Pittsburgh, Four Months In

Bullet points foster understanding. Regarding Pittsburgh: This place is very unpretentious. There are weird bubbles here, though. People who live around campus have no idea what life is like here in blue-collar caucasianville. It usually rains for about 15 minutes a day here. It rains very hard for those 15 minutes. It’s also sunny for

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I’m Still Unique Just Like Everyone Else

I did this once already, but it was 3.5 years ago. First image to come up in Google Images for each of the following answers. I would try Bing for the novelty, but they don’t do a good job of indexing my site. Sorry, JL. 1. Age on my next birthday: The crazy thing is

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The 48-State Road Trip: One Year Later

Labor day a year ago, I was waking up at 4:30 AM and heading out onto the Nina Moose River with a rented canoe, heading toward Lake Agnes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. This year on Labor Day? I’m writing blog posts in order to avoid doing readings for school. What a difference a

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Worst Birds Ever

I made a pledge to myself two years ago that I’d one day post something on my blog about the birds that used to crap all over my deck when I lived on the lake in Mission Viejo. Was transferring photos off the laptop today and came across the cretins: So infuriatingly not dead. They

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Injury Update: Trigger Finger(s)

There’s nothing like a medical condition that makes you feel old while at the same time emasculating you. Because it’s most common in women over 40. Anyway. Basically the tendons are swollen, such that if my left ring finger or right pinky is curled up, the middle knuckle “catches” when trying to extend the finger

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Cell Phone Photo Backlog Discharge

This is a bunch of photos I took on my cell phone (from December on) that I’ve never posted here. Seems like they usually have a different quality to them than my real-camera photos. I call that quality “graininess”. It’s a real word. Never saw the movie, but it was nice of them to get

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Photos with American Flags in Them

Here are pictures I’ve taken in the last 12 months that include American flags. They’re not necessarily great photos, they just have American flags in them. There are 50. If you can name the location of all fifty of them, I’ll give you a quarter. No fair looking at the image file names. You can

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Time Burglary and Not Pictureds

The best days are the ones when I (a) don’t go to Home Depot and (b) don’t need anything from Home Depot that I’m just kidding myself into trying to do without because I’m tired of going to Home Depot. FWIW: About the third day after I moved into the house, I started getting this

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A Day in the Life

Woke up, fell out of bed, comb+head, found my way downstairs and drank a Coke, etc., etc. Opened my garage door and there, between the door and the grill of my truck (parked in the driveway) was a dead bird. A sign, no doubt, an omen of things to come, namely: There was a cop

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My New (Used) Car: An FAQ

So I’m not necessarily *excited* about the car, but then again, it’s not a car I bought for the sake of excitement. It’ll definitely get good mileage. I bought it from a known source that I know isn’t trying to scam me. It was cheap enough that if it spontaneously combusts RIGHT NOW, I’ll recover financially.