First off, I would like to thank two lovely individuals for visiting me this evening. It was great to see you, Hope and Phil! Phil even attempted the map challenge from my previous post while he was here. He did… pretty well. Certainly better than I would have done yesterday before I started studying, but not better than I did today at history class!

Although I am not the first one to think this, or write about it, Flickr is extremely fun. I honestly did not see the appeal when I first visited it… I would see people linking to their flickr photostreams, and not really get why that was cool. It’s when you upload your first pictures and immediately get four visits to each of them that you realize just how awesome the site is… and then when people comment on and favorite your pictures, and you can explore other people’s photos and sets, and the notes on photos, and tags, and, and and… hyperventilates Basically it’s really fun. I don’t think I know very many people already on flickr; if I happen to know you and you do have an account, let me know! It’d be nice to have more contacts.

Oh, just to update you on the unfortunate bag-theft situation, Elijah and I decided to post signs on the stop signs around my neighborhood reporting the bag as lost, and offering a reward for it. We’re hoping that one of two things will happen: Either, the kid who nabbed it in the first place will bring it back for the reward, or some stranger will find it tossed somewhere and return it. Honestly, both situations are highly unlikely, but we just needed to do something. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

That’s all for now… Talk to you later. Ich muss jetzt meine Deutsche Hausaufgaben machen.

You know what’s a surefire way to show you just how geographically impaired you are? Sit yourself down with a map like this one. That’s right, it’s a completely blank outline map of the U.S. No state lines, no nothin’. Now set yourself the task of drawing in the correct borders for ALL 48 continental states, along with their names and capitals. This is the semi-insane task set before us by our history teacher.

Now, this may seem like grade school work, but when your grasp on the number of states in our country is as vague as mine was, it is a necessary intervention. So, when our teacher first told us about this assignment, he decided to have us do it right then and there to give us a contrast with our efforts after we had studied the map. Needless to say, after several moments of hemming and hawing, I tentatively drew an oval encompassing the northwest, labelled it ‘Oregon’, and laid down my pencil. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that bad. But that’s how I felt.

So anyway, tonight I’m trying to actually get myself into shape for this exercise, which we are performing again tomorrow morning (sans capitals; we’re working up to that =-o). I’m doing okay so far, I think… but I never realized quite how many little chunks 50 states divides the nation into! I mean, I suppose I knew that places like Nebraska and Wyoming theoretically existed, but when you realize that they are just two or three states east of you… well, that’s just weird.

I welcome anyone to try this exercise… I would be very interested to see how your un-studied attempts compare to mine. (my un-studied attempts, that is)

Oh, and on a completely different note: check it out! There is another Erin Julian in the world, and not only that, but she also has a wordpress blog. Too bad she got the domain name first. Oh well.

Well, I hate for my first real post on this new domain to be a downer, but you can’t really control what happens. Elijah and I went to Tuesday Night Class tonight in my car. When we returned home, he came inside briefly to say hi to my parents and then left for the night. After he left, I was chatting with my Mom, and after a few moments he walked back in. “My (book) bag isn’t in my car,” he said. I suggested he must have left it at class. But he hadn’t taken it to class. Well, maybe he left it at my house… no, it wasn’t in our house.

Oh, and the other part was… he left his car locked, but when he came back the driver’s side door was not only unlocked, but it was unlatched. We were forced to conclude that some idiot stole the bag out of his car. It was pouring down rain, and we all stood around for a minute trying to decide what to do. We went and looked around his car for any kind of evidence; the main thing we noticed is that there was an expensive pair of leather gloves still sitting on his dashboard. Whoever took it was moving fast, and just wanted the bag for some reason.

We figured maybe the kid that took it thought it was a computer or something valuable; Elijah had a messenger bag that could have looked like a computer case. But all he had in it were a few textbooks and a lot of collected homework–all presumably useless to whoever stole the bag. The truly frustrating thing is, this kid probably just threw it in a dumpster somewhere… senseless waste.

So Elijah and I set out down the street in the downpour, looking to see if someone had tossed the bag by the side of the road or put it in a garbage can. Oh! I forgot the other great part… tonight is garbage night on our street, so just about every house had multiple garbage and recycling containers outside. So that really narrowed the search down. sarcasm As we continued to search, getting soaked to the bone, a little more hope drained out of us with every garbage can we opened. I think we both halfway knew it was pointless, that there was no way we would find it, but I think we just needed to do something about it.

So, needless to say, we never found it. Mom even drove us around a little while to search a larger area, but it was all really useless. We did, however, call and report the theft to the police. Fat lot of good it will do, I’m sure, but at least we tried. The really awful thing is, although it’s possible that some used bookstore will catch someone trying to sell them his books, or someone will find the library books he had checked out and the library will let him know, there is likely no possible way that he will recover all the homework he had in that bag. As far as I know, he had a whole term of French homework in there, including a lot of resources he needed to study. And all the hard copies of the drafts of his research paper, too, with comments from my Mom (our writing teacher)! And some kid probably just threw that all in a dumpster. Arrrggh! Why would someone do that? It’s just SO frustrating. How could someone be that inconsiderate?

So… life is frustrating. And people are mean. At least that’s how I feel tonight. =P