| ...continued from previous page<<< In case any of you are wondering, I lead a very boring life. My parents insist on my spending just about all my free time studying, even though I don't really study that much when they tell me to, and consequentially recieve only average grades, despite my reported above average intelligence. So, when someone gives me the opportunity to get out of the house and do something like take their little brother to piano practice, I pounce on the opportunity like a crouching tiger upon a hidden dragon. So, I was off to Julianne's house and I was quite tense (more than usual) because of the negative events that were continuing to degrade my morale. At this point, I was becoming more and more paranoid. I had sufficient reason to believe that the world was in fact out to get me, based on what had been happening all that week. I walked up to the door looking all about in the process, rang the bell, and covered the peep hole with my palm in the hopes of somehow tricking Julianne into believing that nobody was there. As I stood there, I noticed the sounds of the croaking frogs that live in the tiny creek adjacent to her house. As I was listening to their beautiful music, I shifted my weight to the palm that rested against the peep hole. All of a sudden, I heard the doorknob turning, and before I could react, Julainne had opened the door, and I became off-balanced, and stumbled inside. I received a strange look, but not unlike ones I had received from her before. I finally greeted her and Liz, not really being able to justify my actions. We went up stairs to check email and whatnot, and we had to hook up the complicated external modem she had been forced to use as a result of Julianne's DSL company going bankrupt, leaving her without service. I managed to accomplish something useful while in her room: I networked her printer so that her siblings wouldn't have to pester her to use it. I had given her step-by-step instructions on how to network the printer the day before so she could do it on her own, but like most things I say to people, she didn't take it seriously. After tooling around upstairs for awhile, it was time for Steve's piano lesson, so we all jumped in Julianne's dad's Volvo S70. Julianne was unjustifiably ecstatic about driving this car because unlike her own Infiniti G20, it actually could accelerate at a rate greater than a third of a meter per second squared. I considered the danger of someone like Julianne being given the power of a 5-cylinder (I know "5" cylinders does sound unusual, but I assure you, it is correct) turbo-charged automobile, but then realized that Volvos were considered to be one of the safest cars on the road, so I did not fret too much. We arrived with all our limbs in tact to Steve's piano teacher's house in Thousand Oaks. We could not stay however because Liz just HAD to get to the hospital. Not because she was sick or anything, but because that was her place of employment. I think she's Chief of Cardiology or some nonsense like that. After dropping of little Lizbeth, Julianne and I headed back over to the piano teacher's house. We could have taken the quick and painless way, but NOOOOOO. Julianne just HAD to take the scenic route, which was basically a lot longer, but posed the benefit of driving by a patch of grass on the side of the road. Needless to say, we did reach our destination. Julianne has turned her life around over the past few weeks: she's decided that whenever I'm around, it's a good time to take a walk. I've always wanted to see the world, and Julianne has given me the opportunity. We've walked around her house, my house, my park, some golf course and some day she hopes that we will be able to walk around Westlake (the lake, not the village). Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that we had time to kill inbetween dropping off Liz and Steve geting out of his lesson. So, we walked. This neighborhood was an obscure corner of town. The majority of the people on this particular street decided to make their front lawns a storage facility for their old, rusted automobiles that no longer function. Among the various cars strewn about people's front lawns were a classic VW Beetle and some Jaguar that I had mistaken for a Rolls Royce somehow. There was also a boat trialer and what I was pretty sure was a Corvette Stingray, covered up with a cloth car cover. Some people may think I'm spoiled or snobby or stuck up, but where I come from, we try not to make junkyards out of our lawns. It makes property value plummet faster than a mafia informant wearing concrete boots being dropped into the ocean. Despite the vast fields of eyesores, we walked around the nieghorhood for about fifteen minutes. It started off okay, but there would be several instances in which we were almost killed by crazed beasts. The first was when we turned a corner to find a viscious, hungry dog digging around in a bush for fresh blood. This dog was roughly the size of my dog Roxy, and could potentially do serious damage to us if it felt threatened. So, without saying anything, we did an about-face and went back around the corner. We did not travel further than five steps before a gigtantic, black bee caught sight of us. This was the kind of bee that kills off entire populations of smaller bees and solely dominates over an area of about an acre. I remember from my childhood a similar bee trying to kill my mom and I at Disneyland, so I knew what to do. These massive insects have such incredible momentum that it is extremely difficult for them to change the direction in which they are flying. So, I grabbed Julianne by the arm and told her to duck, and as I predicted, the bee flew strait over us and continued off into the distance. We were safe for the moment, but decided to cross the street just in case the thing was able to u-turn five miles down the road and come back at us. We walked back to the car, and sat down on the curb beside it, where I proceeded to chuck tiny pebbles into a drain located in the curb opposite to us. We observed a high pitched noise coming from behind us and could not immediately determine its origin. Upon further searching, we found a huge black and white cat sitting on the wall yelling its little head off. It continued sitting and making a general ruckess as we tried to maintain a conversation. Eventually, it walked off, but only after thoroughly annoying us. We sat and talked for a few minutes, until all of a sudden I was struck in the head with something. A pink blur rolled across the street after striking my cranium and when it came to a hault, I was able to determine that it was a rose bud. I turned my head and looked around and Steve was standing on the sidewalk beside us giggling. He had taken it upon himself to steal one of his piano teacher's roses and bean me in the head with it for no other reason than to get a good laugh. Upon Steve's return to reality, we all walked across the street to get in the car. We noticed that beside the car was yet another stray dog. It was quite small and had black, frizzy fur, and it looked like the pet of a neglectful heroine addict. Needless to say, it was scared of us and probably would react negatively to a confrontation. We all jumped in the car as quickly as possible and took off. Julianne had to make a u-turn, but due to the turning radius on her car (or lack thereof) the u-turn was converted into a 3 point turn. We went back to Julianne's house where I then left to go to my house. There was nothing to do at my house, so I sat down on the couch and tuned into the world's greatest cable television station: TechTV, the number one source on news about technology in our world. Leo LaPorte, the host of "The Screen Savers" gave out a list of the five worst Palm Pilot applications. If you know me, then you consequentially know my Palm IIIc, the single greatest handheld device ever conceived. Some people scoff when they hear that it only has a 20 MHz processor and 8 megs o' RAM, but they don't realize the true efficiency of the Palm Operating System. Unlike poo poo OSs like Windows CE, PalmOS gets the job done very well in minimal resources. I began thinking about what Leo LaPorte was telling me. How could knowing what the five worst Palm apps help me? I then began thinking about TechTV in general. I'm probably a member of the one third of a percent that is nerdy enough to watch this channel that would most likely appear to be rubbish to the general population. They must spend a fair amount of money on stuff like "Tilde, the motion-captured polygon girl" which requires half a million dollars of equipment all by itself. The sponsors they have are obscure to say the least. continued on next page>>> |