Went to Wendy’s today for a Frosty and snapped a picture of their sign. Later I was on the phone with Amy and she came up with the idea of calling them as a radio station doing a spelling contest. So here’s the call. The only thing I forgot to say was, “Hey, what’s your favorite radio station that makes fun of your spelling errors?”

I’m in a rut again. I can’t get motivated to accomplish anything. And I’ve got so much I need to do. A million things. I hate this. This evening I went on a really really long walk across Alton. And I remembered this really idiotic, crazy, retarded, incredibly stupid phreaking adventure I had when I was 19. Well it was more along the lines of fraud or felonies than phreaking. Anyway, I was living in East Alton, working at 7-Elven and living with my parents. I’d been collecting credit card numbers from customers at work and I had quite a collection of them, along with their names and addresses. I even had the mayor of East Alton’s credit card number which I attempted to order a laptop on later that year. But that’s not the stupid part.

While living in Los Angeles a few months earlier, I’d tried to wire myself money through Western Union with some stolen credit cards. I tried it several times and it never worked. I finally found out that the reason was because Western Union needed to call me at the phone number that was on file with the credit card company to verify I was really the card holder. The obvious solution (other than giving up on the idea) was to call up the credit card company and change the card holder’s phone number to a pay phone I could stand at. But I didn’t do that. Instead I ordered call forwarding for these peoples’ phone lines so that I could go to their house, beige box their lines and forward their phone calls to a pay phone that I could answer.

Two of the credit card numbers I had belonged to people in Edwardsville, Illinois. So I picked them as my victims and ordered call forwarding for their lines. Then I asked my parents if I could borrow their truck for the night because my manager needed me to work in the Edwardsville store which was 25 miles away. (The Edwardsville 7-Eleven wasn’t even affiliated with the 2 7-Elevens in town that I worked at.) So around 1:30 in the morning, I start driving to Edwardsville with a map, a homemade beige box, the number of a local pay phone and all kinds of tools. I found the neighborhood and parked the truck several blocks away, thinking if I had to run away quickly I wouldn’t want them to see what kind of vehicle I got into.

Monday, April 11th, 2005: So I’m back in Illinois. I made the 2 day drive to Oregon, took the kids to Idaho and spent a week with them, went camping, geocaching and easter egg hunting. After the week was over, I took them back and then I spent another 2 weeks in Idaho with friends. It was only supposed to be a week but it turned into 2. On my drive back I got caught in a big snowstorm in Wyoming for a few hours. It was coming down so hard that I couldn’t see out the window. The interstate was covered in snow and the wind kept blowing my car into the other lane. I drove 30 – 40 MPH on the interstate for over an hour. But just before I crossed the border into South Dakota, the snow completely went away and everything suddenly turned green and sunny. I got home Sunday morning around 11:15am after staying the night in a sleezy Kansas City motel that was surrounded by XXX shops.

Nothing particularly interesting has happened in the past few weeks. Nothing I’d feel comfortable writing about in a public journal, anyway. But I did have a comical run-in with famous artist Ralph Steadman! You can read about that here. Oh yeah, my odometer hit 100,000 miles on the way there. That was such an exciting thing for me, I took a picture of it while driving 80 MPH down the interstate.