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I think I may have passed away into the great by and by last night.

It all started with a walk to the Rec. No, wait, I guess it started a little bit before that. Hrm.

It all started with an AIM conversation between Nat and I. I ordered her to invite me to go to the Rec with her (without even knowing if she went to the Rec or not). She complied, and told me to meet her there at 5pm Thursday evening. So, yesterday after work, yesterday being Thursday and after work being 5pm, I made the short walk from East hall to the Rec.

As I neared the Rec, I started looking for Nat. This wasn’t as easy as it really should have been. You see, there’s some big competition known as the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals on campus right now, meaning there are lots of extra bodies on campus. Over a thousand of these extra bodies had decided to congregate in front of the Rec. I stopped in front of two different girls, smiled, and said hi. Unfortunately, neither were Nat. Eventually, I gave up trying to find her in the massive, colorful crowd, and headed inside.

Silly, smart Nat. She was inside waiting for me. We really should have planned better. I would have made fewer high school girls nervous.

I was at the Rec because I’m dreadfully out of shape, and I dreadfully want to be ~in~ shape. I figure an enormous, free (for students) recreational facility is a good place to start down that particular road. I’d only been to the Rec once before, and that was before I was even a freshman, during Orientation the early summer of 1999. Ironically (I suppose), I met Nat at this Orientation, and we snuck away that evening to the Rec to play racquetball.

We started out by jogging. Those of you who know me, know that I haven’t jogged since, well…

Okay, so I’ve never really jogged. This was the perfect opportunity to start, ya? A two mile jog, no big deal.

I think I died somewhere along that track. Two miles is a really, really long distance for someone who has never run unless chased, and usually even then preferred outwitting assailants to outrunning them. And I’d totally forgotten that I have asthma. Did you? I haven’t carried an inhaler since my freshman year. Sometime during my freshman year, I realized that as long as I didn’t get winded, my lungs wouldn’t shut down on me. And my natural aversion to most things physical took care of that ‘winded’ problem quite nicely. For literally twenty minutes after we finished jogging, I couldn’t catch my breath. Or feel my face. Or hear, really. I don’t know what that one was all about.

Eventually, though, I did catch my breath. And I survived. Today, my calves and my butt are sore, which must mean that I did something right. Therefore, I plan to do it again. Partially because I want to spend more time with my friends. Partially because I want to get in shape. Partially because when I weighed myself this morning, I was below 180 pounds again, which made me very happy. And partially because there were a dozen girls on that track wearing shorts that I would have considered too small for use as a towel to wipe the sweat from my brow. I’ll leave the determination as to the individual valuation of these variables to you. :)

By Pamela Glazebrook

Very few camping pleasures measure up with the joy of sending unknowing campers on their first snipe hunt. I find that this joy only rises as the age of the hunter increases.

It started simply enough

Sorry about the slow production of entertainment around here recently. Not much of interest to the community that exists outside of my subconscious has happened as of late. Well, I do have an funny story that ~didn’t~ happen to me, but I should probably wait to hear from my mom as to whether or not I’m supposed to share that one (or if she would like to instead). As an example, here’s my day thus far:

6:00AM - my alarm went off. I turned it off, went back to bed, and cuddled with my girl for half an hour in an attempt to make the day go away. Around 6:30, I decided that I had failed in my attempt, and got up.

6:30AM - Took my pills, sat down in front of the computer, checked my email. Read the weather for the day. Went through all the blogs on my ‘daily read’ list except Novel Gazing. Worked out for a bit (situps, pushups, a couple of dumbbell-related exercises). Got dressed, ran out the door in my usual hurry to catch the bus at the last possible moment before it leaves me.

7:30AM - Boarded said bus. Read the morning news on my PDA for the half-hour bus ride. Ignored the passengers, because they were largely male and larger females. :)

8:00AM - Got off the bus, walked to East Hall. Got almost to my door, before I found out they were closing the hallway to strip and wax the floor. Was forced to talk a roundabout route to the door.

8:15AM - Talked to Nat for a bit on AIM before she left for work, checked my email again, responded to said email (there were five from one secretary). Got a package full of information from a professor, which I leafed through with a bewildered look on my face. Though I understand why the professor gave me the package (his motivation), I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with the information contained within said package (his intent), only that it has something to do with a website. Read Novel Gazing, which I’d neglected all weekend. Wrote an email responding to said reading.

9:45AM - Talked to a professor about his old computer, his new computer, and the stuff that goes on in-between his giving up the former and receiving the latter. Turned on the air conditioner to ease the headache caused by the smell of ammonia or ammonia-related materials in the hallway.

10:00AM - Started a couple of errands for Dwight which involved long walks across campus carrying heavy things. Walk was eased significantly by the great weather outside and (on a related note, I’m sure) the nice (albeit quite small) pair of white shorts and the nicer girl inside of them I was forced to follow (force is relative) for the larger portion of my walk.

10:45AM - Got back from errands. Started copying files from the old computer to the new computer for the professor mentioned earlier. Decided I should really update my journal before everyone (except my mom, whom I talked to on the phone last night) assumed I was dead.

11:30AM - Finished writing journal entry, posted it.

See? Not much is going on.

Friday, I went out with some friends to The Zone. We played cards and drank beverages for a while. We ran into an old friend who recognized everyone in the group and then called me “the new guy”. We left, got some Jimmy John’s, and I think I punched something rather solid, because my wrist hurt for the rest of the weekend. We headed back to their house. Megan came over, and we watched a movie, but I don’t remember what movie. I fell asleep in the bathroom (twice) before Megan took me home.

I spent Saturday and Sunday at my parents’ house, where I watched nearly a dozen movies (literally), and abused my body by eating several pounds of red meat (again, literally). While there, I fed the dogs once, the cat once, and the fish five times. I couldn’t find the Guinea Pig’s food. I updated my “Message Me” script to include Megan’s cell phone. I did nothing else productive.

Yesterday, Megan and I went out to eat at Hickory Park and then attempted to work some of that indulgence off by hiking again in Inis Grove. We watched a deer watch us from across a small grassy field. We found a little tributary that ended in a bunch of rocks on the bank of the Skunk River and sat there for a while. We saw a couple doing something unmentionable on a kayak as they floated down the Skunk. We got less lost this time. We got home, cleaned up briefly, went to Target, bought two more DVD’s, and watched one of them (8 Mile, which had a fun storyline and great music, but ended with the characters much the same as when they began, which made it feel more like an episode of a sitcom than a movie) before going to bed.

Wish me an eventful week. Preferably the good kind of eventful.

First, trek on over to Megan’s journal, and read her entry from yesterday describing our walk last night. Then, come back here for a more accurate telling of the tale.*g*

She did beg me. That much is true. Really, I wanted to go anyway, but I made her beg first because it’s a lot more fun that way. She pouts and does nice things for me and promises all sorts of silly stuff just to get her way, which she would have gotten anyway. :)

So we drove to the park. Part of me thinks it’s silly to drive somewhere to go for a walk. I mean, it’s not like there wasn’t any open earth near where we lived, forcing us to go out on a quest for nature or anything. There’s dirt, and trees, and grass and bunnies and all that stuff right where we live. But anyway, we got in the car and drove north, looking for the park she saw on our way to the grocery store a week or so ago. The park is called Inis Grove, by the way. I started calling it pInis Grove, because it’s funnier that way. And before you label me immature, I think I should tell you that when I told my boss Dwight (who grew up in this area) that we went walking in Inis Grove last night, he said, “Ah, Anus Grove. Good park.” So ha.

We missed it on our first shot. We ended up at a golf course, and decided that walking around aimlessly on a golf course didn’t sound all that fun. Turns out we were really close to the park, though, and we found it on our second try. That should have been some sort of an omen.

We got to the park, and looked for a walking trail. We didn’t see one. What we ~did~ see was that we were at the top of a large hill that looked more like a cliff in some places, so we did the obvious thing and walked / stumbled / slid our way down the crumbling embankment, positive the path must be just beyond that last ridge of trees.

The path wasn’t there, but there was a creek at the bottom, so we hopped along the stones in the creek for a while, and eventually headed back into the timber. We found a lot of neat stuff back there. We found some sort of a playground / lookout tower / paintball target / teenage makeout facility that was pretty cool. After a bunch of wandering we even stumbled upon what Dwight has confirmed was the Skunk river. And once I convinced Megan that the big, scary black thing she saw jumping out of the trees near the embankment was not a panther, a monkey, or a dinosaur, she let me go see the river, too. Aside from the mosquitos (and whatever the dark thing stalking us was), it was nice.

Eventually, we got pretty tired, so we headed back towards the car. We found a walking path on our way out (I guess they did exist after all), so we followed it back to the park and headed for the parking lot.

Only, the playground equipment didn’t look familiar. And we didn’t remember that building being where it was. And my car wasn’t visible in the parking lot. And come to think of it, wasn’t the whole starting point of this mini-adventure the absence of the very trail we followed back? Turns out, we ended up in the wrong park.

I should mention at this point, I think, that I have no innate sense of direction, location, or geography whatsoever. I find my way to and from home every day based on habit, luck, and bus routes, not on any true understanding of the path taken.

Anyway, we were in the wrong park. So we did the obvious thing. We walked back into the woods and got lost again. I mean, if getting lost took us from one park to another, wouldn’t getting lost a second time negate the first and get us back where we started?

Nope. We ended up at some sort of a lodge, right on the edge of the road. We decided to take a different approach this time. We followed the road north, trusting it more than we trusted the trees. I’m better with street signs than I am with the angle of the sun and moss growing on trees any day of the week.

We followed the road north for a while, before determining that we were now in a decidedly urban neighborhood, with nary a park in sight. So we headed back south, found the park, eventually found my car, and went home.

Yeah. We’ll have to do it again sometime. *g*

The Atkins diet has recieved a bit of media attention recently, as two new studies have shed some light on the controversial dietary regime made famous by the now-late Dr. Atkins.

Unfortunately, it seems, no one is really sure what direction the light is pointing, what the light really means, or whether or not the light was really just a low-flying UFO.

According to a story on Yahoo! News released at 5:02pm on May 21st, these two studies have shown that the Atkins diet may be no better at helping people lose weight than a traditional low-fat diet is.

According to another story on Yahoo! News, released four hours and fifty-nine minutes later, these two studies have shown that the Atkins diet has a real advantage when compared to a traditional low-fat diet.

You have to wonder about the clarity of a study’s findings when two opposing opinions can be proven in the right by the same exact data.

Of course, you also have to wonder about a news agency’s editorial process when they can publish two contradictory articles within five hours of each other.

(via Fark)