About Time

The last week of classes is coming up, and it is definately crunch time. I'm starting to wish some of these assignments had been spread throughout the semester a little more.

In the next two weeks I'll turn in a PowerPoint?, a ten minute presentation on said PowerPoint?, 41 pages of writing, and take 8 exams - two of them written essay exams. I'm pretty sure that is more work than the past 10 weeks combined. On top of that, it's kayak week at SCSU.

Today there was a greenland-style kayak rolling clinic in the Halenback pool. There will be 2 video presentations and 2 pool sessions over the next 4 nights, and starting friday is the 4th annual Kettle River Paddle Festival for whitewater boats up in sandstone. This week may drive me to drink, so fortunately Surly Brewing Co. usually hands out free samples at the bar friday night.

I can't even think right now. My mind is completely burnt out, like a throbbing, burning fuzz behind my eyes. Ugh. So tired. Need sleep. And then kick off the week with an 8 a.m. exam tomorrow morning.

With summer coming and all this great weather we've been having, I took advantage of my Easter trip home to grab my motorcycle. The week before Easter was sunny and approaching 80 degrees, so it seemed like the perfect time to make the 5 hour trip. That's when everything started going wrong. When I got home, I discovered that the battery had gone bad. I recharged it overnight, but it remained weak and was just barely able to start the engine. Considering that I had time on my hands, and no motor part stores open to replace the battery, I decided to take the trip and risk a dead battery en route. The two days before I left were raining with temperatures in the mid 30's. Saturday it hailed almost an inch. Luckily, I awoke sunday to clear skies and 50 degrees. I made the trip safely, albeit a bit chilled from fighting the 20 mph steady headwind. When I got to St. Cloud, I parked the bike in my garage and waited until I had time to replace the battery. That time came this weekend. After adding the acid and charging my new $70 battery, I installed it and took the bike for a spin. The battery worked like a charm, the engine just cranked right over with battery power to spare! I was pretty satisfied that I'd made a nice improvement to a classic old bike that would keep it running for the summer and hopefully a few summers beyond. I was wrong. On my way to the library today to write this blog, the bike sputtered and the oil light briefly flashed on. I pulled over and looked down at the crankcase, which is where all my previous experience with leaking and low-oil motorcyles has been centered, but it appeared clean. So I started up again and went around the block until I found a parking space. When I got off the bike and looked back, my heart sank. The entire chassis was bathed in fresh oil, a lot of fresh oil. About as much oil as in normally contained INSIDE the motor. Damn. I was too depressed to research it much further, without tools, but i'm guessing she's blown up, or a valve bent and punched through the case somewhere. I only know enough about motorcycle engines to be depressed, i guess. And this comes the day after i blew out my mountain bike fork... although i now how to fix that one. Added to the fact that i've spent most of these past two gorgeous days at a computer or in a kitchen, only venturing out long enough to physically destroy two of my favorite possessions, this has been a real downer of a weekend.

I was trying to get to my blog when I realized that I had been automatically signed out. I signed in again, and clicked on "Post" and it said something about "error: you cannot post", so I then decided that websites are hard to make. After bouncing around all the avenues that I have currently discovered leading towards Blogs, I found one without a "Do Not Enter" sign and proceeded to type. Then I realized that it was 11:00 and well past comfortable time to be biking home from the library. But then I remembered when I was in high school and you could go to Angelfire.com and create your own website. So I kept typing. Anyway, it was totally a gimmick, you just created an account and they basically did everything for you, you basically just typed information into their little boxes, and you could upload your own pictures to their server and type the address into another little box and it would load on your page. All this was well and good, but pretty cookie cutter and lame. Luckily, they had a button you could click that would switch you over to an HTML editor, and you were basically given free reign over your web page. Unluckily, once you clicked the button you couldn't click back, and I had absolutely no idea what the hell HTML was.

The Angelfire site was pretty cool about it though, there were a few little basic tutorials for beginning typing HTML, and they also had a link to a sort of forum where users could type and upload their own add-ons that you could copy and paste into your page, and then break down and edit any way you wanted to. You could also find them all over the web. I think that is pretty much how I learned the art of learning by reverse engineering... although it probably stemmed from my earlier research taking apart remote control cars and figuring out how I couldn't put them back together again. As for the websites, it was pretty cool how much one could learn pulling a couple all nighters searching the web and performing genetic experimentation on the creatures one captured. At one point a button on my page would send an email to my friend Jess with nothing but a random curse word in the subject line. I wish I would have spent a few more hours on that one...

It's getting to be the end of March, which means holy crap... where did winter go? I think I used my snowboard pass 4 times? Not that i'm complaining. I am loving the early taste of summer. Today is freezing, with a cold, windy "feels like" of 12 degrees, but at least it isn't raining. I remember a couple years ago when March showers brought April mud. At this rate, the ground is slowly drying out to acceptable mountain biking levels without getting mucky, while keeping the rivers high for kayaking until the frost finishes coming up. I think this is the least I deserve, after putting up with a dreary rainy winter. (see: snowboard pass 4 times)(knock on wood) So far it's been a little cold for kayaking or biking, but there have been plenty of teaser days to keep me hanging on until summer. I've also started some seedlings in the window of my apartment, I guess we are alotted a space in the communal garden this summer, plus I like to see little plants growing in the spring. I've tried to do indoor gardening in the past but i always just ended up growing sticks. I think the people who bought my last house inherited dwarf pomegranite and dwarf lemon sticks, and I gave my mother a miniature chinese palm stick from florida. This year my seedlings are growing like crazy! I have no idea what i did right/wrong, but they are taking over my apartment. I'm starting to worry i planted them too soon, they might overgrow their little starter pots before i can get them outside... so maybe they WILL end up shriveling into little sticks

I planted some watermelons and some herbs, they grew like crazy. So then i planted some strawberries and beans and peas, and then some peppers and onions, and then some sort of yellow asian melon... and then I realized I'm probably O.C. Which is okay, because I used to have A.D.H.D. pretty bad, and some of the symptoms still hang around. Like forgetting everything. Namely the fact that I'm probably O.C.

I frigging love watermelons. I spent last winter in Costa Rica, which is the dry season there. The average temp was 96 F with 100% humidity yet zero rain... about the temperature that makes the dogs' balls hang down to their ankles. I think dogs have ankles? Which would have been disturbing, if the human brain were capable of functioning at 100 degrees. Anyway, I pretty less ate half the GDP of Costa Rica's watermelons in 4 months. Somewhat proud of that achievement, just another notch on the old bedpost... which oddly enough has plenty of room for senseless notches. I actually ate several of those watermelons IN my bed in costa rica... just slid it over until it was underneath the fan, slid the fridge full of watermelon over as a bedside table, and practiced not moving. And plotted the domination of my future apartment by watermelon seedlings when i returned to America. Phase One: Complete! I'm thinking about breaking onto the roof, and releasing the seedlings. There's half an acre up there perfectly suited for a melon plantation, a mecca of sugary red goodness!

It's getting to that point in the semester when everybody's getting a little burned out and is in desperate need of a "spring break." No wonder they toss that in there. Personally, i'm so sick of homework that I couldn't even find a forum discussion on here that I had any desire to reply to, i finally had to start my own blog. The spring weather is arriving, I know i'm not the only one getting cabin fever. By the way, I hate the term "cabin fever," but I guess that's one of the downfalls of an ever-evolving language. We need to evolve that one. Maybe pour a little ninja turtle ooze on it. "Yellow dog" is another saying for it, but even worse. But I digress. The temptation of this beautiful weather is not only mind-numbing because I'm stuck indoors doing homework, but even if I had the free time there's nothing to do yet. There isn't enough snow for snowsports, too much snow for moutain biking, and the rivers won't open for another couple months. This utter lack of motivation can only cause the homework to pile up, resulting in even further lack of motivation. On top of that, I incorporated my construction business last summer and now it's tax time. Boy did I bite off more that I can chew with that one. There are a million websites out there telling you what you need to do, but exactly zero, including the IRS website, that tells you how to do it. So I'm slowly figuring that one out, i've read a few hundred tax code PDF's now. At least next year will be a snap. Midway through second semester is also just about money-running-out time, so that's a bonus. A perfect little formula for how to cause insomnia, which is actually an exponential multiplier in the equation. 3:00 a.m. phone calls from apartment tenants that could just have easily waited until morning.

Ahhh, but getting it all out on paper is a relief. The sunlight brings expectations of a new spring, some thread of hope to keep us afloat. And I just got new guitar strings? Time to re-prioritize this voyage. If life sucks, you're just doing it wrong, right? There should be a couple more wednesdays and fridays left on this college snowboard pass. The pool sessions for kayaking are starting up next week, time to get the old shoulders in shape before i tear a rotator cuff on the river. I still haven't serviced the shocks or the crank on my bike, there are some productive things to work on before april. I've got some hardwood flooring to do over spring break, maybe get that checking account back in the black. If I can just keep the old grades together til May i'll be in the clear, and if not... there's always the option of dropping out and running away with a rock and roll band.