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Fluffy Muffin Taters

Must


Not


Kill.


The coffee house has been besieged by a middle-school, girls, soccer team.

My monastic mental discipline has allowed me to fend off the Urukai-like assaults to my senses, but the sheer vacuum of cogent thought is starting to suck my mind out through my right ear.

I am not sure what they're talking about, but the few syllables that break through my rapidly failing shields have formed the phrase:

Fluffy....Muffin....Taters.

I'm afraid.

-T

Denison-Trip

I'm sitting in a very nice coffee house in Granville, Ohio near Denison University. Jim and I drove up at o'dark-thirty this morning for a meeting.

The coffee house is not what one would imagine as being a traditional caffeine den as it's built within a beautiful house on a road near the river. Aptly named, it is called the River Road Coffee House.

Within five minutes of stepping through the doors I am immediately filled with sense of both longing and disappointment. I would love for Portsmouth to have such a coffee house near campus - but I don't think it will happen for several more years if at all. This place, the River Road, has a very warm and inviting atmosphere. It encourages people to spend a few hours and relax. Just from where I'm sitting, there are tables full of laptops and text books and students / professors a plenty.

Ahh... Academia.

Feels like home.

More later.
-Tom

A Road Trip

It all began with an idea: a road trip down to Berea, KY with my friend June so that she wouldn't have to make the return trip (about three hours) by herself. She was going down to Berea to drop off her son, Adam, to the University there. Since I hadn't really seen the University, though I had been down to a corner of it almost six years ago for a SCA event, I thought it would be cool to head down.
The trip started off at 10:00 a.m. early Wednesday morning at Ashland's central park. I drove up and parked the Saturnator so that I could ride down with June and Adam.

June is starting school herself here in a few days and wanted to borrow my NEC. As I now have an office on campus and can use it to work on my lectures, I didn't need the NEC in my bag all the time. So, since I had it and the charger in my bag for the road trip, I let her take it home. I'm sure that she'll put it through its paces.

After a quick breakfast / brunch in Grayson, we were heading down the road again and the conversation branched and split and retraced its steps a few dozen times. If someone tried to map the topics in the conversation, I would guess that they would swear it was made by a drunken pilgrim.

When we got down to Berea, I was surprised that the University had a student body of around 2k students but had a lot more buildings - a larger 'footprint' than I would have expected. One of the more impressive structures was a replica of Independence Hall from Philadelphia.

I'm not sure what purpose the building has but the design is very... academic. It looks like it belongs on a college campus. One of the things that I have thought about Shawnee's campus is that the buildings don't look like they belong together. Each building has a different style than the one next to it so there's a somewhat disjointed feel to campus; nothing ties it together.

A friend and I have spoken about this and he wants to put a fountain or a statue or both in the middle of campus to sort of establish a 'center' of the footprint. I think this would be an awesome idea; somewhere for the students to sit down around the fountain and such.

The trip down to Berea was not incredibly complicated but June said that it's a solid 3-hour drive. I didn't even recognize the passage of time because it was a good trip. Plenty of conversation to chew up the miles.

Even the longest of trips can be taken in stride,
as long as you are gifted with a friend beside.

-Tom

A bit of a detour...

Around 9:30 a.m.

Well, guess where I am? Last night, Jim and I were going to head up to Huntington to watch Harry Potter and grab some food. Well, while driving through New Boston the idea struck us to go kidnap Heath who is all by himself up in Columbus; April and the kids are down in Kentucky for the week. After a quick phone call to confirm the plan, Jim and I grabbed clothes and we drove up to invade Easton mall.

O.M.G. It's not a mall, it's a small community of capitalism. I love it. We saw the Order of the Phoenix and had dinner at Panera. Afterwards we ended up crashing at Heaths and talked until around four or five in the morning. It was definitely something different than just driving up to Huntington.

Who knows what we'll get into today.

***

Later, around 11:30 p.m.

Today was very cool. Jim and I crawled around Columbus for most of the day - I didn't get home until around ten o'clock. We ended up back at Easton and we started at one end and walked its four corners. I hate being poor. I need to go back up with about 100 dollars to blow and then I'd be quite happy. I had to walk by Barnes and Noble six times with less than 20 dollars in my wallet - oh, the agony.

Jim grabbed some cologne at Abercrombie and Fitch (awesome place) and we ducked into dozens of shops selling everything from electronic gadgets to a shop, Eddie Bauer, where I saw a possible new bag.

Leave it alone.

One of my Quests is for a perfect Field Bag.

Eventually we ended up at an awesome sea food restaurant (McCormick & Schmick's) and then meandered our way back home.

When I got into the house, I could smell the unmistakable odor of decay. The kitten's body was decomposing somewhere in one of the rooms. I ditched my bags and grabbed the flash light and began searching behind and around things once more. This time I found it in one of the few places I had never entertained as an idea - behind the entertainment center.

It was so exposed and 'open' that it didn't seem like a place she would have chosen. All of the other places were under something with a real 'roof' to it; my bed, both couches, etc. The kitten's head was at an odd angle so I can only guess that when she tried to move it from the basket to somewhere else - she either snapped its neck or perhaps it suffocated. Unfortunate but now, at least, the matter has been resolved.

I'm out on the front couch and watching the tv a little while I write this up. I think I'm going to crash soon.

Night

-T.


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