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Friday, September 30th, 2005: At 9:00am my doorbell rings. I jump out of bed, throw on some clothes and answer the door. It’s some guy who says he heard that I had an entertainment center. I’ve got this entertainment center on both Craigslist and FreeCycle but I hadn’t arranged for anyone to come by and pick it up today. He says his wife gave him my address and told him to come by and look at it. I told him my address wasn’t on either of the ads. I invited him in, he looked it over, said that his TV wouldn’t fit on it and left. Which makes it even stupider because in both ads I’ve put exact measurements of the entertainment center.

Ugh, okay. I just checked my email. It’s a lady I was talking to via email. I always ask people to let me know what day/time they’re coming by so that I can make sure I’m awake and home. This lady emails me at 8:30am that her husband is on her way. Grrr. Damn Freecyclers. My house is getting really empty. I’ve been making lots of trips to my storage locker and I’ve been slowly getting rid of more on Craigslist. A few things just aren’t selling so I put them on Freecycle yesterday. Some lady came by and took my futon yesterday and tomorrow somebody is coming to get one of the couches. A few people have inquired about the entertainment center but no takers yet. I’ve got almost of the entire house condensed into the living/dining room. All the bedrooms are empty and sealed off. The basement is nearing completion. And due to recent developments, my goal moving date is the first week of November.

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005: Did a Fark Audio Edit today where the theme was, “The phone rings this afternoon and it’s your future self, calling from the year 2015 to give you a few pointers. Fortunately, you recorded the conversation.” Here is the result. You’ll hear plenty of Back to the Future references in this call.

Saturday, September 24th, 2005: Here’s my Saturday…I woke up and watched CNN for a little while and was thoroughly disappointed with the lack of cool hurricane distruction pictures. They’ve been hyping us up with the horrible destruction about to ensue for days now and NOTHING! I had some Eggos for breakfast and worked on some random web site stuff for awhile. Did some more cleaning/packing in the basement. Talked to Jammie, went to Quiktrip for some Tostitos and Pepsi. Came home and ate the Tostitos while watching part of Rat Race on TV. Sat on the deck for FOUR HOURS playing on the internet and burning wood in the yard. Oh yeah, as soon as I was outside the cat came running towards me. I think I have a new cat. It hung out with me on the deck for most of the 4 hours. I gave him marshmellows, which Jammie took webcam snaps of. It needs a name. After tiring of the deck, I loaded up my Ipaq with mp3s and went on a walk for THREE HOURS. Got home and my new cat greeted me. Gave him another marshmellow, kicked him away from the door and collapsed into a chair. And here I am. The bad part is that today I was invited to a soccer game, a winery and bar hopping. But I chose to be bored & alone all day instead.

I’ve been really hooked on the hurricane coverage on TV these past couple of days. Especially since they’re showing nonstop pictures of Galveston, my old home. It’s so great to see all these random shots of Galveston on TV and being able to recognize everything they show. I miss that place. In 1992 I lived in Galveston and got to deal with an evacuation for a couple of days. I worked at a Diamond Shamrock store and the manager was buying big piles of plywood for me to cover the store windows with. I don’t remember how much of the island ended up evacuating but my girlfriend and I didn’t plan on leaving. I do remember how cool it was, seeing the entire island virtually empty. But at the last minute, the hurricane turned and destroyed New Orleans instead. We barely got touched.

Today I grew tired of the coverage on TV since they keep saying basically the same things over and over. So I turned to another source for my news – LiveJournal! I did a few searches for LJ users living in Galveston, Port Arthur and some of the smaller surrounding cities. It’s really interesting to read the reaction of random teenagers and adults from the area, being forced out of their homes and having to leave most of their possessions behind. So I decided to compile a list of the more interesting journals that I found and share them with everyone. All of the journal links below have recent entries that talk about being evacuated…

Blogs in Galveston:
giggly_girl,
luka01,
theletterque,
siritalis,
melly_d,
mel_tus,
mr_dictionary,
gorgeousgilbs07,
deviousxcunt,
reddragon_21,
dr_kipper,
ezrapanthy,
nezumichris,
dadslilaggie,
floyd_mephit,
snickers2006,
shragjag,
bethaboo_aggie,
goofy92.

Blogs in Texas City, (just north of Galveston):
rosesalwaysdie,
starrieblueyes,
pseudopicasso,
texaspaige.

Blogs in Port Arthur, Texas (right on TX/LA border):
aj_monkey_face,
read_300300.

Blogs in Orange, Texas (right on TX/LA border):
kritoke,
simplicityworks,
cookieassassin,
roahm,
crosstie_walker,
myshu.

Blogs in Beaumont, Texas (right on TX/LA border):
widler13,
maladjustedpunk,
christina_g,
beaumont,
calamity,
doomkitty121,
albhood,
valkensyc,
aeroalyce,
have_hope,
ataindre,
archervixen,
reesar,
calisto,
malcolmthebear,
gthang.

9:00PM: Had another stray animal harass me tonight. A friendly cat approached me tonight while I was outside, then invited itself into my house as I came inside. Gave it some water and a chopped up hotdog, then kicked it out.

Stray	cat

I noticed today that there are 20 Sarah Conners listed in the United States but none of them are in California. HMMMMMMMMMMM… Yeah, I was pretty bored today. When I wasn’t reading hurricane-related blogs, feeding stray cats and looking for Sarah Conner, I had lunch/supper at Taco Bell and got a bunch of packing done in my basement. Me and Jammie watched hurricane coverage on TV together until 1am.

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005: Today I found a lost dog! Well, it came into my yard anyway. I called it over, brought it into the house and gave it some water. It had some tags on it so I called animal control and they gave the owner’s name, address, phone number and the dog’s name. It was just down the street so in a little while we went for a walk to it’s home. I rang the doorbell a few times but nobody answered. We checked the backyard and nobody was there. Finally I just locked him in the back yard and left him. On my way home, some girl was walking around with a leash and it turned out to be her dog. All of this was so exciting to me that I had to come home and immediately create a journal entry about it.

Even more exciting was my dream last night. I dreamt that I was debugging a PHP script. It was giving me all kinds of problems and I kept trying different things and getting different results. I just about had it figured out when I woke up. Man, that was such a disappointment.

Today I discovered the wonderful world of RSS feeds after Nate suggested that I should have one on my page. Little did I know that he was merely mocking me. But anyway, I’ve set up RSS feeds for my homepage and for phonelosers.org. And I’ve also set up a syndicated account on LiveJournal so that you can see my journal entries on your friends list. Isn’t this just the most exciting thing evarrrr? I’m still learning how it works and now I have to write some scripts to automate my RSSing, but it should all be working. If you’re using Firefox, you should look into Sage for RSS viewing. I tried out a few different programs and so far that one is my favorite.

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Sunday, September 25th, 2005: Did nothing, then more nothing. Then drove around aimlessly for awhile and ended up in Highland. Ate at some restaurant and read the paper. Came home. Um. I guess that’s it. What a waste of a Sunday. I did get to see a fairly neat car wrecked near Edwardsville:

Friday, September 16th, 2005: After a little work in the morning, I drove to the Kansas City airport to pick up Jammie, a mere 4.5 hour drive. I arrived in the airport a few hours early so I sat around the bar a lot and explored a lot of the airport. Kansas City is the first airport I’ve seen since the 9/11 attacks where you can actually meet whoever you’re picking up at the gate they come out of. They separate the passengers and nonpassengers by glass so that we can’t pass along bombs to each other or anything. It’s a very nice setup and it’ll be nice when all the other airports start doing it. I hung around on some benches outside her gate for over an hour, mostly chatting with Roxy on Yahoo.

Jammie’s flight was delayed by 1.5 hours and she finally arrived at 10:15pm. After another 4.5 of driving in the intense fog (I’ve never driven in fog so thick. It was worse than some of the snowstorms I’ve been through.) we made it to Alton

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Saturday, September 17th, 2005: Earlier in the week Jammie searched for fun things to do in St. Louis and came up with the annual hot air balloon race in Forest Park. So after sleeping in all morning we made it to the balloon race in the afternoon. I parked at Union Station and we took the Metrolink to the park and had to walk about a mile through the park before we found it. Did a lot of walking around and picture taking. Then called up Nathan, some kid I’ve known online for a couple of years, who was supposed to be at the event. Met up with him, walked all over the place, took more pictures and left the park by way of treacherous jungles. Ended up on a closed off highway and walked down it for awhile until we reached civilization.

We went to a pizza place and after a little smooth talking by Nate, we sat down to 3 free slices and drinks. Jammie’s theory is that Nate is either the mayor’s son or connected to the mafia because he knows everyone and gets us everything for free. We repaid the pizza parlor’s generousity by screwing with their TVs with my universal remote program.

Sure to be used for blackmail at some point in my life, here is me wearing cute pink bunny ears	Me and Jammie wearing cute pink bunny ears	Hot air balloons	Jammie & Nate and some poor, innocent penguin being exploited in the name of PLA	Jammie & Nate playing on some road construction equipment
Shot of the crowd	Energizer bunny getting ready to poop on Jammie’s head	More hot air balloons	And even more balloons	Nate & I, overlooking the abandoned street we’re about to walk on
We walked about 1/4 mile down an abandoned highway to get to the pizza place	Nate behind the counter, getting our sodas	Nate chugging some hot peppers	Nate regretting his decision	A perfect advertisement for the green PLA stickers

After that we took the metrolink back to Union Station, picked up my car, drag raced an unwilling lady and ended up at the City Museum. I repeat – I convinced some underaged teenage kid that I met on the internet to get into my car. We gave him candy. Nate got us into the museum for free, took us onto the roof and gave us a big tour of the roof. One part of the City Museum that I’d never seen.

After a few hours at the City Museum, we walked across town onto the Eads Bridge and across it. By this time it was getting late and Jammie & I were exhausted so we parted ways and left Nate at the Metrolink station. Took a cab back to the City Museum, looked around the gift shop for awhile and then drove home. Nate, you rule. And it was fun to finally meet you.

From the roof of the City Museum		This thing was rather scary to walk on, it spiraled around a dome on the roof and there wasn’t anything to hold on to	WHEEEE!	Jammie walking along a bridge on the roof, 11 stories up
Nate paid off the train engineer to let us sit in the kiddie train	In an airplane	Trying to pet the fish	Sunset from the roof	Jammie falling into a scary unknown cavern
One of the many spiders along the Eads Bridge walk		Nate comtemplating death		Good shot of the arch from the Eads Bridge

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Sunday, September 18th, 2005: Drove to Edwardsville and saw The 40-year-old Virgin. (A movie, not a person.) Stopped at a few Targets on the way home, looking for some card-reading hardware and then ended up back home. Started up a campfire and roasted marshmellows and hotdogs. And then we roasted my shoes. At some point in Portland a few weeks ago, my 4-year-old shoes finally reached the point of not being wearable anymore. Jammie was always making fun of them for being so ratty (not to mention users on Cal’s forums making fun of my shoes) so we decided to burn them in the fire.

Getting a fire started	City girl thinking she knows how to roast marshmellows	My shoes	My shoes in the fire	My shoes burning
Neighbor kids watching my shoes burn	Me endorsing Pibb Xtra	Me	Her	Us

After extinguishing the fire, we went on a long walk. Stopped at Sonic for some food, then walked for a few more hours, eventually ending up fairly soaked from the rain.

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Monday, September 19th, 2005: Drove back to Kansas City today and left Jammie at the airport. Her plane is gone and I’m hanging out at the airport now, not really ready to get back on the road yet. Had a good drive up here. Listened to my old 90’s mp3 CD for the entire drive and then ate at a bar-b-que place which a coworker of Jammie’s recommended. Got caught in a pretty heavy storm as we found the bar-b-que place but it cleared up quickly.

Thursday, September 15th, 2005: Today I washed lights with darks. Nothing terrible happened, though. I should do it more often.

Saturday, September 10th, 2005: Woke up at 9am, had some hotcakes at McDonald’s, mowed the lawn. Did some more packing for awhile, worked on some web site stuff. Somehow I decided that hiking through the woods in the 90 degree weather would be a good way to relieve my boredom. So I drove to Pere Marquette and did that. According the my map, I hiked for approximately 3.25 miles. Not very much, really, but the trails didn’t go much further without backtracking a bunch, which I hate. I didn’t see or hear any other hikers until the very end when I ran into a couple of old people. So here’s a bunch of pictures of nature.

The very beginning	This is either the Illinois River or the Mississippi river. Or maybe both.	These are trees and sticks and stuff	I did this just so I could cameraphone it to Jammie and make her smile. Oh, and cause I love her.	I got a glimpse of a snake on this trail.	Almost back to my car

After the hiking, I stopped by Subway in downtown Alton for lunch. This Subway has only been around now for a year or so. And not only does it have a fireplace, elevated seating sections, a weird artsy-looking fountain and Kenny G’ish music playing, but now they’ve got a big-ass flatscreen TV mounted on the wall so we can watch sports while we eat. And every time I’m there the place is empty. How do they stay in business?? Even weirder is the DVD player mounted up there, 12 feet off the ground. Changing DVDs must be a real bitch.

Went bar hopping tonight for about 4 hours with Tami, Bryan, Denise and a few other people that I don’t know too well. Met some girl at the last bar and had a really long conversation with her and THEN she tells me that she went to school with my brother and knows my parents and starts naming off a bunch of my old friends and acquaintances of mine. And somehow I’m suddenly able to remember a ton of hers as well, and even give her updates on how a few of them are doing and where they are. And I thought I’d forgotten everyone. Apparently we were in band together for a year although I’d never heard of her. Finally got bored with bars around 11:00 and went home.

Friday, September 9th, 2005: Did a little job hunting today. Filled out a couple of applications. I’d like to get a job for a few weeks or months, before I leave for Oregon. Mostly just to occupy my time in the evenings since I seem to have too much of that. I tried for a salesperson at a large appliance store but it’s only full time which I don’t really want. Then I stopped at this one gas station and asked the cashier there if I could fill out an application. She said I would need to go by the main office and get one from them. So I asked her where the office was and she attempted to give me directions to it. The problem was, this lady didn’t seem to know the names of any streets in town. Her only points of reference were bars.

This lady was all stringy-haired, droopy eyed and had really bad teeth and looked like she probably spent 100% of her free time hanging out in bars. Not to stereotype or disrespect all of the non-bargoing stringy-haired, droopy eyed bad teeth ladies. But she asked me if I knew where some bar was and I said no. She asked me if I knew of another bar. Nope. She named 2 more and while I’d heard the names of these bars before, I had no idea where they were. Finally she just kind of pointed at a road and told me to go that way. I did and I finally saw one of the bars she referred to and saw the office across the street from it. It was right on the corner of 2 major roads in the town. I can’t believe she couldn’t give me a street name.

This evening I did a lot of packing, mostly in Payton’s room, and took a load of stuff to storage. Earlier this week I completely emptied out Emily’s room, sealed up the heating/cooling vents and shut the door. I’m just about finished with doing the same in Payton’s room. I’ve sealed off both bedrooms upstairs and I’ve moved my bed, dresser and most of my office into the living & dining room area. This should reduce my electric bill considerably over the next few months. I’ve got all the stuff I’m selling on craigslist piled up in the living room too. It’s very cluttered, but much better than being locked up in my room all day like I was for much of last year.

My new office	I have a TV in my room now!

This evening I went and saw War of the Worlds by myself. Great movie. I need to read the book now.

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005: We’ve been doing a lot of nothing over the past couple days. Catching up on being lazy after such an active week. I put a bunch of furniture up on craigslist.com again and it’s been going well. Lots of good inquiries and 2 things have been picked up already. Yesterday I sold an office supply cabinet for $25.00. The lady and husband come in and look it over. She asks if I’d take just $20 for it. I say no, I’d rather take the full $25. She says she hopes I have change because they only have $20 bills, as the husband is looking in his wallet and confirming that yes, there are only $20 in there. Finally, after a few moments of me not changing the price for them, the husband pulls out a big wad of cash from his pocket (lots of $1’s and $5’s, it looks like) and pays me the even $25.00 – a $20 bill and 5 $1’s. I’m such a terrible haggler.

This morning, for my work, I was talking to this guy in a call center about a person’s account. The call center guy was being helpful and reading the guy’s address to me. The guy lived in Dequincy, LA. The call center guy kept telling me that his address was in Dequincy, Los Angeles. I played along, saying “That’s odd, how can he have 2 cities in there? I wonder which state this belongs in then.” He suggested it was probably a California address. I wondered to him why they would put Los Angeles in the state field, then, instead of CA for California. The call center guy figured it must be some kind of mistake made by whoever originally created the account. Luckily he didn’t seem interested in correcting the “mistake” so the customer’s bills didn’t get sent to California. Pretty sad, really. The guy sounded older than me but didn’t know what LA was. Those call center people are always confusing MI for Mississippi, Missouri and Minnesota too. But this is the first time I’ve come across one that doesn’t know what LA stands for.

Jammie, you rule for pointing out craigslist.com to me. I’ve already made about $200 from selling furniture. And I’ll make another $200 this week if everything sells. Then even more when I put more furniture up. Then I get to use craigslist.com when I get to Oregon to buy furniture back. So yeah, you rule. This is much more efficient and profitable than having a yard sale. Thanks!

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Friday, August 26th, 2005: Jammie put up approximately a million of our vacation pictures on Petridish. Click here to view them all.