A week or 2 ago an atomic bomb, combined with giant killer robots, exploded the Lego town we’d had for at least 6 months. So last week we started rebuilding. I did most of the exterior of the buildings and Emily did most of their furnishings. Below are pictures that I took this evening.

It’s been in the 70’s for weeks now. We haven’t really had any hot weather at all this year. Until yesterday – it finally got in the 90’s. Today it’s 100 out which is the forecast for most of this week. Kids & I went to the Corvallis pool yesterday. Had to stand in line to get in for 30 minutes. Their pool kicked ass and was cheap. Only $10.25 for all of us. But they closed at 4pm. WTF is up with that?

Not a whole lot else going on this week. Got the kids hooked on Daria since I downloaded 5 seasons of that. Stayed inside all day today except for a quick lunch at Wendy’s. Thank God for central air. When I was looking for a place to live 8 or 9 months ago I couldn’t decide between washer and dryer hookups, a free outdoor pool or central air. I’m very happy I picked this one.

Yesterday as I was outside checking the mail, something made me decide that turning the big lamp post outside our door into a giant sun dial would be a great idea! I don’t know why. So I explained to Emily how a sun dial works and she immediately began marking the hours for most of yesterday. Then today we filled in all the blanks that we missed from swimming and this morning. Here’s a couple pictures of the completed timepiece:

It’s hard to see in my shrunken pictures, but the numbers go all the way out onto the curb and into the street a little. Luckily the dirt side of the clock is all night time so that part doesn’t matter. There is no rain in the forecast for at least 5 days. So people walking down our heavily trafficked sidewalk will be able to enjoy our work for at least the next week.

I got 11th place in a photoshop contest, revamped the commenting system on phonelosers.org (for the 3rd time in a year now, this time completely in PHP), revamped Old People Are Funny and added some forums to it (some podcast plans to feature it on their show sometime this week), released another Big Beef Bueno, got #2 in Mahjong, and then #1. I didn’t even play much today, I just happened to have a couple of good games.

Also, Delta Park Project played another of my voicemails. It’s on the last 20 seconds of this show. But the show is a “best of” show and both of my other 2 voicemails are also thrown into that show. So apparently I’ve done some of the best parts of a show that’s up to it’s 83rd episode.

Yesterday I got a sensual head massage from a gay man. Later we went to see Cars.

Went to the library the other day with the kids and ended up finding Mark Twain’s Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays. There’s 2 volumes of it so I just picked up the first one for now. Great stuff!

Speaking of libraries…around 1992 I had checked out a book called Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman. Before I got around to returning it, I looted a 7-Eleven and attempted to flee the state. Somehow this resulted in me never returning the book. When I moved back to the Alton area in 1997, I went to check out a book and they said, “It looks like you never returned Steal This Book” which sounded pretty damn funny. Somehow they let me continue using my library account for the next 8 years without paying for Abbie Hoffman’s book.

Thinking this was a great opportunity for a prank phone call, I called up that library yesterday to check on the status of my account. I was waiting for them to tell me that I’d never returned Steal This Book so I could make a bunch of obvious jokes at them. But nobody I talked to could find any reference to it on my account. I called up several other libraries in the district, since they all had access to my account, but none of them found anything about the stolen book. I guess they just don’t care about a book that I didn’t return 14 years ago.

What was great was that a few years ago I checked that library’s catalog for that book. Right next to the title of Steal This Book it showed the current status of the book. Which was, “Presumed lost/stolen.”

And speaking of library antics! Also back in 1991 or so, Chris Tomkinson and I discovered how incredibly easy it was to get a library card with minimal identification. At the time you didn’t even need picture ID. Just something with your name on it, such as a utility bill. And utility bills were easy to forge. So we starting getting library cards and stealing tons of books. Well, I make the fake utility bills and applied for the accounts. Chris was always too much of a wuss to do any of the dirty work himself. He was just there to reap the benefits.

The maximum you could check out in 1 visit was 8 books. But all the libraries in our district were connected which meant we could check out 8 books from each branch. We had about 7 or 8 branches within driving distance, so that was at least 56 books per fake utility bill we printed up. We spent many evenings driving to every library we could, piling up books in the back of Chris’ car.

The method I used to fake a utility bill was quite primative at the time – I took a real utility bill, applied a light coat of whiteout over the important bits of information, then used my brother’s typewriter to type in new information. Neither of our dot matrix printers would have done that good of a job. The only time this method failed was in the Edwardsville library, when the librarian noticed something odd about the print on the bill. She held it up to the light and could clearly make out the real name and phone number information underneath. I can’t remember how I responded to that, but I know we didn’t get a card that time.

Right around 2001, 10 years later, I decided to return most of my stolen books. Many of them I’d never even bothered to read and they just took up space on my bookshelves which could be going to books that were actually useful to me. So I drove to the East Alton library late one night and dropped a few dozen books into the book deposit. Most of them still had their identifying numbers on them and the stamped card inside, showing the date in 1991 that they were due. I bet the librarians were surprised. If they only knew that many of those books accompanied me as I criss-crossed the country several times in the early to mid 90’s.

Friday I was thinking about going to 2600. I’ve only been there once since I moved to this area and it was incredibly boring when I went. But instead I fell asleep watching Knight Rider.

Saturday was my day of good deeds. I was riding aimlessly around Albany and some lady yells “hi!” from her yard. She ended up wanting me to help her start her lawn mower which I managed to do. Then later my aimlessness took me to the skateboard park where some teen approached me and asked if he could borrow my bike to go home and get his shoes. I said sure and took his skateboard as collateral. Had Wendy’s for lunch. Wandered around the mall at some point. Played video games. Hung out in the book store for a long time.

Sunday I spent pretty much all day putting together a new PLA Radio. Throughout the weekend I obsessively played Mahjong on Cal’s for hours at a time. This is all Jammie’s fault for getting me addicted. But at least I’m the champ of it. Oh shit, I just opened up Mahjong so that I could link to that. Now I have to go play it.

Emily was on the Twisted Pickle show this morning for her promo. Click here to listen and forward to about 4 minutes 25 seconds.

I was going to do a promo for Corby but Emily won’t let me cause she doesn’t want the competition. So I made one for Nate and Di instead.

Oddly enough, the very morning after Emily submitted her promo last week, I got this email from Corby:

Sup Brad, how are things? Just got a great submission
for my recently posted contest but I think they
sent it to the wrong address. I think this actually
goes to you…

Attached was a promo for PLA radio which can be heard on this page. It’s the #5 promo by Evan.

In other news, yesterday was really exciting because I installed a ceiling fan in my office.