A Review of Thursday's Chaos

It's been an interesting day. First off, I'd like to announce my solidarity with Mighty Mo, who has encountered some unwelcome and undeserved challenges of late. I hadn't expected that they'd make it public, but you can read more here and here. Like I said, solidarity with Mighty Mo.

At any rate, the day started out with me and Police Fan (I gave him the option and he chose that over Manchild, though he liked both - unfortunately, neither can be explained) eating at Waffle House. I'd never been there before; it's a fascinating place. At any rate, Police Fan and I went to a gun shop, looked for Blackwater with limited success*, hung out at Barnes and Noble for a while, and then went to Panera for lunch. Both of us needed a day off from our respective jobs, so it was a good time.

Then things went terribly wrong. I've mentioned that I've been attending a church in recent weeks. I'm having lunch with the youth pastor, who's around my age, today. I went to the church to touch base with him. Not only was he not there, but I slammed my right middle finger in the door of my truck. How badly? I had to lift the handle and release the latch to get it out. I immediately went into the church and doused it in the sink with cold water for a couple of minutes. Upon attempting to actually go to the church office and transact my business, I got pretty nauseous and returned to the men's room where I proceeded to lose everything I'd eaten over the course of two meals. I was pretty much fine thereafter, save for how tender my finger is. Save for the initial shock period of five or ten minutes, I still have full range of motion on it, it's not aggravated much by typing, and it's just sort of swollen, so I don't think it's permanently damaged.

Over the last few weeks, I've mentioned the Facebook marriage hoax that Manda and I perpetrated. Well, it looks as if we weren't the only ones who pulled this, although the other folks did it as more of an experiment than anything else. Observe.



For the record, even though Manda ended it a couple of weeks ago in order to avoid being considered crazy by co-workers who were starting a work network on Facebook, I've still gotten at least one person who thought it was real. When asked, she hadn't even seen it on Facebook; she'd heard it from someone we'd gone to high school with, although she couldn't remember who that person was. Fascinating. And as if that wasn't enough comedy for you, behold this!



As I thought I would, I shaved off my beard today, as you can see by the grainy picture above. This leaves me with modest sideburns and a trimmed up goatee. In a way, I miss the whole "Grizzly Adams" vibe that I had for a while, but it feels good to have a smooth face again.

The other thing that I did yesterday evening was to start writing out a list of goals for the time that I'm at Van Dieman's Station, or if I move somewhere else in the area when my lease is up, Old Dominion in general. I made my list of resolutions for 2008, and although I don't intend to abandon those goals, I feel as if I need to look at my 2008 resolutions as short term goals, develop some feasible medium term goals for the duration of my time in this area, and structure all of them to facilitate my long-term goals. As I begin to solidify all three phases of these plans, I'll post more about this.

Alright, folks, I have stuff to do. I hope that you all have great success! Chinkui.

* Thomas Edison never failed; all of his experiments resulted in learning one more way not to make a light bulb. In the same way, yesterday I found several ways not to find Blackwater.