Saturday, April 02, 2005

so far, so good

So, this is my first "daily" post...let's see how long I can keep that going! Hehe. Well, I'm still reading Fast Food Nation these days; it's taking me a while because I'm having trouble finding time to read these days. *sigh* Anyway, I was (oddly, I know) rather quite amused by the chapter on diseases found in meat ("What's in the Meat" was the name, to be precise)...I know, sounds weird, but I was amused by myself because every time I came to the words E. coli or Salmonella I kept thinking that the italics were being used for emphasis, not because they are Latin words, and it was making the reading highly entertaining (well, as entertaining as a chapter on children being killed by large corporations can be, anyhow...).

Anyway, on to other things. Let's see...oh, Dan and I drove up to Syracuse today! I believe it was my first trip there - I could have been there when I was very young, but I don't recall. My parents took me a lot of places, but somehow I figure Syracuse was never on our agenda... It's a pretty little city, though, with some interesting buildings. We found the Bank of America building to be very intruiging - it looks almost like a castle! Anyway, we made the hour-long drive up there in the pouring rain (and I missed the exit because I was thinking I was looking for 34, because that was the number of miles we had to drive on 81N - didn't realize that it was exit 23 until we hit 30, oops!). We stopped briefly on the Onendaga reservation because we wanted a drink. The first place we stopped said it sold cigarettes - we didn't realize that was ALL they sold. We peered in the door and saw floor-to-ceiling walls of cartons of cigarettes. Crazy! I mean, I guess they do pretty good business because reservations can sell cartons for $20 a pop, but wow. We ended up finding a place to stop a little further down - Daniel's Auto Shop, in fact.

When we finally made it back to the mall, we stopped first at Banana Republic so I could return a beautiful white coat I had bought there (I decided I'd get it dirty way more than was worth it, grr), which was the reason I had really wanted to go to the mall in the first place - believe me, I'm not the kind of person that goes to malls hours away just on a whim! Then we wandered around a bit, and Dan ended up sitting down to a charity game of chess (playing against some chess master, who would walk around to all of the boards set up and make moves periodically), so I wandered around a bit on my own. We spent maybe an hour more there, then got back in the car - still in the pouring rain! - and headed back to Ithaca.

On the way home, when we got off of 81S, we were driving happily down some state route towards Ithaca when we faced a detour in the middle of the road - apparently the town (Cortland, I believe it was) was experiencing a ton of flooding! We kept looking down side streets that were blocked off; it looked like the entire town was made of lakes! Crazy. We ended up not really finding our way back to the same street (the detour didn't really direct us back, just away), but we found our way back on a route towards Ithaca, so we took it. Unfortunately, the A&W was closed for the night, so we'll have to go there another time. I looked so fun! Like those drive-ins of the old days. Neat.

We made it back in one piece, though, thankfully. Listened to Alice's Restaurant on the way home, even though it wasn't Thanksgiving. :) Arlo's a funny guy! We stopped at Tops on the way home so I could get meatloaf ingredients for tomorrow. I really dig self-checkout, even though I know that's kind of weird... Scanning things is fun, though. I've no idea why.

I just fired up Anarchy Online for a couple of minutes because I haven't played in so long, and for the first time I realized that there are Sprite ads where the Rubi-Ka billboards used to be! What! Intrigued, I decided to find out more...turns out that to fund this new free version of basic AO, they signed a deal with some advertising company to put real-world ads on their RK billboards! Makes sense, and it can't be that difficult...just have to replace the code for their billboards with new code to display ad pictures...but it just struck me as so odd to see billboards for stuff I can buy in on online world. And here I was thinking that they could offer the free version because they thought enough people would go "wow, Shadowlands and Alien Invasion look so neat! I think I'll buy a subscription to those!" But I guess they can't entirely bank on that, because I am an older AO player who paid for SL and didn't love it, so when I saw they were offering basic AO for free, I signed on. What can I say. I'm a sucker for freebies. :)

Meh, not much else to report right now...I think I'll go kill a few more mobs, and perhaps read a chapter or two. It's getting late, anyway. I also have to get some work done on prepping for this game I'm going to start coding...yay! I am so excited that this dream might actually become a reality soon...!

Have a good night - more tomorrow! Let's see if I can keep this up.

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