Recent Movies: Too many to remember
Music: Ditto
Literature: Lucky Wander Boy by D. B. Weiss
Games: Zoo Keeper (Arcade), Pac-Man Vs. (Gamecube/Game Boy Advance)

I don’t know how Zoo Keeper has managed to remain under my radar for my entire life, but I wish it hadn’t. This game is fabulous. The goal: keep as many zoo animals caged as possible and avoid getting killed by the ones that get loose! Seems very environmentally controversial and something PETA would try to snatch up and lock away in their vault. Then again, it’s from 1982 and all of the animals look more like bricks and candy bars than elephants and camels, so… whatever. It’s a good game.

Well, it’s been sort of a long hiatus… where do I begin? Unfortunately, my feeble brain only remembers three or four meaningful events from the past two months, so I guess I’ll talk about those. However, it’s also possible that only three or four meaningful things actually happened to me in the past two months. Okay… let’s get to work.

I suppose the best place to start would be Friday, November 14. I got a phone call at around 4:45 PM, and got to Southeast Hospital as quickly as living 20 miles away and driving through nasty weather would allow. I found my dad, went upstairs, looked through this little window, and saw a fire extinguisher. Dad then pointed me to the correct window, where I saw none other than Talon Chiles, who was about two hours old at the time, and still looked pretty newborn and gross. I really didn’t know what to think, seeing as I hadn’t been an uncle before then. Eventually, they got him cleaned up, and everyone there had a nice visit in Amy’s room. Since then, Talon has grown quite a bit, sleeps less, but is still extremely annoyed by movement of any sort. He brings lots of excitement anytime he’s around, even though he still doesn’t really do much. It’s mostly just fun to watch the little guy kick and flail his arms around.

Sometime later that month, I was pulled out of retirement to attend Silver Arrow with the always-lovely Katie Jenkins, who is much too cool to pass up such an invitation from. I guess I was a little nervous about going to a dance at a place from which I was a year and a half removed, but I ended up seeing and being around mostly people I knew, and I didn’t have any awkward conversations with teachers I didn’t like or anything like that, so everything was good in the end. I expected to have fun in the first place, but ended up having a lot more than I thought I would. Katie is a pretty good dancer, even though she would never tell you that. She and her Shark skills could kick my Jet ass in a dance-fight. And little Cole… well, I probably shouldn’t talk about the trouble he got into on such a public forum. Let’s just say we were concerned about getting him out alive.

Somewhere in between, this lingering hip injury I have started acting up to a point where it would sometimes hurt to go up and down stairs. I’ve been sitting out of dodgeball as much as I can, but it doesn’t seem to be helping at all. Then, the other day at home, I stepped over something and felt a twinge in my other hip, so I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m kind of getting worried about what I’m going to do about it. It’s better now than it was when it hurt going up and down stairs, but that’s not really a lot of comfort to me.

Finals are over, and I did well on four of them. The fifth one concerns me because it was a three-essay final and one of my essays was comprised of quite a lot of BS, so we’ll see. In any case, I’m looking at either a 3.8 or a 4.0 for the semester, which I’m proud of because things were looking much bleaker as recently as three weeks ago.

That’s probably enough. I only expect you to read so much before you click “Back”, and I’m at a decent stopping point here. Happy holidays, everyone!