Digital Analogue

Christmas break begins

Since Nutmeg is vacationing at my parents' house, I decided to take the opportunity to jaunt on down to Urbana for the afternoon.

I left a little after two, which got me to Needleworks with a half hour to spare before closing. I browsed a bit, grabbed some sock yarn that I probably didn't really need, and then spotted the perfect yarn for my next sweater. I bought out the dye lot (six 100g skeins) in a great colour of greyish blue (slightly bluer than "my blue" for those of you who know what that means), plus a couple skeins of a complementary off-white in case I figure out a tasteful way to throw them in (and if not, they'll make a good something else, I'm sure!).

From there, I drove over to Strawberry Fields, Urbana's well-stocked natural foods store, partially to kill time but also to get some stuff that Cornucopia here in Galesburg doesn't sell. That brought me up to about a quarter to 6, which is when I had agreed to meet Jonathan for dinner.

Mmmm, sushi.

After a couple hours of great sushi and even better conversation, I dropped Jonathan back off at home, and drove to the Illini Union, where a bunch of the IMSA-UIUC crowd often meets to go bowling. (I had unsuccessfully tried to join them a few weeks ago, but this time I was almost on time.) After a bit of confusion on finding them, I hooked into the group, we got our lanes, and I bowled for the first time in perhaps three years, and maybe only the fourth or so since I graduated from Quincy. So rusty! It was so bad that on my first ball, I literally lost the ball on my backswing, causing it to crash onto the wood floor. No damage, but how embarrassing! I then threw a gutterball and followed it with a lot of open frames. Finally, in the last few frames I started recovering my swing and finding my spots, and I pulled out a 98 with some last-minute spares. The second game went even better, breaking my average even in my heyday: I got a 163. Woo!

Then I drove back to Galesburg in a nasty little snowstorm. No real accumulation, but the flakes were falling fast and heavy. Visibility wasn't too bad as long as the wipers were working, but I kept getting accumulations of icy crud on the wipers that made them completely useless. I actually had to pull over twice to clean them off. Finally, about thirty miles past Normal the weather cleared, and the rest was smooth sailing, bringing me into my driveway at about ten minutes past midnight.

"It becomes a faith, not an ideology, when it grows over a lifetime. Because there will be times when you disagree completely with the tenets of Christianity, doubting everything, and yet deep down, you'll still feel Christian. That wouldn't happen to a convert." --Jonathan Prykop