I am home for the summer.  I love it here.  I love being near my family -- not just mom & dad and Nick and Maria, who live here, but also Rolly, Brian, and Tasha and their families, who are now "within range" instead of 3+ hours away.  I don’t know how I manage, being be so far away for 2/3 of the year.

Today my dad took my mom and my grandmom out to lunch (plus me, Nick, and Maria... heh), at the Coventry Tea Room.  This is a quaint dining room that’s used mainly for formal occasions; for example, Brian and Heidi had their wedding rehearsal dinner there.  Anyway they cook some amazing meat... at the rehearsal dinner, I had a filet, and today I had prime rib, and man... was it ever delicious.  And when we asked for it medium-rare, they cooked it that way, to perfection I might add, which most nearly every restaurant manages to get completely wrong.  Even my dad, who is the least tolerant of us all when it comes to meat cooked to order, agreed it was good.

I’ve been getting along with my parents amazingly well for the past couple years.  It’s been that way pretty much forever with my mom, but my dad just seemed to have trouble connecting to us or talking to us at all when we were teenagers.  He’s pretty tough on the outside, unapproachable to some extent, and at least in the past, was a lot more grumpy than not.  But more and more I’m starting to believe that’s just a thin candy shell, and he’s all gooey chocolate on the inside.  No, seriously, I guess since all of his kids (well except Maria) are adults now, it’s just easier to get along with and talk to him.  He’s always been hilarious in a really dry, sarcastic kind of way (which I’m sure is where I get my sarcasm...), and he’s still the always-right, my way or the highway type... but lately he’s been getting more and more friendly it seems.

So anyway... I’m really really glad to be home, away from school, starting work tomorrow, and standing on the edge of summer.

Oh, and in unrelated news, this messageboard now has spell-check.  Enjoy.  Oh wait, that would require ACTUALLY POSTING messages.  Honestly people, if it weren’t for my mom, Rolly, Steev, and Joseph, I’d swear I’m talking to myself sometimes.... not that there’s anything wrong with that, right?  Right.  But still.

hey all, really weird request here... or at least, it is to me... but i’ll try it anyways, i ummm, finally went to church tonight, was nice, i enjoyed it alot, and think im going to start going every thursday night (its a college group type thing)  and well, I want a bible, and due to the fact that I have a lack of a vehicular mode of transportation, I am wondering if anyone knows a good website to buy a bible at, that maybe uses paypal for payments (not a requirement though), and if so, if you have done any purchasing from there, and any recommendations basically.  thanks

Mercury is a lot smaller than the sun.

My 2-year contract with Cingular is about to expire, so I need a new contract.  I’m thinking of moving away from Cingular to a different provider, for a couple reasons: 1) they require a 2-year contract, which means you’re locked in for a long time, and it also means they have little incentive to improve their service (since there’s no chance of people switching to another provider after a year).  For example, you can get AIM Wireless with every major provider except Cingular.  2) Cingular has such a small selection of phones and they’re all boring.  3) I’ve been with Cingular for either 2 or 4 years now, I can’t even remember it’s been so long, and I know I’ve had countless frustrations with them that I can’t even recall right now.  So I just want to try something different.

However, Cingular does now have free rollover minutes, and the "nights" in the "free nights and weekends" recently began starting at 7pm instead of 9pm.  So...

Anyway, if you have a cell phone, with Cingular or anyone else, post a reply and let me know if you’re happy with your service.  And also where you’re at.

Hideho, people.  I just got back from the Agape Festival in Greenville, Illinois.  It was awesome.  We got there a little late, considering it’s a three hour drive for us, and got there just in time to see Pax 217.  After them Five Iron Frenzy played.  They rock so much they rocked my socks off.  (They did the song "Pootermobile" from the Cheeses of Nazerath C.D.) They have such a great stage presence.  They kept screwing up, but they didn’t care and neither did the crowd.  In fact, the lead singer (I forget his name) even said, before they started one song that he forgot the lyrics to half of it.  But, in true Five Iron fashion, they played it anyway.

We met some other guys there.  They brought a couch with them and we set it out in the middle of the field, cut a hole in it, and shoved an umbrella in it for shade.  Then we took some golf clubs and elastic bands and made a little lean-to.  It was pretty cool. 

The Elms, By The Tree, The Benjiman Gate, Superchic[k], Skillet, and Jars of Clay played the next day.  I’m sorry, but even though they are not my favorite band, Superchic[k] still rocks.  And maybe I like them for all the wrong reasons.  Maybe it’s because Trica and Melissa are just as cute as they are.  I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a thing for Trica.  I talked to her a little bit (don’t know if she knew I was hitting on her or not) and found out that she is actually younger then Melissa.  I always thought she was the big sister.  She’s 23 while Melissa is 26.  They all initialed my shoe and signed my C.D.  Max said I needed to work on the smell of my shoe.  It wasn’t the smell of a man, apperently. 

I’m actually grounded right now, because I got home at 2:41 A.M.  My friend Jimmy wanted to stay until Jars was completly done.  They just never seemed to get done.  They even left the stage, waited and came back to play a few more songs.  It was funny, because they played a slow, melancholy version of "Girls just wanna have fun"  Yes, they really did that.  None of us could believe it, but we loved it anyway.

Skillet did a pretty cool altar call, but it almost got ruined by some guy "touched by the spirt" who kept yelling out things.  Skillet told him that they appriciete his passion (you need spell check on this thing), but he was ruining their altar call, yet he still kept going.  It got annoying, but still a few people went up and ’got saved’.  Let’s hope it’s true for all of them and not just a show which some people do, unfortunatly.

Well, all in all, it was a great concert/festival.  Made some friends, heard good music, hit on Trica from Superchic[k], and had some fun.  I’m hoping to go again next year.  Also, it was nice that I got in for free. (It’s good to know a D.J.)

I’m starting to be tired earlier, and am getting back to a normal sleeping schedule.  Go me.  (And yes, it is 1am... anything before 2am is early for me.)

Thursday, apparently a hard disk died in the server that my site lives on, so my site was inaccessible for a while.  Actually it was 8 hours.  From ~3pm to ~11pm.  There is no way a hard disk failure should cause 8 hours of downtime.  With mirroring RAID-arrays, there are 2 independent copies of all data, and a dead disk can just be replaced and re-mirrored.  Depending on the RAID subsystem, the disk can even be hot-swapped.  I was under the impression that all hosts used such a setup, but I’d venture a guess that mine does not.  If their servers weren’t so fast, and they didn’t give me free SSH access, I’d be looking for a new host right now.

Friday I had someone from the treas.gov domain -- that’s the US Department of the Treasury -- on my site, downloading Submerge songs.  It’s pretty unusual for me to get hits from government computers; in all of last year there were only about 30 out of some 20,000 visitors.  You gotta expect that the government frowns upon use of public machines for downloading mp3s.

Also on Friday, the bassist from Freemartin IMed me.  He came across my site site by searching for info on a show that his band played.  Anyway Freemartin is an up-and-coming band that I stumbled upon about 6 months ago, and I really like them.  But they only have one CD, and I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, so I just have mp3s.  Well this guy IMs me and tells me they have a new EP coming out, and he wants to send me a free copy, along with the old album, and a t-shirt!  All because I have his band listed on my music page, saying how much I like them.  See, it pays to have a cool website  : )  So the bass player (he has a name, it’s Shawn, why don’t I call him that from now on....), Shawn, was really nice and we chatted for a while.  If you’re into indie/punk/emo definitely check Freemartin out.

I just put up some photos of my room.  They’re fun.  Go see.

Let’s end with something ridiculous from Bob Whittaker’s site:

In this [comic], the guy who sends messages by throwing them into the ocean wrote:

"We have a new Department of Homeland Security to protect us.  I recommend it to you."

The reply said, "We don’t need it.  We just enforce our immigration laws."

Entirely true and entirely ridiculous.  Bob also points out how ridiculous it is that Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum is being called anti-gay for his recent comment on privacy laws.  He may well believe that homosexuality is wrong, but #1 there’s nothing wrong with believing that, and #2 that’s not what he said.  What he said was that if a "right to privacy" exists such that the law cannot interfere with people’s actions behind closed doors (in this case, sodomy), then such a right would by definition prohibit the same interference by the law in cases of any number of other things, like incest.  Which is, of course, undeniably true by simple logical implication; however liberals cannot be troubled by such things as "truth" when sacred Political Correctness is at stake.  Free speech is becoming such a joke in this country.  No one is allowed to say these things that everyone knows are true.

As Tool so hopefully put it, I have a suggestion to keep you all occupied: learn to swim.  If only.

We make an agreement with North Korea, in which they promise to dismantle nuclear weapons programs in exchange for five hundred thousand tons of oil per year from us, tons of food aid, and for the world’s help in building 2 "safe" nuclear power plants.  A few years later they reinstate those weapons programs (sounds familiar by the way), so we naturally stop giving them $100 million worth of free oil.  This throws the already-hopelessly-failed country into a crisis.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il then proceeds to blame us for their development of nuclear weapons:

North Korea has since said the crisis spawned over the admission could be settled if the United States were to back off from its "hostile policy" toward the country.

And not only is it our fault that they violated the agreement, but in fact, we declared "nuclear war" on them:

"This is a declaration of war, a nuclear war against the DPRK. Therefore, the U.S. openly violated and destroyed the DPRK-U.S. agreed framework and nullified the North-South joint declaration on denuclearization," the Rodong Sinmun said.

North Korea huffed and puffed for months in an attempt to wring concessions out of Bush.  They threatened that New York, Washington, and Chicago would be "aflame" and there would be "nuclear war" if we took out their nuclear facilities.  Despite these lunatic ravings, and the lunatic ravings of some Americans saying that we shouldn’t attack Iraq because we weren’t attacking NK, Bush quietly refused to humor the dictator’s demands.  Presumably, he believed that Kim Jong-Il was all hype.  A few months later, without any actual substance behind all their big talk, we can only conclude that Bush handled that situation pretty well.

Now here’s the funny part.  After breaking their agreement with us, losing the benefits of that agreement, and showering us with empty threats, they want us to do it again -- but this time, they’ll only hold up their end after we’ve satisfied a long list of demands:

Administration officials said that during talks in Beijing last week North Korea had asked for a step-by-step package under which it would receive oil shipments, food aid, security guarantees, energy assistance, and economic benefits, among other requests. In return, they said, North Korea had offered to dismantle its nuclear weapons, but only at the end of the process.

Ok Kim, let me get this straight.  You lied to us once, so we should not only trust you again, but trust you even more, to the point that we don’t ask anything of you until we’ve already delivered our half of the deal?  Right.  I think you’ve been talking to Carter too long.  President Bush is no Jimmy Carter (thank God, honestly), and he understands that appeasing a tyrant is not an acceptable solution.

I am constantly impressed by my roommates.

Monday morning, our plumbing backed up.  When my roommates’ dad bought this house last August, the basement wasn’t finished; in fact, it was a damp mildewy mess, with some walls made of mdf-ish wood, some made of just wood paneling, with a drop ceiling, a thin wet carpet, and just altogether gross.  The plan was to finish the basement and put a full bathroom into it, so that the basement could become my bedroom.

They did that, working every weekend for a couple months, and the result is amazing.  They conquered this basement and I love living in it.  But while working on installing the bathroom, they discovered that the plumbing in the house was done all wrong.  Instead of the main sewage pipe sloping down 1 inch every 4 feet, it’s nearly level through the whole basement floor.  Which means that... um... the stuff doesn’t drain so well.

Which wasn’t a huge deal, until they put this shower in down here.  Because now when stuff backs up, the lowest opening in the system is the drain in my shower -- as opposed to the sinks on the first floor, which would never be in danger because any back-up would never climb an entire story.

So, Monday, it backed up, and there was about a half-inch of yucky water in the bottom of my shower.  Not really nasty gross yuckiness, but pretty gross, and it did smell.  So plan A was to get a plunger and try to force the obstruction through the pipe and out where it belongs.  Plan A didn’t work.  So Konstantin went out and got a sewer tape (sometimes called a sewer snake), opened the clean-out on the main sewer pipe (which is in my closet, incidentally), and started running the tape into there.  In case you don’t know (as I didn’t), a sewer tape is a flat, stiff band of metal, about a half-inch wide and 25 or 30 or 40 feet long, rolled up into a circle.  The end of it is much like the end of a fancy arrow, like a four-pointed 3D triangle.  So when your stuff gets clogged, you feed this tape into the pipe and hope that it breaks through the obstruction enough that you can flush it away with a toilet.

That took a decent amount of effort on Konstantin’s part, and after about 15 minutes of battle, he prevailed.  And I spent the next 2 hours cleaning my bathroom.

I think I’m a fairly handy person.  My dad is a roofing / siding / window contractor, and he’s one of those people who can build and fix just about anything... and I have learned a lot from him growing up, both around the house, and working with him during the summers for a couple years.  But we’ve never had any plumbing problems at my house that I can recall, so I don’t have much experience there.  And Konstantin and Dimitry spent 5 years (re)building their entire house with their dad, literally 5 years, every day after school and on weekends.  And then they did a lot of re-doing on this house here.  Between the two of them, if there’s a problem they can’t solve, I’ve yet to see it.