sprocket i/o

I woke up far too early this morning (05:15am), so I thought I’d take care of random things and update my blog. Twirl.

Yesterday at work was pretty quiet. In the morning I was still riding high on the weekend, but after lunch it sunk to a strange low. Whenever everything really cool happens to me, my body reacts adversly when normality resumes. I think it’s kind of a test of “Was that just a temporary high, or are things really going that well for you? How quickly can you beat this funk?”. When I went down to the Amazon, it lasted a good week. The 9-to-5 life just seemed so dull. The good news was that by the evening, I was back to happiness. Yay Me.

When I got home from work, I finally took a photo of the damage we had done to the kayak during the Crabtree Creek Episode last week. That’s what the blog entry photo is for today. I’m going to go ahead and send it back to AIRE today. Shaun Allumbaugh hooked me with the repair info’s, I get free repairs for 10 years, but shipping the 40lbs kayak (which folds up nicely) to Idaho is still my responsibility.

I went ahead and cleaned out my car, which has been suffering garbage and mud creep with the kayaking and early morning breakfasts. A little bit of Armor-All, Windex, and paper towels took care of most of it.

I got invited for dinner at Scott & Candi’s, where Scott prepared a delicious meal consisting of some very tasty chicken breast, corn, and some really good potato based substance who’s name I forgot. Throw in the Cabernet Sauvignon, and you have one awesomely prepared meal. I though it was somewhat odd that the chicken was so good, but that Scott hates chicken. I was practically raised on breasts growing up.. I have an aversion to eggs though, so I can’t say anything too much. Afterwards, we had warm chocolate brownies with vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup. I get spoiled when I visit them, I have to say.

Since it was nearing 20:00, I stuck around for George Bush’s war speech. I was reminded a lot about the nifty facts I learned from the comedy about the entire Iraq situation, Between Iraq and a Hard Place. I have to give George credit, he tried awfullly hard to be convincing. His speech writers were actually fairly well this time around. If you’re going to go to war, at least try to make it so everyone doesn’t hate you for it, ya know? Candi asked me if I was against war or against violence. I’m against suffering, when it all comes down to it.

In my opinion, war very often brings more suffering than the reason why we go to war. I think it’s important to go to war when someone is causing great suffering and destruction (Germany in WWII, and the whole Yugoslavia chaos in the 90′s). In these kind of wars, you make a great sacrifice to prevent obvious wide-reaching human suffering. I’m not just talking about being under a dictator, I’m talking real fucking widescale genocide here. Dictator’s come and go. I’m not honestly convinced about this whole thing. I wasn’t terribly convinced about going into Afghanistan either, but it seems to have worked out fairly well so far. History will decide whether or not it was right. This Iraq war thing is so much more than assisting an already existing war in Afghanistan, however.

Afterwards, I went inside. I spoke to Chad a little bit. He was surprised when he asked me about my opinion of the war. I told him “I make use of my Buddhist and my European card here, and say that I’m against it”. When I said Buddhist, he got a real strange look on his face. He said “What’d you say?”, and after I repeated myself, he said “You’re a buddhist?”. “Sure am!”, “No fucking way”. Heh. I guess it goes to show how little I talk about religion, and how some people skip over the About Thomas page.

Okay, enough war crap.

I hung out on the balcony for a while, finishing my bottle of Cabernet, writing the blog entry about the bus trip. I also spoke to Alberth Matos, who’s currently in Rochester, NY for some training. I think it was at this point that I started to feel happy again in the evening (the war stuff definitely did nothing to make me happy, that’s for sure). He’ll be moving down to New Orleans soon, but before that will most likely be doing some training here in Raleigh! I can’t wait to see the oaf. He hooked me up with Jennifer Cook (Brodersen)’s contact information in VCF format. I had no idea he was in touch with her! The gal who I once dated and told me that “You’re an experiment to prove that all men are pigs” is alive and well in Pensacola, serving in the US Air Force. She’s married and has a kid. I sent her a small probing e-mail to see if she actually read her e-mail and wanted to talk. Ahh, the memories.

Speaking of such, I found out why Alexandra never replied to her e-mail that I sent her on Valentines. I know the real reason is procrastination and not knowing what to say, but her excuse was that she didn’t want to show up on my website. I sent her a quicky mail saying that I’ll respect her privacy, so long as she actually writes me.

Dallas invited me to EveryBus 2003, another Volkswagen transporter event, this time in Greensboro. This one seems a bit bigger, and looking at the Riot Act, possibly a little more chaotic and or troublesome. Needless to say, I had a huge smile on my face when I got invited along

Afterwards I went to bed, obviously too early.