The Voyage Home

Scout and Scoff

These pictures were taken in October of 2001 and thereabouts. It would have been a full roll, but I made the mistake of buying a 40-exposure cartridge. Whoops. So here are some last pictures of Rapid City and Iowa State, taken on the cheapest Kodak APS camera I could find (which accounts for the red demon eyes on everyone.)

• Mr. Beasley, my little sister's cat, sitting in a box. A very versatile little cat, he doubles as a conversation piece when people come over.
• Good ol' Mindy and Scott, showing Dr. Laura the Board Game what for.
• Dr. Laura the Board Game is so much more fun with a knife.
• ...so I was in Rapid for thirty-six hours or so, and I had some friends over to play the Dr. Laura Game, if I hadn't mentioned already. Jesse, Scott, Mindy and the Hand of God were kind enough to hang out for a while, and so I took some pictures. These pictures. I didn't mention that before, did I?
• I mean, don't get the wrong idea; it's not like I drove 1400 miles just to watch Beasley attack Dr. Laura's Game with a few friends. I did other stuff too!
• But there was no way I was going to go that far and not take the opportunity to see these guys wrestle and... stuff.
• I had more "legitimate" reasons for being there, you know. I picked up my high school yearbook, for example, and Jesse was flipping through it that Saturday. I'm just not nuts, or homesick, or that big of a wimp, that's all.
• Marston Hall at night, a while after I returned to Ames. Iowa State has a better picture, and some floor plans, and so on.
• The mystery door to Parks Library 034-A. I looked into its purpose since I last mentioned it, and I'm still not sure what it's there for. It's listed in the space allocation chart as "Library", but the floorplan does not show any means of egress. 654 square feet of blocked-off nothing with blind-filled windows and a sealed door. Curious.
• Erin says hi. I would have excluded it to avoid vanity and all, but it made me laugh. Who goes around posting phone numbers on random dorm doors? I'm guessing cruel friends or something, myself. Also, this is the last I saw of the whiteboard; someone went on a door-hangie-ganking run over Thanksgiving break, and it is gone now, along with most of the others in Sanborn House.
• Lake LaVerne in the autumn. Geese are very rarely seen on LaVerne; usually it's just Lancelot and Elaine out there.
• Trees? Why did I take a picture of trees? Well, here are some trees.
• Castle Bwr Blffn, as seen in the Cornerstone of Roberts Hall. Every fall, businesses in Ames get together and assemble these coupon books for distribution by the thousands all over campus. Boxes filled to the brim with them can be seen sitting outside the book store at any given time, open and waiting to be taken. So someone built a castle out of the wee buggers. There's a close-up that better highlights the Reese's spires atop the structure, but the quality of that one sucks.
• A tiny chipmunk, gathering food outside of Lyon Hall, just to the left of the big steps in the ISU picture.
• A nice inscription from under the steps of Catt Hall.
• My car and Lot 20, because I had a whole bunch of leftover film. This picture (and this one) may make Lot 20 look busy, but don't be fooled--the three cars in the frame are actually in the adjacent commuter lot, Lot 29B. Lot 20, the staff lot for people working at the Library Storage Facility on the northern tip of campus, is usually either empty or almost empty, yet for some reason, 1) I have a permit to park there, and 2) I had to wait a month to receive it, because the friendly people in Parking said all of the lots were full. I'm still not sure what to make of it all, but I have somewhere to park, so I'm okay with the arrangement. End of rant.
• Hey, Gonz, NOL!
• The 1991-era Gateway SpaceSaver keyboard. There was no way I could do something like this without coming away as a geek, was there? That's okay, though. Professing my love for this keyboard is worth it. It's massive! It's reprogrammable, and can run macros by itself! It has two banks of function keys, an eight-way direction-pad, and dedicated pipe and asterisk keys for a total of 127 buttons. The SpaceSaver has to be the greatest keyboard ever. I just wish it was still being manufactured...
• And finally, mystery: