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I checked out of the old apartment this morning. It looked so empty and bare after everything was moved out and cleaned up. To be fair it always looked sort of empty and bare, but this was even emptier and barer than usual. Checkout went pretty well, thankfully, and we should get most of our deposit back by the end of next month.

In the meantime all my stuff is in the new place, but everything is in stacks and boxes and I don’t really know where anything is. I’ll be gone for the rest of the weekend though, so I guess it won’t get sorted out until I’m back.

steve :: Jul.31.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Well, I now know how to use my cell phone as a computer modem, thanks to “davidemm”:http://homepage.mac.com/davidemm/vx4400/modem.html. I’m sure this will be so _very_ useful to me, for all those times where I have my laptop but no internet, etc blah blah and so on.

It works, though.

steve :: Jul.29.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Yesterday’s beautiful Sunday afternoon seemed like the perfect opportunity for a bike ride. I’m trying to become a stronger rider, so that I can not only go a long distance but go those distances at a relatively high speed. Yesterday’s ride was going fantastically well, when I made 30 miles in under two hours. My average speed at that point was about 15.25 mph, and my normal average is closer to 14 mph. Things were really going great.

Somewhere near 32 miles into the ride, though, I really started flagging. It felt like no matter what I could no longer keep my speed up. At that point I was riding toward home so I just kept going, but by the time I made it to the garage I was at 38 miles at 14.9 mph.

Now I thought that I had just hit a physiological wall, due to a lack of energy or water or something, which may still be true. But this morning when I got my bike to ride to work my rear tire was flat. If it had started leaking during the ride the reduced pressure would have noticably increased the drag from my already high-drag tires.

steve :: Jul.26.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

It looks like I have found a place to live for the next year. Mom, if you read this site you can now relax a bit. I have not signed a lease yet but all that will happen in a day or two. I’ll be living with three other people, one of which I know already. The other two seem very easy to get along with, so things should be good. The place is less expensive than my current apartment, too.

I think the place will have more of a “college” feel to it than my current apartment, if that makes any sense. Whether that is a good or bad thing remains to be determined.

steve :: Jul.13.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Some would have us believe that the United States was founded on the principals of Christianity, and that the US is in fact a Christian nation. We see this tendency in the addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and the controversy surrounding the (now defunct) lawsuit to remove those words. Interestingly the Pledge was originally “written by a Baptist minister(Pledge of Allegiance - A Short History)”:http://history.vineyard.net/pledge.htm, and contained no references to God at all. Similar tendencies are seen both in law and in public discourse, where it is not uncommon to hear the claim that we were founded as a Christian nation stated by those who wish to inject religion into the government.

“Here(The Founding Fathers and A Question of Faith: American History 101)”:http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon179.htm one can see in the original words of some of the most influential men in the infancy of the United States that the US was indeed _not_ established as a Christian nation. The common tendency to assert that the United States _is_ a Christian nation would likely have greatly upset many of those men who are most respected in our short national history.

steve :: Jul.12.2004 :: Religion and Politics :: No Comments »

I picked about two pounds of sugar snap peas from my parents’ garden this afternoon. Tonight I think I’ll saute the peas with some onions and garlic and serve them over a bed of rice. I’ll also have a small side salad drizzled with lemon juice. It sounds so good I can hardly wait until suppertime.

There are times when cooking really seems to be a drag and a chore, but whenever I get ahold of fresh vegetables I get excited to do something with them. Still, one can look at my proposed menu for tonight and see the glaring lack of protein in it, and I think that is a major deficiency in my diet. “Jim”:http://www.mips4.com/ had some good suggestions for fixing that, though.

steve :: Jul.12.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Alex’s “30 miles or so” ride took a turn toward an 80 mile disaster today. About 55 miles in, maybe 8 miles from where we turned around to head home, Victoria suddenly had to stop because she could no longer breathe, and to be quite honest I was almost broken at that point as well.

Victoria and I rode to the nearest park to find shade and try to recover while Jim, Bryan, and Alex rode on. Maybe three hours later Alex and Jim pulled up to rescue us, and I found out that Bryan’s bike has thrown a spoke and was pretty much unrideable, so we had to rescue him as well.

Out of five people who left this morning, only two made it all the way back. I would say that this ranks right up there with a Robert Chumanov adventure.

Man, I’m beat.

steve :: Jul.10.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

I landed in Kansas City around 8:45 this evening. Another 240 miles down one long highway; nothing really memorable. But now that I’m here I got to meet Jim, who’s really very interesting, and seems to not be suffering too much from his 900 mile bike ride. We’re sitting here, Jim is drinking Jack Daniel’s whiskey, and we’re talking about travel, politics, segregation, school, and many other topics. Apparently I need to live on a beach house on the east coast. Who knew?

steve :: Jul.09.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Maybe I should say roommmate hunting, since I don’t think I can really afford a one bedroom place on my own. Time is running out and I have to get over not only my dislike of calling people on the phone but also my general dislike for meeting new people, for being social, for taking initiative, etc.

I’m running out of time though, and it has to be done.

steve :: Jul.08.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

The bullet is enormous. There is no escaping.

Jumping! Is useless.

steve :: Jul.05.2004 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »