Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2003 > Mid-September Edition
Alas, my fall vacation has come and gone, and it seemed to go by so quickly.
The week was nice and cool (temperatures never got higher than 20°C), with little rain. So cool it was that the growth of the grass was retarded, so no lawn-mowing this week.
During the last weekend came Museum Days, the annual town festival that honors James Dean, Jim Davis (Garfield) and other local-born luminaries. Indeed, Garfield was the grand marshall of this year's festival parade, which heralded the return of our local high-school band after a long absence. I did my usual festival stuff, including the eating of an "elephant ear": a flat piece of deep-fried bread dough flavored with butter, sugar and cinnamon.
The festival this year was not as hectic as in the past. The first day of the festival was rainy and cold. Sister Tina and brother Bill did not bring their kids with them. And this was an off year election-wise, so there were no big polits on parade.
That weekend also held my high school class's twenty-fifth reunion. The event was very hastily set up, poorly timed, and held at an American Legion post fifteen miles away. That meant that only a couple of dozen classmates could attend. Most of the women I recognized at once, esp. one Shelly Collis: Voted most beautiful girl in class, she is still incredibly gorgeous after twenty-five years. As for the men, I could recognize almost none of them: They had become either fat, bald, well-worn, or some combination of the three.
Tim Yale came; he was the closest thing I had to a friend back in high school. He hadn't changed personally since I last saw him. I spent most of the time talking to his wife, a very garrulous dentist whose brother is a congressman.
On Tuesday I took my semi-annual visit to Purdue and shopping at Von's; and this time I took pictures. The highlight was the discovery that the computer science department has, at long last, found the seed money for their new building catty-corner from their current headquarters in the old women's gymnasium. The ground-breaking ceremony was the following day.
On Wednesday I watched the whole of FLCL, the odd little six-part series from Gainax with:
And they're all tied together; there is even a homage to South Park.
That afternoon I put on a suit and tie and walked down to the funeral home. Jon Hummer, another classmate, had passed away. I learned that after recovering from pneumonia he collapsed suddenly and never regained consciousness. I also learned that Jon was working at the VA when he passed away. The last I knew, he was a trucker; I once saw his purple cab pass by while filling my gas tank.
Jon was an avid outdoorsman, and fittingly he was dressed up in a camouflaged hunting suit.
On Friday I had planned to attend this month's Whoosier Network meeting. But in the early afternoon my computer emitted a sound like a boiling teakettle and crashed. After tracing the sound to the hard disk, I drove to CompUSA to buy a replacement hard disk and a cooling fan. As it turned out, the cooling fan did the trick. I never opened the hard disk package, so the next day I drove back to CompUSA for a refund…and a hard disk cooling fan. That customer service guy was taking his job quite well given the customers are working his ass off. :)