robglazebrook.com

Well, Dead Week is over after today, and finals are taking their places behind the bushes, ready to jump out and be all scary and vicious and hand-crampily mean. I plan to spend this weekend killing off as many weak and sick brain cells as I possibly can. I only want strong brain cells for finals week. :)

If you find yourself bored, go play in the road. Or, at least, in the road sign generator (via Davezilla). Here are my creations for the morning (click for largerian versions):

First, a little sumpin’ for all you Iowa residents out there. It’s only fair to warn people, in my opinion.

Heh. Matrix reference. Get it? It’s funny. Yeah, I’ll shut up, now.

I guess maybe it’s an inside Classical Studies joke. I just got done doing a presentation on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the only one that nobody can definitively prove existed. I figure a roadsign would be decent in the evidence category.

What has this little expirement taught us? It’s easier to be funny using the blasphemous Church Sign Generator. The proof is in the puddin’.

Thank you, Bloodhound Gang.

I’m going to hell; who’s coming with me? :)

The first image is the area of the room where my bed had been sitting half an hour before. Had I gone to bed as I’d planned, that is what would have landed on my face. The second image is my poor dresser. I can’t yet tell what sort of shape it’s in. The mirror itself didn’t break, but it did get torn of its backing. I spent five minutes at my dresser this morning recovering a pair of underwear. *g*

Time to get ready for class.

When I moved into my new place, my roommates and I knew the ceiling of my temporary bedroom was in bad condition, but we figured it would last for a couple more months. Since I was only going to occupy the room for three weeks, we figured it wouldn’t be a problem.

Over the last week, we’ve changed that initial estimate from a couple of months, to a month, to “well, it’ll probably last long enough.” Tonight, when I got home from work, I noticed small flakes of plaster coating most my furniture and a crack I didn’t remember from this morning.

10:30pm - I get home from work, notice the flakes, and call my roommates in to have a look-see. We talk about it for a while. Justin and Mark think I should move my stuff out tonight, while I’m arguing that we should wait until tomorrow. It’s my bedtime, after all. Justin finally convinces me that I should move into the tiny, unoccupied upstairs bedroom.

11:00pm - We start clearing out the upstairs bedroom, which has been acting as a game room. We also start moving my most essential stuff (my bed and computer) out of my bedroom. I’m getting pretty tired, because normally at this time, I’d be in bed.

12:00am - My computer and bed are in my new bedroom. We’re setting up the essentials and moving small non-essential stuff into closets.

12:15am - The ceiling in my old bedroom collapses. The ceiling surface falls as a single piece, taking out my dresser mirror and a couple of bookcases. The space where my bed had been an hour before is underneath a large piece of unbroken plaster and concrete weighing several hundred pounds. Had I decided to go to bed and wait until tomorrow afternoon to move out, as I had planned, I would be at best seriously hurt and at worst moderately deceased.

I think I owe Justin and Mark for convincing me to move out. Of course, they did move me into the bedroom directly above the obliterated ceiling, so maybe we’re just delaying the inevitable here. :)

There are a lot of things I like about my new place. On the other hand, there are some things that I’m going to have to learn to deal with.

For example, my bedroom. Sure, it’s only going to be my bedroom for about three more weeks (at which point, I’ll be moving again… a grand total of around 20 feet southwest and 9 feet up), but seeing as how it’s the room I currently spend most my time in, it’s significant. I like that my room is large enough to comfortably fit all my furniture. I like that it has carpet in the center (where my bed sits, and where my feet hit the floor in the morning) and hardwood floors around the edges. I like that it has an attached bathroom that I don’t have to share with anyone. I DON’T like that the walls are painted a lovely shade of midnight blue, making the room feel three times smaller than it really is. I don’t like that my windows face a daycare, and when I get home from classes, I listen to screaming children and watch them watch me for several hours until their parents cart them home. I don’t like that I’m generally the only person on the ground floor of the house.

Also, I don’t like that my bathroom looks like one of those you’d see on TV. Not on “Cribs,” though, or “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” or anything nice like that. My bathroom is the sort of hole in the ground that the criminal investigators find the murder victim in, tied up, sliced apart and strewn about. It’s the sort of room that makes crackwhores decide they can wait until they get home to tinkle. I saw a bug crawl across the kitchen floor towards my bathroom the other day, look in, and change its mind.

The kitchen also used to be on my list of All Things Nasty until last night, when Justin and Mark apparently spent the evening scrubbing. Now, it looks fairly clean (as clean as a kitchen in a century-old house last renovated in the 50’s can look). With the inches of grime removed, I can more readily see things I ~do~ like about the kitchen. Par exemple, I like that we have two huge fridges (essential for four guys) and a dishwasher that does an excellent job at what it does. I still don’t like that it seems to rain in my fridge, creating pools of water in the vegetable drawer, but I can live with it until we figure out why our Frigidaire doubles as a Precip-O-Matic.

I like that I can leave at 8:40am for the bus stop and get to work at 8:55am. I ~don’t~ like that my bus trip only last six minutes… the bus ride to and from campus has been where I’ve been doing all my leisure reading for the last year or so. I like that I get to see my friends every single day, that I laugh constantly when I’m around them. I hate that I have to sleep alone every single night.

Story from TheIowaChannel.com - Their video is from the first hour or so only.
Story from WhoTV.com - Clearer video, but solely from behind police lines.
Picture of guy bleeding from BootToTheHead&tm;.
Sample of smashed storefront windows.
One of the burning dumpsters rolling down Lincoln Way, framed perfectly.
Comments from various people in Strangetalk as the rioting began.
Video of CNN’s coverage of the riot.

Okies, time for me to do something more productive with my day.