June 2006 Upates

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 I'm back! back

Friday, June 9th, 2006 I sleep 12 hours now during the day... in no particular order As I am now moving up to the Twin Cities area come July/August, I've taken the last few weeks to read about all the places I have lived in (or the nearest Metropolitan area, in the case of Crawfordsville) through guidebooks. It's been rather interesting to read just what attitude the natives who write the books about their cities present, and I am inclined to believe that it is somewhat representative of the city's attitude as a whole. After reading through a good six or seven of them to this point, I think I can give you the rundown of how denizens view their city/cities. Guidebooks to cities in brief... Twin Cities - It's cold up here. AND FUN, FUN, FUN! But cold. And FUN! Indianapolis - Well... it's not L.A. or New York or even Chicago (which is only a two hour drive from here, by the way)... but we got stuff too, you know. Please like it. Madison - Can you BELIEVE that some cities don't even have museums?? Well, we do! And some cities don't even get to see independent films, but WE do! Chicago - It's tons of fun here - particularly our nightlife! Now, you want to avoid driving in the city. Take public transportation... except at night. Also, have you ever created a separate AIM account for whatever reason and then stopped using it? Back in 2001 and 2002, when I was using the personals, I created separate accounts so that I wouldn't have weirdos IMing my regular BBX acct. Anyway, i revisit the things every few months or so, and it's just kind of funny how after a good five years, things change for people. Well, for instance, out of the 28 people that I added to the 2001 list, only one shows up consistently(3.6%). The 2002 list fares better with about 6 people regularly coming online out of 35 (21.4%). Sometimes I feel like IM-ing the few stray cats and saying, "hey, weirdo, remember me?" Because I have a feeling they wouldn't and yet I can remember a ton about those people that are online. There are a few question marks when I look through the entire list at those that don't come on anymore, but those that do- I remember them. Well, since the probablity of them remembering me is rather slim, I think I would prefer to go with option B, which is to pretend to have never met these people before and approaching them "for the first time." Yes, that's what my once-busy schedule has degenerated to: playing mind games with people I didn't really care for all that much the first time around and watching star trek... always with the star trek. I talked to Jason on the phone last night, which is pretty awesome. He's doing fairly well down in law school down in Dallas and while we may not always see eye to eye on everything, I at least am grateful that he can tolerate my really bad tendency to not stay in touch. I mean, unless someone is on IM, I tend to just put off communicating with them until "later" and then it probably isn't until they contact me. I'm a bad friend, I know, but that's just the Nando way. Oh and speaking of the big D, I caught Game 1 on tv last night. It was refreshing to see the Heat look like a bunch of losers- something that the Nets and the Pistons were all but happy to keep them from doing. Dirk Nowitzki got 16 points in the entire game and the mavs still won by 10? Now that's a team. I even got a nice laugh out of it. When I was visiting Funk, we were able to catch Game 4 of the Pistons vs the Heat, and he pointed out the classic Jason Williams maneouver, which involves getting the ball, and hoisting up a mindless three in desperation with a man guarding him and a good 18 seconds left on the clock. Sure enough, there was a moment just like that in game 1, and I just about cracked up. Oh man, i just took the Which James Bond are You test, and I scored a Timmy D. I was hoping for a Pierce Brosnan, but this will do just as well. I'll post it up on the remote. Nando

Monday, June 10th, 2006 Weekend of Summer Chicks Saturday and Sunday were spent with the only two female BBXers - respectively of course. On Saturday, I got to hang with Melanie for the first time in like over three weeks, which was cool. We got some burgers and then went all around the downtown area taking pictures of me in the Cow Parade that has made its way into Madison. I'm not sure if any of you, who are not from Chicago are familiar with the concept, but it basically involves having decorative cows with their own themes sprinkled throughout the city for tourists and natives alike to enjoy. They were a big hit when they started in Chicago in like 2000 and since then, other cities have adopted the idea. Lest you think that the cows are just recycled and transplanted from city to city, I should point out that it's only the idea that is adopted, as most of the cows try to have a theme that is unique to the city or the state. Then, they are auctioned off. So, there are a good 101 or so cows throughout Madison, and Melanie and I figured we could do all of them in one fell swoop, but much to our chagrin, just getting the ones that were near the capital and near the Terrace proved to be quite the time consuming task. We shall have to leave the ones that are on Campus for another time. There are also some in neighboring Fitchburg and Sun Prarie. Once we get at least the ones from Campus done, I'll post them online for all of you to enjoy. Some are pretty hilarious. Afterwards, I made Melanie watch the first two X-men movies to get her ready for X3, which took up a good portion of the evening. Before long, I had to make it home, because my apartment was a mess and I would have to wake up early to greet Erinn, whom had yet to visit me in the two years I lived directy across from her city. Number of times I had gone to visit her: two. I had a pretty good time, for hanging out with someone that I had seen twice before in the last three years. But I had forgotten how fun Erinn could be and how far back we go, and mostly how much she gets me and my rather... odd sense of being. She had grown up a little outside of Watertown before moving to Chicago and she kept telling me that she remembered going Madison on some occasions and going to this place called Ella's Deli that had a carousel outside. So, being the awesome person that I am, I took her to the Deli, which was rather easy to spot since it did have a ginormous colorful spinning attraction right outdoors. What Erinn had failed to mention, however was that inside, was all a bustle with... well, I'm not quite sure how to describe it... just stuff that moves. I would never bring my children into a place like that for fear of them becoming over stimulated: billiardballs that go through a series of trap doors, mazes and tubes; toys that spin and move by way of a motor; a train that goes around and around and around high up one of the walls - and that was just the section that WE were sitting in. Even the tables were weird. They each had a landscape of some type constructed with legos placed inside the hollowed out table and covered on top by a sheet of glass. I'm not sure about all the rest, but ours had a speedway with cars that you could control by placing the attached magnet over them and then moving it around. Just as we sat down, our waitress, who happened to be one of my former Human Sexuality students came on over. "Hi!" she said. I asked her how he semester had gone and we talked about my plans for the future before she went off to get our drinks. Erinn then said, you know, when she came over here and addressed me and then started paying all this attention to you, I didn't realize that you knew her and I just thought, "Oh, this is great! He gets hit on everywhere!" At the end of our meal, I wanted to know if Erinn wanted to go on the Carousel outside, and she declined, stating that she would feel rather silly being a 25 year old woman riding a plastic horse intended for children. Somewhat disappointed, I said, "okay." Erinn had also talked about going to the zoo when she was younger, so we went there next, and we saw all the different animals that the free zoo had. The penguins had been the last thing we needed to see and once we had crossed them off our list, Erinn started asking, "now what?" But before I could let her whine about being bored, I noticed a sign detailing all the different ways Penguins communicate. "Hey, Erinn,"  yelled,. "Let's greet each other like Penguins!" she just looked at me and declined the offer, but i really didn't take that to mean "no,"so i proceeded to follow the steps, which involved, facing each other, looking straight up, spreading your arms wide and nodding your head. Of course, Erinn wasn't gonna have any of that and just left a brother hangin while she laughed and laughed. "you know, Erinn," I said to her as she walked away in hysterics.  "You'd be a very lonely Penguin without any friends." And with that we stroled around for a bit longer before taking off to the mall. As luck would have it, there was a carnival going on right next to it and after going through a few stores, we paid a visit. All i know is that that thing was damned expensive. It cost three bucks to get on one ride, but it was the Tilt-a-whirl, so it was quite worth it. WEEEE! That's pretty much how it all ended. We went to get me some groceries and then came back to my place. Overall, Erinn appeared to have fun and now suddenly wanted to spend a lot more time together before I took off to Fun&Cold land. Anywhoo, my new computer arrived so im gonna be spending the next few days doing a Data Transfer. Take it easy, bros.

Thursday, June 15th, 2006 Well, my computer is pretty much all set up. It's been quite a hassle transferring all the programs, hardware and info that was on my old Compy onto the new one. I guess this came about because I was tired of programs being so slow and despite the upgrade in Memory, nothing would ever get faster. I figured it was the processor, and since my comp was so old (five years) to begin with I figured it just made sense to start anew. The last straw? When I couldn't play Civ 4.  The hilarious thing? even with 1 gig of RAM and 2.5 GH processor, I'm still operating below the Civ 4 specs - must be a video card thing- but it runs a hell of a lot more smoothly (people don't have weird blocks all over their faces). Oh well, everything else is running swimmingly. remember a few years back when I bought Nightfire, and it broke my computer? I finally got to find out how the first Chapter ended! The funny thing though is that I'm not much of a video game person, so i get bored with all that rather quickly. I saw Xmen 3 again last night with Melanie. I always end up seeing the X-men movies twice for some reason. I was worried a bit how the new director would handle the film (particularly because he's best known for directing the Rush Hour movies). Overall, it was pretty good, but I still like the second one a little better. This is mostly because of all the death in the third one- I don't really like who dies or their death scenes (or lack thereof). What irritates me the most is that we'll probably have to wait a while before the next set of X-men movies, which will have to be a reboot and start all over again, because you can't just continue from that point with new actors. Well, that's really all i have been up to. As soon as the Melon feels up to it, we'll be going to campus and getting my pciture with some more cows, but since she's rather busy, I'm not sure when that will be.