Plain yogurt.

That's what the theme is for the moment. [I do like the new templates ... mine felt a little lacking. Now I just need to fiddle around with some colors ... and we be good.]

Things are good here at home. I am at the library right now, and, after bopping around town, I have seen a couple of acquaintances from high school. One almost didn't remember me, and the other one has married and picked up a mysterious Missourian accent. She's not from MO, as far as I know. And it seems as though her husband works with her [step]father, and that her last day working at the bank is this Friday, after which she will be working for her father with her husband. And she said, "And if that doesn't work out, I'll get fired and start a family." [Begin sarcasm.] Sounds like *someone* has it made. [End sarcasm.]

Alas, nothing else of note to tell. Poor Timmy's car's in a bit of a fix after a non-starting session yesterday on our outing. He's headed toward Franzoesisch's place, though, and off to NYC tomorrow. Woo! In the words of that annoying neighbor kid in Home Alone, "Bring me back something French!"

Thunderstorm.

You'd think that after nigh on twenty-one years one would be able to handle a little severe weather. Thunderstorm warnings, tornado warnings and watches, high winds, hail ... kind of the supreme pizza of weather, if you get what I mean.

Goddamn*, the weather sucks. Right now there was a lovely burst of thunder. That's just a very small taste of what I drove through. I left Winterset at around 4.30p after gassing up, and drove, and drove, and drove. I decided to take the scenic route [Highway 20 to 63, through Waterloo]. In the end, I'm not sure whether that was the best choice or not. Farther north [from when I left the interstate for the aforementioned 'senic' route] there was some pretty crappy weather. From listening to the weather reports on about five different stations while I was driving, I think the weather was relatively the same in both directions. North of Waterloo, I hit the worst weather I have ever driven through in my life. [This not being too much, as I don't drive nearly as much as some people I know.]

The sky was terribly dark, the clouds were low [thunder crashed just now], it was pouring, and lightning flashes made the sky around it purple. There were about ten miles of hail, and somewhere between Waterloo and New Hampton, I lost my passenger side wiper. It broke right off. After a small freakout fit, I kept going, because there was nowhere else to go. I could barely see ... I followed the taillights that happened to be in front of me.

Once I finally hit New Hampton, I pulled in to a hotel parking lot to rest for about a minute. Then I drove through the town, and found a KwikStar, and called AE. I decided that it was best to keep on trucking, so to speak, because the weather that I had avoided from the other direction was still behind me. So I drove the thirty-five miles in about forty-five minutes, which, now, wasn't too terribly bad. [.. news break: there was a tornado, I see, about ten miles south of where I was driving along Highway 20, it seems, sometime near when I went through there ..] Except for the other wiper, which I lost about a mile outside of Decorah.

Long story made a little shorter - I'm back, and I don't want to drive any more. And I have to buy new wipers. And Michael's musical was really good. As stressful as the drive was, I'm very glad I got to see it.


*You know how often I swear in my typing, so you'll pardon me.

Greek to me.

I've finished my final, er, final. Well, mostly. There's the orgia Byronis* tomorrow afternoon at Chez Byron. It will include coffee with yummy frothed milk and other unimaginable delecatable goodies and conversations. I'm looking forward to it. [And I can get rid of my Latin take-home final - I'm quite tired of Laocoon and his snake-y adventures.]

I'm also listening to a Depeche Mode CD that Lina burned for me ... disc one of The Singles. It's so nice. [I haven't popped in disc two yet. I'm going to head back up to my room shortly and do it.]

That should be about it for now. I can't believe school's pretty much over. Just the fun stuff left - the orgia Byronis, trekking home to see Michael's musical on Thursday, and singing for baccalaureate. Then summer will begin. Dorian's not too far away now! Yay! [John Deer green shirts for the counselors ...]


*Secret rites of Byron.

Books galore.

I found a list of 101 books that one should read in order to plan for college today on angst-ident prone, with the original list here. So I'll paste the list and tell you which of them I've read [probably about three of them] or started or whatever. [Read +, Started *, Enjoyed ++]

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart
Agee, James: A Death in the Family
Austin, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain
++ Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul: The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights
+ Camus, Albert: The Stranger
Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton: The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
* Dante: Inferno
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
* Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore: An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George: The Mill on the Floss
+ Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Selected Essays
* Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Faust
Golding, William: Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
* Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
* Heller, Joseph: Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to Arms
Homer: The Iliad
+ Homer: The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God
++ Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World
+ Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll's House
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw
* Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
+ Kafka, Franz: The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior
+ Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair: Babbitt
London, Jack: The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain
* Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman: Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman: Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur: The Crucible
Morrison, Toni: Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery: A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene: Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George: Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago
++ Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen: Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel: Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond: Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry: Call It Sleep
+ Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye
+ Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
+ Shakespeare, William: Macbeth
+ Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream
+ Shakespeare, William: Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard: Pygmalion
* Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
+ Sophocles: Antigone
+ Sophocles: Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William: Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
* Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons
* Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire: Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.: Slaughterhouse-Five
* Walker, Alice: The Color Purple
Warton, Edith: The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora: Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee: The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard: Native Son

So in other words, I'm kind of embarrased. I haven't even heard of some of these.

Save the olives!

I've changed it up a little, but I doubt you'll notice it unless you go to a previous post. Anyway, it's been a good day. B and I went to have our training day at Chez Pizza Ranch, only to find that Sr John wasn't really prepared for us to do anything ... so we got a tour of the place. The tour included a lecture on the dangers of chicken and delivering pizzas, at which point B said later, "He makes it sound like the only people that die in car accidents are results of pizza delivery." [This was true, it seemed he emphasised that a little too much for our comfort.] He also littered the tour with stories about pizza delivery-related deaths and some guy saving something like $10000 in costs by removing one olive from salads on a plane. Wow. He's long-winded and odd.

The long and short of it is, we were all prepared to work for five hours, be we were there for about half and hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Hmph.

So I'm off to dye my hair.

Cheers.

Architect.

"Every man is the architect of his own fortune," said Appius Claudius.

I don't necessarily want fortune, but I'd like to have a nicely unique structure.