Last Day of the Season... and pictures!

I really need to get rid of my facebook account. I'm getting sick of constantly getting invitations to groups I don't care about and people I've never heard of asking if we can be friends. "Hi, I was in your American Heritage class your first semester of college! Yeah, there were 2000 people in the class, but I was one of them! Let's be friends!" Uh... yeah, sure! Best buddy!

Today was the last day of the season, meaning one of the busiest days of the year. It was nice stripping out the rooms, because we moved faster than I've moved all summer. In my opinion, that's what work really should be like--real work, none of this dilly-dallying around.

There was a squirrel by the 100s this afternoon who had both his back legs broken. It was real sad--there was still nothing we could do except hope the thing doesn't die too painfully. Apparently, there's no animal shelter around here where we can take him.

Speaking of squirrels, you know what's weird? The squirrels up here aren't the gray squirrels I'm used to from Virginia. They're red squirrels, about a third the size and much much louder. I've never heard a gray squirrel make a noise, but the little red squirrels here never shut up. Not that I mind. I like squirrels.

I made Beth speechless today for nearly three solid minutes. It was frikkin' hilarious, but I'm never going to live it down now. We were folding sheets and she said they smelled good. I sniffed them and made a weird face and sniffed them again, and then smelled them in a different place, and then smelled them again until Beth said "Okay, stop sniffing the sheets!" I gave her a weird look at said, "They smell like Rye."

Man, I wish I'd had my camera! Beth gave me a reeeeeally weird look, and opened and closed her mouth a few times, and then made another weird face, and was speechless for a really long time while Priscilla giggled like a schoolgirl. Unfortunately, Beth told Rye I think he smells like a dryer sheet and now I'm never going to live it down. Even Laura found out and later mocked me.

Ah, Laura. I don't think I've ever written much about Laura. She works in grounds and is probably one of the coolest people ever. She's even less feminine than I am, she majored in Russian (I think), and is now going to school to learn to be a mechanic. She gets along famously with Beth and Rye and pops her head in occasionally to talk to us. She vents at Beth and flirts with Rye and helps Beth and Rye in their diligent attempts to corrupt me. She once asked me about my curse word vocabulary. "Crap and suck," I told her. "Bastard and damn, when I'm really mad. That's about it." "Man, we need to work on that," she told me.

After work today, the grounds people--Tracy, Eric, Frieda, and Laura--talked my ear off for about ten or fifteen minutes. Apparently, the snow berms get enormous in the winter, even in southern Alaska. Eric and Tracy say they get bigger than the RVs here, and that digging a snow cave is a piece of cake. I tried digging snow caves in the blizzard of '96 in Virginia, but two feet of snow just wasn't enough. They also say that when it warms up, rains, then freezes again, they have to break apart the snow with a chainsaw. I wonder if I could talk Jewel in to letting me help in grounds for a few hours a week to make up for the not-forty-hour weeks in the wintertime. I also wonder if anyone will object if I make snow sculpture guard dogs outside my door.

I intend to get some books about auto mechanics and other such useful stuff to learn for the winter, though knowing me, it won't actually happen. Well, it might. I'm running out of books to read in the library here, WoW is starting to get (dare I say it?) a little boring, since I spend most of my time farming gold and rep and waiting for people to join our guild so we can someday raid Karazhan, and watching TV is boring and gives me a headache because of the high-pitched squeal TVs give off. Besides, learning useful stuff is... well... useful. Maybe if I learn both auto mechanics and chemistry, I can come up with a realistic alternative to using gasoline. Apparently, there have been at least two or three that came up, but the stupid oil companies bought the patent and shelved it so they keep making money. Idiots. The ideas still required the use of oil, which is a non-renewable resource. Well, it's renewable, but it takes millions of years, so it's not really renewable. Ugh, self-serving, wasteful idiots.

Anywho. That's about all for now, I guess. I'll go ahead and upload a few pictures from Mount Marathon and a bad one of me and Laura. Vanya sulie.