Join a Sport, See the World

...or at least the upper Midwest.

Back in the good ol' days of Crew (March 16, 2003 and September 23, 2002), we traveled to such exotic locations as... Omaha! Iowa City! Indianapolis! Madison! Quad Cities of IA! Having driven to Chicago recently, I can basically confirm that I know every notable Subway, rest stop, and truck stop off of I-80.

And now, ladies and gents, having rejoined a swim team... guess where we're going for the Zones meet this weekend? Cedar Rapids, IA! I could not be more excited to add this tropical locale to my list of destinations, or to add the rest stops of I-380 to my collection.

Lest anyone be tempted to ask... Iowa does NOT make me smile. Though the fact that they raised the speed limit does make me smile a bit.

I have photos of last week's toga party at work to post. I'll do that when I get home on Sunday.

n00bs and the Internet

Why is it that the first thing people do when they initially get access to the internet (or should I say "the internets -- a series of pipes) is send out ancient forwarded emails ...that somehow are still circulating after at least 10 years... ? Why is this? And why are there so few people that bother doing any fact-checking first? OMG-- watch your kidneys!

Anyway, I think I've found a fairly reliable way of getting people to STOP. It's worked twice, and I'm currently working on a third. For every stupid urban legend / phony photo / OMG-look-at-this email, I go hit Snopes.com to find out its status. Then I send a link and some commentary about the email back to the sender. The way I figure it, it's a mild shame technique. Either the sender gets the point and stops sending forwards out (presumably doing hir own research), or just gets pissed off and me and stops sending *me* forwards. Either way, no more clutter in my inbox, thank you very much.

And on a totally unrelated note, this pretty well illustrates why I don't like people:

As promised...

Ugh. Watched the end of the national championship game... didn't care a bit about the rest of the game. Didn't really care about the game. You know it's a bad season when (if I had had to choose) I'd rather watch the Royal's home opener than the NCAA-BB championship game.

Anyway, as promised here's some photos of our trips. First, samples from the Columbia / Jeff City trip:



Check out the rest on my Webshots page. And the winners from Chicago:





And yes, that's TOTALLY Kirk Hinrich.

Life here is totally dull and normal. 59 days until Peru.