What is going on?

This is what I kept muttering to myself as I drove home tonight, staring at beams of light arcing out from oncoming traffic. Beams. Not just light splayed over nearby surfaces. Great horizontal pillars of light, or rather, of illuminated smoke. Everything was immersed in a light layer of smoke. No fire visible. The smoke smelled like fire, though and not like fog or car exhaust at all. The Hills are on fire.

According to the most recent updates (as of this writing) from the AP wire, "smoke from the fire [in the Grizzly Gulch area near the town of Deadwood] could be seen 100 miles away. A huge column of smoke was drifting over Bear Butte and Sturgis." Deadwood and some area residences have been evacuated. The Grizzly Gulch fire is not nearly as serious as the Arizona Rodeo-Chediski fire, which CNN reports has covered over half a million acres so far--the largest fire ever in that state. But it's still something new for me, and it's What's Going On in the 'Hills right now.

Oh, and about that: What's Going On in the 'Hills. This may or may not be the best area events calendar--in print, on air, or on the Web--that I've ever seen. Much of it is crap, but much of what we do for fun around here is crap, so the PanCal is alarmingly effective in that respect. Denizens of the City, spread the word!

...I had more, but screw it. World Cup final in two hours or so. I think I told my Polish co-worker the wrong time and channel for the game. Whoops...
...also, new computer monitor coming soon (I hope), so perhaps I will be able to design something. Or maybe I'll learn the hard way what the phrase "poor color reproduction" in all those LCD panel reviews means...

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? I haven't done anything since Thursday, in fact. Happy Thursday!
No, it isn't.

Anyway, today marks a somewhat monumentous occasion in my life: I rolled my car over 100,000 miles today! Yep, an hour and a half or so ago, at 12:05 am, the sixth green digit on my dashboard lit up for the first time, excepting of course all those times I fooled around with the 'metric' toggle. Really, I've had many momentous occasions in my life, but none has summed up the others more than tonigh, when as a brilliant chamber-style violin/cello duet streamed over the radio and a rather odd-looking vehicle approached from the other direction, I glanced down at my dash to check my speed and noticed those dim green lights glancing back: 100004.

So that's my personal drive-home story for tonight. I had one about the beautiful full moon two or three nights ago, its light gently flickering against my arms as my car danced in and out of the long lunar shadows cast by the big pine trees just off the road, but I decided to sleep rather than record my musings. I remember it being... err... pretty, for what it's worth. When I tell people that I work in Keystone, the first comment I hear in reply is usually, "Wow, that drive must get old." And I usually respond, "It's not so bad," which of course is Midwestern for "I don't mean to contradict you, but frankly I love it." In reality, spending half an hour in a car before and after work, listening to music and news is a very relaxing thing. It could be just me. Or it could just be the Black Hills, which are not too hard on the eyes, especially under a full prairie moon and star-filled, cloudless sky. It's South Dakota's best-kept and perhaps only secret: we have hills here. Beautiful hills. Sharply-cast yet relaxed hills. These are hills so serene and ideal that the Sioux people consider the Black Hills to be holy land. The hills are shaped like a human heart, they explain, and is the heart of everything that is.

And so in the late 1930's and early 40's, a fellow named Borglum carved four heads into the heart of everything that is, and sixty years later, launching explosives into the air above them annually is a Big Deal. Such a big deal that 35,000 people were to have come to watch the colorful bursts of light this year. However, on Tuesday, the National Park Service announced that nothing would be blowing up this year in light of fire concerns. While this is a wise move on their part -- last year, a few shells went astray and ignited a tree or two -- it will seriously affect the local economy, as just about every shop in Keystone will lose at least 10,000 potential customers as a result. For me, it probably means a half-day off work, so I am most pleased with the Park Service's decision.

Some closing random thoughts:
Joan did indeed hypothesize to me that all NPR broadcasters are animals of some sort. I'm starting to think, however, that David Brancaccio is a living, breathing human being and not a super-intelligent, genetically enhanced marmoset.
KTEQ's benefit art-punk show at the Minnelezuhan senior citizen center next Wednesday is sponsored by Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut: making your ears bleed since 1962.
Hey, I have to get up in four hours, don't I? Well, good night...

Gaaaaack.

Hi! It is Thursday. Thursday! Thursday. Dammit.

Still no computer monitor, still... well, too much happening, I guess. I have this house to myself, and a house I'm watching for one of the neighbors. I have more space to myself than ever before, and I kind of like it. It's much more relaxing than dorm life, even though I'm not relaxed at all and pulling through on four hours of sleep a night beside. It's fun, though. Serving ice cream to tourists alongside foreigners at the Keystone Dairy Queen! Mastering fourth-order numeric multi-variable differentiation! Being awake! O, how I hate being awake.

Randomness: the Blue Chemist snagged a spot on The Screen Savers tonight? Or at least got Patrick Norton to read his URL on cable television. Hwaa~.
I have pictures. Joan is mighty with a camera. Mighty!

All right, that's enough.

Is it Tuesday? I must have passed Monday somewhere
around Echo Ridge.

Just before I started writing this, I heard a big thump directly above me. I want upstairs to investigate, and found the little orange cat zipping about, hunting the evil death moths. I love that little cat. If only I could prod him into clearing out the infestation in my car...

The monitor crisis was partially averted today when my Dreamcast came in the mail. Ah, Dreamcast, savior of mankind! I won't have any time to really use it between class and work, but it has a web browser, an email client, and an available Linux distribution make it a decent replacement computer, sort of. So perhaps I will be able to do something soon.

But now, sleep! Or maybe Virtua Tennis instead!

...but now instead of redesigning, I get to spend my time working extra shifts to buy a new computer monitor because the one I was using here is dead. There's still one in the house that works... it's just connected to a computer that doesn't have any of my files or programs on it. So no Fireworks, no ImageCommander... wait, yes ImageCommander. But I can't do anything with the images I command, because there is no Fireworks. Oh well.

At the restaurant tonight, I realized how alarmingly often young children order huge ice cream concoctions. Some of these kids walk away from the counter with more than a pint of ice cream and toppings in a cup. And eat it all. It's rather obscene at times, though I guess it's not as bad as what some people would buy for their children when I worked at Hardee's. 1,000 calories in a double quarter-pounder plus 600 calories in a large fry and 300 calories in a large drink equals too much for anyone, let alone a kid who has to sit on a phone book to eat it all. So much fat...

I have a new tract to scan! Some creepy preacher from Tennessee stopped by Keystone and handed one to everyone he saw. They advertise a church in his home state, so I'm not sure why he bothered handing them out, seeing as how I would have to drive for about sixteen hours to hear his sermons. Maybe they're just really good sermons? Whatever. I'll scan the tract in as soon as I find somewhere to plug in the scanner so you can see how creepy the man looked.

Today's lesson: tourists, even tourists like you and me, have strange notions about what does and does not constitute a good idea. Always remember this when traveling for pleasure.

After ten and a half months of operation, the first-ever review of rapidfish.org went online today. In theory, I shouldn't be mentioning this because of the troubles the site hosting the review has had with bandwidth, but I've alluded to the mighty Order before, so I'll just go on.

The review read, in its entirety, "dumbity dumb," which is about how I was feeling about my rooms in the little loft here. The drapes don't match the furniture, there's a big juice stain on the rug, and yet I seem to keep talking about it all. And talking about it. And talking about it! When I'm "in the flat," I talk about nothing else. It's not that I'm the most boring person in the world, or the least creative, really, I'm not. Just before typing this, a new layout popped into my head; with a copy of Fireworks and an HTML style manual at my disposal, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to make something of it. And while sweeping the floor at work, I came up with a little essay about love and frozen hell-holes. So it's not either of those at all. It's just that I have a hard time putting my opinions and feeling (one at a time, or things get confusing) on paper, let alone on a computer or on the internet. Doing anything at home is hard enough, seeing as how I'm living with the family for the summer. How any grown adult can survive living at home--especially when sharing space with younger siblings--eludes me, though my bafflement might depend on my unique relationship with my family. But expressing anything more complex than "yes, the weather is fine" seems so difficult to me for some reason, and has ever since... well, since about 9 p.m. on February 1, 2000. I can fiddle with HTML or Perl all I want; unless I change who I am, the problem will remain: everything's just welled up inside, waiting not to burst out but to be quietly forgotten. And until I figure out how to move beyond this barrier, I, too, will just be quietly forgotten.

It's all rather abstract, and I should probably be explaining this to someone who cares instead of indifferent strangers who now think I'm just another whiny prat, but I'm even worse expressing myself in spoken words, and anyway my work schedule for the most part precludes interaction with ordinary, day-walking humans. So I guess instead I rant to the 'Fish. Blast.

I'll work on redesigning, though, soon. If I can't entertain with my life story, perhaps I can whip up some amusing digital content and a more palatable interface. And maybe, of course, I just don't care about the Internet to do so, as the Internet won't catch a movie with me, or ask me for a ride to Spearfish, or know anything at all about my diff/eq homework. I guess we'll see what happens tomorrow.

It's now 2:44 in the morning, by the way. Hopefully later I will remember I wrote this, and also to spell-check my foolish ramblings first. After all, the 'Fish is "dumbity dumb"--not "dumitie dumm", eh?

Note to self: new slogan, "rapid fish dot org: we're working on it."

I left home this (technically yesterday) afternoon, voted, picked up my cleaning and went to visit a friend. When I came back around 10:30 tonight (last night), all of the accursed election signs on my street were gone. Gone. Vanished with nary a trace. Even the two that had appeared in the front lawn were missing. Just thinking about this sends sparks of glee through my spine and out to my fingers as they share my happiness with the world. Better than even this discovery, however, was the announcement I heard on the radio a few minutes before arriving home: that Mike Rounds had defeated Steve Kirby and Mark Barnett in the Republican gubenetorial race. Finally, a worthy Republican candidate! There's more on the absolute upset in an article from the Argus Leader.

On a sandwich-related tangent, Pauly's has a web page! They even have a couple of expired coupons you can download! Pauly's, a little sub shop/deli downtown, has always been a major part of my Rapid City life; I've shared a good many tasty sandwiches and soups with friends there over the years. It's nice to see them online, even in such rudimentary form.

Random thoughts for the night: yes, I work. In Keystone. All hail Representative Janklow. And make sure to choose Zpoc for all your Christian music pirating needs.

You don't know how glad I am to be able to sit here and write this today. For a while there, I thought Rapid City was going through seven plagues, sent from the heavens by an indifferent God angered with our political candidates' squabbling over who is most conservative... on Monday came the swarm of campaign signs; on Tuesday the giant moths; cheerleaders on Wednesday; dandelion fluff on Thursday. Friday morning I woke up petrified, because not only were these banes to humanity everywhere, they didn't go away after twenty-four hours like the plagues of old. Only a God very detached from the world would put forth such a weak showing, as plagues go, and then leave the mortals to clean up after him, right?

Friday was just an ordinary day, however. No red food coloring falling from the sky, no common cold epidemic, and no sea of glass or whatever. The signs and everything else are still around, inexplicably enough, but I think it is safe enough to post now. So here I am again. I apologize for the long delay.

The sad bit is that I really have nothing to say. I guess I'll just say 'screw off' and end it here, because I'm a fake.