…because caffeine is just the beginning.
Today some projects that my coworkers and I have put a lot of time and energy into were well-received by our organization. It was a joyous occasion for us all.
Also, I have made plans to have an authentic Japanese lunch on Thursday with travelers from Japan. I am looking forward to it.
I’m working long hours this week, though, so I’m going to try to get to bed now.
And the reason was: to be safe from earthquakes!
I’m back at work now. I spent my final days of disability with my brother and his family up north. Here’s a low quality video of my nephew Savino falling.
This blog is gonna kill me (h/t JasonBoom). I’m still not sure whether it would be better to die blogging or the way I did in my dream last night. I dreamed I was in a public building with other people, when suddenly we heard the loud crash of a missile landing off in the distance. A mushroom cloud sprang up immediately, followed by shouts and screams of people in the room with me. We had mere seconds to watch the explosion roar toward us as the terror overwhelmed us. I crouched down with my hands over my head as the shockwave approached, and I felt a deep disappointment that I hadn’t had a chance to bring closure to all the various aspects of my life. I expected incredible pain, but instead felt nothing. I looked up to discover that I had nothing to look up with; my body and everything around me was replaced by white, more like a blank sheet of paper than light. Then I woke up.
When we drove up to Iowa for the Stuart Davis show, my brothers and I found cheap laughs on the streets of downtown Rock Island, Illinois. The first is a store I’ve known about for just about as long as I’ve been going to the Quad Cities: Hyman’s. Hilarious for those of us who have crude senses of humor. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to get a picture.
Next we saw a Karaoke bar that offered delivery service. We got a laugh out of that idea, and laughed harder when we realized the store had been closed. There must not be high demand for Karaoke to go. Who knew?
Just a couple doors down was Thirsty Beavers. Again, adolescent humor I know. But we laughed.
We stopped by the coffee shop where we used to see Stuart play and saw this new sign:
“There are two kinds of people – those who drink espresso, and the rest of you poor bastards.”
The next day, I went up to Chicago with my mother and fiancee to visit with my new sister whose husband recently coached his basketball team to win the IHSA championship. When we rolled into their neighborhood, we saw a few amusing stop signs:
“Whoaaa.” Apparently some effort to get people to actually pay attention to the stop signs in the neighborhood. There were others, but I wasn’t going to spend my entire evening getting pictures of stop signs.
I had the more important task at hand of getting a picture of my nephew’s basketball court bedroom floor. I didn’t bother to ask if my new sister paid licensing fees to use the logo before she painted it on his floor.
We were all quite impressed by a little classroom project one of the coach’s teacher relatives put together with the help of her students:
Finally, all that driving put the ol’ Yaris up into the quintuple digits:
And when I got back to California, I hit a little milestone in my new car:
(I know; there’s a horrible glare. I hit 400 miles.) The only problem is that I feel silly making my first payment when I’ve hardly driven the thing. Could’ve planned that better, probably. I blame the head injury!
I’ve posted a new poem and a new essay to tide y’all over until I can relocate all the old stuff. Not that anyone reads that garbage anyway. Other than that, I’ve just been trying to get over this sore throat/mild cold. Apparently the Airborne didn’t do its job. (h/t: Colinski)
My three-week trip to Central Illinois was nice, but difficult in ways. I enjoy spending time with friends and family, but I felt obligated to try to spend a reasonable amount of time resting, and I was stressed out by the difficulty associated with trying to get paid by the California disability department. Now that I’m back, and have been approved to go back to work later this month, I have managed to do what it takes to get the disability checks rolling, finally.
I have yet to blog many of the things I had been hoping to blog, and I still need to bring the JavaJunkee Poetry and JavaJunkee Essays pages up to date. I also need to sell my motorcycle, buy a new camera, finish transferring files from the Gateway to the Toshiba and sell the Gateway, and organize and upload my photos to my new Picasa web gallery.
My doctor told me I could drive again and that I could go back to work after the 20th as planned. My EEG showed only mild abnormalities. I should be back to normal in no time. I had a nice time driving my new car yesterday and took it in for a free wash, courtesy of Frontier Scion. Then it rained last night. And I woke up this morning with a sore throat. Ugh.