Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Attack of the Mutant, Killer Deer Ninjas

I am back to writing at Kingland now so my urge to write on this site is found to be on a decline once more. I look back to when I was in my journaling prime and I was posting 4-5 times a week. Now if I get 2 half-assed posts in during the week it can be viewed as a good amount. Maybe it's because summer is almost here and I want to be doing other things besides sitting in front of a computer screen, especially since I spend a solid 8 hours in front of one for work every day. I know I'm beating a dead horse by saying I want to post more and that I hate being in front of a computer, but every time I post I can't help but think about how much this site is idle when I have so much that I actually do want to write. Anyhow, onward I must go.

This last weekend I was up in St. Cloud again. I went up to see Kristin and also to go see the Diavolo dance company performance at CSB. I had seen them perform two years ago and it was simply amazing so I had high hopes for this performance. When I saw it a couple years ago, the main focus of the performance was on the acrobatics that the dancers performed. They had two big props that they used to do stunts that you'd be hard pressed to find outside of a circus performance. With that in mind, I was disappointed by this year's performance for two reasons. First, it was shorter than before and second, it was more interpretive dance than it was acrobatics.

The prop that they focuses on this year was a gigantic 5 ton wheel in the middle of the stage. It was supposed to represent a huge dreamcatcher, but I thought it looked a lot more like the Stargate from the movie Stargate. Most of the performance was spent with the dancers doing random stuff on the wheel, which was cool, but it just wasn't all that acrobatic. It was still good, but I don't think it was totally worth the $25 I had to shell out to see it.

As for the rest of the weekend, I spent most of it just chilling out with Kristin. We watched a lot of Smallville (man, this show is addicting) in order to finish up season 2. I am now eagerly anticipating watching the third season and catching up to what's being broadcast. We also took in the nice weather and went for a walk through CSB's woods. The walk was pretty interesting. Let me explain.

So Kristin and I were walking through the woods when we saw a deer a little ways off. We stood and stared at it for a little bit but as soon as we moved it ran off. We didn't think much more about the deer as we continued to walk, which is what led to the predicament we found ourselves in. While we were watching the deer on the horizon, two other deer had circled in behind us without us knowing. As we got further along the path, we found that a tree was blocking the path. That's when I realized we had been played for fools. I franticly turned around and grabbed Kristin to get out of the area, but we only ran smack dab into the two deer that had been trailing us.

I thought for sure that my time on this earth had come to an end. The deer were angry and I knew that it was only a matter of seconds before they pounced on us and tore our flesh apart. As I was saying my final prayers I caught a glimpse of pointy stick that was protruding out of the tree next to one of the deer. Not wanting to die being murdered by deer, I jumped at the closest one and managed tackle it into the sharp stick on the tree next to it. It let out a devilish growl as it breathed it's last breath.

While I was tackling the now dead deer, Kristin had attempted to incapacitate the other one. She had executed a swift roundhouse to the deer's head, but it wasn't enough to knock it out. I watched as they two squared off--Kristin using her karate skills while the deer was making use of some form of deer-fu. I didn't jump in to help as I knew I was out of my league, and I also wanted to keep my eye out for the third deer we had seen earlier.

The next minute happened so fast I hardly remember it. As Kristin laid the finishing blows on the second deer, I was jumped by the last deer. It managed to climb one of the trees while we were fighting his compatriots and had now jumped down on to me. I was flailing about trying to get bitten in any essential areas, but I was again facing certain death when a rock hit the deer in the head, knocking it unconscious. It the process of laying the final blow on the deer-fu deer, Kristin had accidentally kicked a rock on the ground next to her which hit the deer on top of me in the head. We had avoided a brutal slaughter by three of the most notorious evil deer in the CSB woods. The whole thing is still sinking in today.

What? You don't think that could have happened? Hrmph! Fine, you're right. Most of the story isn't true, but Kristin and I did see a really pretty deer while we were out on our walk.

Friday, April 23, 2004

More St. Cloud Talk

So where was I? Oh, yes, roller skating. Yeah, it was fun, but I sucked at it. There was tons of free pizza and pop (which I took major advantage of). That was the end of Friday night.

So Saturday. If it wasn't for my premature case of Alzheimer's I'd be able to remember things better, but from what I remember Kristin and I went to St. Cloud for our weekly mall crawl. We also visited her house for a bit. That night Kristin, me, and a bunch of our friends went to see Big Fish and then go to an outdoor concert in Flynntown at SJU. Big Fish was phenomenal. In my book, it was easily Tim Burton's best film ever, and this movie makes my top five movie list of the year with ease. If you haven't seen it, it'll be out on DVD pretty soon and you should definitely check it out when it comes out. Imagine a story somewhat like Forrest Gump but as done by Tim Burton and you'll get a general sense of what the film was like.

The outdoor concert was a decent time although it was horribly overrun with drunk people. I'm pretty sure that our group made up the almost 2% of the crowd that was sober. It was all good, though, since I usually don't mind that much hanging out with drunk people as long as I'm having fun too. We watched Fred Savage and the Unbeatables play. They're a local St. Cloud band with members that attend SJU. I've mentioned them on my site before. They played pretty much the same stuff they've played before with a few new tunes, but they didn't sound much different from their older stuff. They're an ok band to watch and listen to, but not overly special or new--just your basic ska-punk band.

Anyhow, the concert was cool. Afterwards, I slept and then woke up (wow, what a surprise). What's even more of a surprise is that I have to leave for St. Cloud for the weekend once again before I even finish talking about last weekend. Gah!! Too much crap to do lately. Bah!

Thursday, April 22, 2004

You'd Usually Think Newer is Better

Ugghh...and I thought getting a new work computer would be a good thing. How could I be so completely wrong? So, the computer I've been using at work was a top of the line 500 mhz PII. Yeah, I know, that's way more speed than I could ever need for running Photoshop, IIS, Frontpage, and Word all at the same time. Ok, so that was complete sarcasm in case you didn't know. That computer chugged and chugged whenever I tried to do anything in more than one application. Luckily, I was given a new computer to accommodate my needs--a laptop even!

This helped remedy some of my needs, but it created a host of problems all on its own. First, the benefits. I can now work from home if I need to, which is wonderful considering I have a 80 mile round trip commute every day. I usually don't need to be in the office for anything so I can get most of what I need done from home. The laptop is also a little faster than my old desktop being it's a 750 mhz PIII, but it still chugs along when I try to do too much. Beyond the portability and processor upgrade, the thing has created a couple of wonderful little annoyances.

This biggest annoyance is that I need some bulky docking station to hook anything up to the thing. There are no ports on the laptop itself besides one USB port. I can't even hook up a mouse without some big docking station. Because of this, I'm forced to use the stupid mouse stick on the keyboard when I travel with it. It's not so bad, but I'd much rather have a mouse.

Along with the docking station annoyance, when I have a monitor hooked up to the docking station, the graphics card on the laptop will not output a screen resolution as high as on the laptop's screen. I run the laptop's screen at 1400x1050, but the most it will output to a standard monitor is 1280x1024. This creates a weird ass looking virtual desktop where I can't see everything on a normal monitor and everything is huge. So far there has been no solutions to fixing this problem so I no longer even use my nice, big 19" monitor at work because I'd be stuck at a lower resolution than on my laptop's little 14 or 15 inch screen.

The last minor annoyance about it is the 5 minute boot up time. I wish I was kidding, but this thing takes next to forever to start up. I thought for it being a faster computer it would boot up a little quicker, but it takes so long. This will get to being a pain over time because I shut it down when I transport it because hibernating on windows 2000 machines is playing with fire. Half the time hibernation doesn't work or it just shuts down anyways. As it is I usually go get coffee or do something else for a bit while it takes its time starting up.

Ok, enough about the new computer. It's caused me enough headaches (and is also the reason I haven't updated in a while). This past weekend I was up in St. Cloud for the weekend. The SJU alumni frisbee players were invited to play in a little mini-tourney at St. John's on Sunday and I also wanted to go up and see Kristin. On Friday night, Kristin and I went to the Skatin' Place in St. Cloud with a big group of people from SJU and CSB. Man, did it feel weird to have roller skates on again after about 8 or 9 years passing since the last time I've had them on. It was an interesting experience to say the least. I was easily one of the worst skaters there. It was sad, but then again, at least everyone had something to laugh at.

As for the rest of the weekend's events, that will have to wait for tomorrow......... too much other stuff to do yet instead of journaling, but definitely stop by again tomorrow!

Friday, April 16, 2004

My Poor Gizmo

Two days ago in the afternoon, our poor doggy, Gizmo, was the victim of a vicious attack by the wheel of an auger being hauled into our yard. I was in the house eating supper with Ryan when the incident occurred. We heard a yelp, but when we looked outside we didn't see anything and figured it was probably just the animals fighting with each other like they often do. Little did we know Gizmo had actually been ran over and had run off.

The guy that ran him over simply went about his business at our house. He unloaded his auger and tried to set it up and then as he was on his way out he decided to tell us that he had ran over Gizmo. Couldn't he have told us right away after he did it? After he told us, Ryan, my mom, and myself all went looking around the farm to see where he was and if he was all right. I kept imagining him all broken up or spewing out blood from internal bleeding. I couldn't imaging getting run over as being a fun experience so, naturally, I think my train of thought ventured into a somewhat morbid direction.

We spent around an hour searching every piece of our property as well as looking in all the sheds, across the road, in the fields, and anywhere else we could think of. We didn't find him, though. Ryan took the four wheeler over to the neighbor's house and told them to keep an eye out for him. After we had given up looking for him for the night, our neighbors called saying they thought they saw our dog out in the field next to their place.

Wanting to see if it was him, I took the four wheeler over to the area where he was supposed to be and sure enough, he was out there in the field, about a half a mile away from our house (and he ran there injured too). When he saw the four wheeler he started running further away, most likely because he was afraid of the vehicle. I got off and walked over towards him and as soon as he saw me off the four wheeler he came bounding up to me and almost bowled me over. I could tell that he was absolutely petrified after what happened. He was huffing & puffing and he had that scared look & feel to him. Even so, he was more than happy to see me and to have me giving him attention. It was rather sweet, actually.

Even though Gizmo isn't our favorite pet, he's still one of our family (even if he was added into our family against our will, but that's another story). Sure he's a big, dumb, slobbery animal, but he just wants to be loved and get attention. I can't recall him ever not being friendly towards us. He's never once growled at anyone, at least that I can recall. He'll always follow you around no matter what you're doing, with only one thought in his mind, "I like you and just want to be noticed by you." No, I can't read animal's minds so don't even ask, but it is easily apparent by the way the dog acts around us that there is nothing but love in his big, dumb heart for our family.

Anyhow, after I got him somewhat calmed down, I wondered how I was going to get him home. I tried putting him on the four wheeler with me but he didn't like that so much, and I couldn't really force him to ride since he's a big dog (probably 40 or 50 lbs). Instead, he just followed me home as I rode the four wheeler. Since he was still walking gingerly from being ran over, it took quite a while to get him home. I think around a half hour or so, but I didn't really keep track of time. When we got home, it was good to know he was back. Everything seemed back to normal. Even though I might not show it enough, I'd miss the big beast if he had passed away. For being as dumb as he is, I can't help but like the dog deep down. He's dumb in a loving way.

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Countless Fires in my Area

So the big news in the Hayfield/Blooming Prairie/Brownsdale area is the rash of fires that have been taking place. In the last week there has been at least 15 fires that the local fire departments have had to respond to. I knew about 6 of them because a couple happened close to our farm and to my grandparents' place, but I had no clue that there were as many as 15, especially with them all happening in such a short period of time.

A couple of the fires have been chalked up to it just being extremely dry out since we haven't had any rain in our area for a couple of weeks, but many of the building site fires have been classified as arson. It's a little scary knowing that there's people (my guess is some stupid-ass kids whose parents aren't watching them well enough) running around with the intention of lighting buildings on fire. The fires that have been classified as arson mostly revolved around the fires that involved abandoned building sites. I'm not sure if they've classified any of the fires at occupied residences as arson or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

I really hope that whoever is doing it gets caught asap. My grandparents' own an abandoned building site with a few barns on it and we're hoping that nothing happens to it. I also feel kind of bad for the fire departments in the area because they've been so busy. My brother has a teacher at school that is on the fire department and he's hardly gotten any sleep the last week because all of the fires have been happening in the evening. If I go to sleep tonight without there being any fires, this will be the first night in the last 8 that I've been able to go to bed without there being a fire somewhere in our area.

On a somewhat related note, I just finished watching the anime series Hellsing. It's an anime series about vampires, specifically an institution (the Hellsing Institute) that is vowed to wiping out the vampire and undead population of England. The interesting twist is that two of the Institute's members are vampires themselves. I had high expectations for this series going in and now after it is over, I'm somewhat fulfilled, yet also partially let down.

The animation of the series is superb and there are some great action scenes. These scenes don't hold back on the gore factor, though, so if you have a weak stomach, they're probably not going to be too enjoyable for you. The big disappointment for me is the storyline. The first few episodes don't play into the end of the story at all. I don't really know what their purpose is. The main arc of the series also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I think this might be from a combination of way too many parties being involved in the plotline and some murky translation. In the end it comes down to a big vampire on vampire battle a la Dragonball Z, but not nearly as crappy. With the finishing of this series, and since I'm still on an anime kick at the moment, I think I'm going to watch the Bastard! series or maybe start Escaflowne.

Friday, April 09, 2004

I Wish They Were My Words

With my back to the wall you've somehow pinned me up against.
Fingernails in the palms of these tightly clenched fists.
And I'm somewhere in between a held tongue and a curse.
Or I could keep it inside, and hide it.
In hopes my avoidance will cure it.
But there's no time for this.

So light it up and let it fly away.
A Molotov Cocktail, my dreams symbolized in flames.

Put your back to them all, I swear they're not getting you there.
A blueprint for the outside, when it's cold out there.
It's not clear, but I refuse to breathe from these machines again.
You all depend on the filters that keep you away
From the pain when you cry, and the praises you sang.
It's not real so I refuse to breathe from these machines again.

So light it up and let it fly away.
A Molotov Cocktail, my dreams symbolized in flames.
And I won't ask a lot from you, I just pray that the masks will come unglued.

I hope I can be with you soon.

So light it up and let it fly away.
A Molotov Cocktail, my dreams symbolized in flames.
And I won't ask a lot from you, I just pray that the masks will come unglued.

And this routine feels like a knife, entering my back then down my spine.
I've withstood the sting for long enough, and I'm prepared to discard it.
So light it up and let it go away. So light it up and let it fly away.

Fly away.

Sometimes it’s easier to let other people’s writings express what you feel. I know I often have a hard time truly articulating what I feel. I never have an easy time wrapping my head around what I feel well enough to be able to translate those feelings into words, let alone elegant and symbolic poetry. The above is by one of my favorite bands, Dead Poetic. It’s entitled “Molotov”. As I was listening to the cd this morning that song, along with one other, really related to me. I felt a connection to what was being sung. Somehow what I was listening to expressed what I wanted to say but couldn’t figure out how.

I’m sure that the way I interpret what they write is different than how they intended it, but that is the beauty of music and poetry—their format lends themselves to illuminating different responses in different people. Heck, I could probably relate to the same song in completely different ways depending upon the situation I’m in. Life is wonderfully fluid like that. That fluidity also helps keep me sane when things don’t go my way.

I have a hard time accepting when things don’t happen as I want them to. Sometimes I’ll be a mopey brat about it too. What brings me out of that bratty slump is usually the realization that something good will happen down the road. Maybe not right at that moment, but eventually I’d hope something went my way.

Hmmm…I guess I don’t really know where I was going with this today. Must be because it’s Friday or something. Wow, it is Friday already. This week flew by. Anyhow, I’ll end today’s post with another Dead Poetic song, “Bury the Difference.” I really wish I had the talent to express myself as eloquently as so many of the gifted writers that are out there…

Bury all the differences between us. When I still can't find the air,
You keep the toxins flowing for me,
And I'll bury all the differences between us.
And I still can't help but care for moving mountains,
But your, your head's held high again.

You will find me out. You will find everything.
We all, we just battle ourselves. We just battle ourselves again.

Bury all the differences between us, that same mechanical sound.
That keeps on ringing for days and days.
And you're standing like a clueless titan.
And everything around falls right down on you.
With your head held high again.

You will find me out. You will find everything.
We all, we just battle ourselves. We just battle ourselves again.

And there's a storm cloud waiting over,
On the land that's sinking
At the bottom of these buildings again.
With your head held high again.

You will find me out. You will find everything.
We all, we just battle ourselves. We just battle ourselves again.

Thursday, April 08, 2004

Something I Really Want to Do

I think that this weekend is going to be the day that I do it. Yep, I really need to. This site’s design is annoying the crap out of me. I’ve let this website become a monster since I originally made it almost two years ago. Back then I had very little web development experience and this site has been lingering in the accumulation of unoptimized pages, crappily coded HTML, and many other things I haven’t had the time to properly look at or fix. Heck, I don’t spend much more a half an hour a day on this site, and that’s usually just writing the post for the day. Actually, I’d be lucky if I managed to dedicate an entire half of an hour to a post, but I’m sure it has happened a couple of times in the past.

I read so many other online journals and I also look at the work I did on Kingland’s web site and it amazes me how much I’ve let this site turn into something so junky looking. After reading some of my past posts, I also realize that I should start proof-reading them before I put them up…but that would take too much extra time and effort so I’m afraid you readers will have to suffer with my occasional lack of grammar, punctuation, or spelling for the time being. It’s just a pain to proof-read even more text when I’m poring over pages upon pages of text at work. Oh, on a side note, the manual I’ve been working on is at the beta stage now, which means it’s pretty much done except for the review process. It only weighs in at about 170 pages, which is much better than the 200 I thought it would end up being.

On another work related note, I’ve finally been hired on to a full time salaried position at Kingland. It’s nice not to be stuck in intern limbo any more. The pay is also a little better than what an intern gets, and I actually get benefits. I’d been meaning to make a note of this earlier, but I always forgot to.

Anyhow, as for the updates to this site, there’s a few I want to make. First, the layout that is here has to go. I want to make something that has a cleaner feel and will stay simple and not require much upkeep. I also want to clean out a bunch of the older random pages that have been hanging around forever. The reviews section was something I just did when I had a couple minutes of spare time at work, so I think I’ll axe that. The thought archives are functional, but I’d like to set up a different way of accessing them, probably using some asp scripts. The pictures will probably stay how they are for now because I don’t want to go through them. I’d also like to make a style sheet that all new pages would adhere to. The only problem with that is there would be a distinct difference between the look of the new pages and the old ones because I am not going to go looking through the old pages to try to fix them up. They’re too full of code fragments that I don’t even want to imagine all the work I would have to do to make them CSS compliant.

Anyhow, I just wanted to give a little bit of a warning to anyone who regularly comes here that there might be some construction, destruction, and page errors for a while over the weekend, but don’t be alarmed because I’ll be taking care of everything in time.

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Making Babies... But Why?

Kristin asked me the other day if I believed that teen pregnancy and self-esteem were related. The easiest and most logical answer to that would be sometimes yes and sometimes no, depending upon the person’s personality type. In most cases do the two correlate? This is a harder question. I would think that self-esteem, namely low self-esteem, relates to a good number of teen pregnancies, but I don’t think it applies to all of them.

I’m going to base most of what I know on my personal experiences here in the small town of Hayfield, MN. There were the occasional pregnant students in our school, much like any high school, I would imagine. You’d usually hear rumors about how so and so was supposedly pregnant. She’d outright deny the fact, though, sometimes even claiming never to have had sex to support her stance. It would be utterly terrible if anyone knew that she was doing the nasty with someone else in school, or possibly out of school, as it has been known to happen.

Then one of two things would happen, the girl would either drop out of school, thus confirming her pregnant state or the girl would finally admit to being pregnant and attempt to finish school. The latter option rarely succeeded. So was there a specific trait that all of these pregnant school kids shared? Actually, there was. Most of them were pretty slutty. Most of them were also hanging out in the “bad” crowd. You know, with the kids who drank, smoked, cursed, and showed up late for class because they were so damn cool. In all actuality, though, these kids often ended up being the trash of the school—they just never realized it. Or maybe they did, and that’s why they resorted to their tendencies of illicit activities.

So is simply a girl being slutty the only trait the pregnant ones shared? Well, that and, as I explained above, they were in the “wrong” crowd. The crowds really didn’t start to form until the end of middle school and the beginning of high school, but when the groups started forming the one you started in was usually the one you’d always be in. So if a girl had low self-esteem during the clique forming phase of high school, it might have driven them down the path of hanging with the wrong crowd, but I don’t think that alone would cause them to be slutty. There were many kids in the wrong crowd that weren’t slutty—they were just jackasses.

Maybe the slutty girls had a perpetuating sense of low self-esteem that led them to be vulnerable to male persuasion into knockin’ boots and the girls that managed to gain a little self-respect stayed in the wrong crowd but managed to keep away from sleeping around. I don’t know, really. I’m not a teenage girl and I never was so I’m just speculating. I do, however, think that a big part of the self-esteem portion of the equation stems from the kid’s parents.

Most of the kids that were in the dregs of high school society were the ones with the horrible parents. They had parents that were divorced and didn’t want them or their parents were horrible drunks or they wanted to spend more time at the bowling alley then with their kids or they spent a good portion of children’s younger years in prison or any other related scenario. The kids with the good parents (ie: the ones that took interest in their schoolwork, the ones that came to their extracurricular activities, or the ones that simply cared about their kids) usually were in the good crowd, which of course had it’s divisions into the jocks, nerds, and wannabes, but at least they weren’t the troublemakers.

So in the end, does self-esteem have anything to do with teenage pregnancy? Yes, it does. Is it the only factor? Not by a long shot.

Monday, April 05, 2004

Working in Rochester

Mission accomplished. Well, at least it’s almost accomplished. What mission, you may ask? Well, the mission of getting Kristin a job in Rochester for the summer. This weekend she came down to visit and on Saturday she went in for an interview at Hiawatha Homes, an organization that takes care of the mentally and physically handicapped. This job seemed like a natural fit for her considering her social work major. I also thought it would be a good job for her and would allow her to get some good experience in the human services field, especially since she’ll probably be working with people the rest of her life, unlike yours truly who will probably spent a good majority of time conversing with a computer screen in frustration.

So anyhow, I took her in on Saturday for her interview. It was supposed to be at 11:15 am. We managed to get there at a little after 11 (I hate being late for anything so any time I take anyone anywhere they also will never be late). We then hung out outside the door of the building. Why did we stay outside? Because the doors were locked. No one seemed to be in. once 11:30 rolled around we both started getting nervous that she was forgotten about. I took a lap around the building to see if I could find anyone while she waited at the door in case anyone showed up. Still nobody there when I got back from my trip around the area. Finally, as we were about ready to give up and head out the lady that was to interview Kristin showed up. Whew. From there Kristin filled out a bunch of forms, watched a video, and had the actual interview while I sat in the lounge reading Dracula.

On a side note, I’ve been reading Dracula for about 3 months now. It’s not really that long of a book and it is engaging, but I just have such a hard time focusing on reading it at night, or any text for that matter. I want so badly to finish this book, and many more that are on my reading shelves, but after poring over thousands upon thousands of words of text at work every day, my motivation for reading more, no matter how interesting it is, wanes once I get home. I think this is also the reason that most of the reading I do at night is in comic books. There are pictures in comics! I don’t get that at work. All I have there are words and technical diagrams. Hopefully one of these weekends I can use a good chunk of time to sit back, relax, and finish Dracula.

So Kristin finished up the interview and let me know she got the job. The interviewer was actually quite impressed by her qualifications and Kristin seemed to be very anxious about the job. I am quite happy for her, but one obstacle remains—making sure she can live down here for the summer. My family has offered her a place to stay in our house, Ryan’s room to be exact. Actually, it’s not really his room anymore since he’s migrated to sleeping in the basement on the living room floor every night. The only remnants of his occupying his old room are some assorted posters, a few things lying around the room, and a dresser with his clothes in it. The bed has been untouched for probably a year (except for the times mom wants a nap when we’re being loud in the living room or when we have a guest). My parents also have a makeshift closet clothes hanging thingy for the corner of the bedroom for her to put her clothes. It’s all pretty much ready for her to move on in.

I’m really hoping she can stay with us. It would be nice to spend more time with her as opposed to talking occasionally on the phone or IM and then seeing her on the weekends. I also know my family would love to have her around, especially Ryan since it would mean there would be one more player in the house for video games and cribbage. I could also dump off a bunch of my chores on her so I could have more lazy time to myself…… ok, so maybe I wouldn’t dump all of my chores on her, just a good chunk of them! So anyways, I’ll continue to keep my fingers crossed and hope that all will work out for the summer time.

Friday, April 02, 2004

An Interview with an Up and Coming Author

The following is an interview that was conducted earlier today about my latest and greatest novel that I have been concocting here at Kingland Systems. The interview was conducted by none other than the very famous Neville Tanden. So, without further adieu, here is the interview!

Neville: I see that your epic semi-autobiographical mystery suspense thriller romance horror fictitious nonfiction self-help book has been topping the NYT Bestseller's List for 13 minutes now. "Indy IV: The Reckoning", the title really grabs you and says, "Hey, read this or I'll tell everyone what you did."

Rick: Hehehehe, that's funny stuff. I can't believe it's doing as well as it's doing, especially considering the lead character is SO homosexual. Just shows how our society is changing

Neville: I don't think I'm overestimating the impact of your book when I say, our society is changing because of the deep insight into the squirrel psyche it provides.

Rick: it always has been a passion of mine, it really has. squirrel's have always seemed to possess that 6th sense that allows them outwit any other small rodent of comparable size. Really, they are an animal of grandeur.

Neville: Truly scrumtralescent.

Rick: I'm already hard at work on the sequel, Indy V: Squirrels Gone Wild

Neville: You have shown us the squirrel way. A way that transcends the bonds that holds the human race down - In particular, our lack of nuts for the winter.

Rick: True, I am often amazed at how short sighted us humans can be when it comes to getting our nuts together. We're so content to just play with our nuts, but we often forget the big picture--we'll need some of those nuts when it gets cold out! When will we learn?

Neville: I am going to use your book as required reading for both my 3rd grade class and my graduate level literature course, "Expanding the Horizons of the Idea of Womanhood and the Impacts of Such Horizon Expansions on Developing Countries of the South Pacific."

Rick: How interesting! I would be very interested to sit in on a class and see how a 3rd grader's psyche reacts to such a plethora of information about the life of the squirrel and how it relates to womanhood. For me, squirrels and women seem like such kindred spirits.

Neville: In the developing countries of the South Pacific, women are often betrothed to squirrels.

Rick: Interesting. How, exactly, does a ritual such as that work?

Neville: It doesn't, that's why the squirrel population in developing countries of the South Pacific are dwindling, and I think you book will server as a wake up call to the world about this problem.

Rick: That is so sad. The world should definitely know about this type of situation and if my book can accomplish that, then with God as my witness, I will make it my goal to put Indy IV in the hands of every living being on this continent that has money to donate to saving the squirrels. We can't do this alone.

Neville: do you realize that people will shoot 300 squirrels to yield 600 pounds of meat when they know they can only carry 100 pounds back to their wagon. These people should die of cholera, dysentery, or drown after the wagon overturns after trying to caulk it and float across the river

Rick: I am actually guilty of this myself. When I was younger and a little less informed, I would take my dad's rifle, go into the back yard, forge the river, and just kill relentlessly. I tried as hard as I could to carry more than 100 lbs. back, but to no avail. I was weak.

Neville: I told you before you left that you needed some extra sets of clothes. Look at me, I just foraged for berries and I'm as healthy as a yoke of oxen.

Rick: I always have been a little jealous of your healthy, young looks my dear friend, but that you've always known, haven't you!

Neville: Yeah, I could tell. The way you watched at Kingland as I walked to the bathroom...Oh, and the signs you put up in the break area that said, "Justin, I have always been jealous of you healthy, young looks. -Rick" kind of tipped me off too.

Rick: I thought adding my name might have been a bit much, but heck, I couldn't hold back those feelings lest I become spiteful of myself for missing the opportunity of a lifetime--to let you know how I felt

Neville: I have to say, that summer was the time of my life. Nobody puts Baby in the corner.

Rick: Ah, the memories. They truly are something to behold. In my reminiscing, I have lost track of time, I must be leaving now, my good Mr. Tanden. I thank you for this wonderful chance to converse in such an elegant fashion. Until I gaze upon your face once more, remember to live like the squirrel that is inside of you.

Neville: El pleasuro waso mino