blanket on it, to chat or whatever, but it turned into some contraption that can only be described as an unholy marriage between a motorized bed and one of those electric moving chairs that go upstairs and so it started moving down this HUGE spiral stairway, until it lurched to a stop right in front of a picture window in a big bedroom high up looking out into a tree. I got up, and found under me a note ripped from a little spiral notepad that had a drawing of an evil Chicken Woman wearing little cat eye glasses and it said some nastiness about how Chicken Woman didn't trust me AT ALL and wished I was dead, dammit, and I got up thinking, "what is this craziness that I'm gonna sit on some motorized equipment set up by an insane murderous chicken??? I don't THINK SO!" and so I got up and was going to LEAVE that place when I woke up. I'm thinking it might have turned into some scary dream if I stayed in it. Also earlier in that dream I had to clean my room and it involved shoveling snow off of a different bed.