hello. well i just got back a few days ago from traveling all over the place. i was in Austin, TX for a week to look for an apartment (i found one, yay!). then i went to New Jersey to visit some friends and spend some time in NYC, which is a place i like to visit at least yearly.

Anyways, while i was in Austin, i looked at a bunch of apartments and got a lot of help from my realtor, Myles (hats off to Myles). i found a totally sweet place that actually has a nice view (most of the apartments have a view of a parking lot). there was a Harley convention in Austin that weekend, so we were driving around w/ all these bikes everywhere, especially when we went to the Oasis on Lake Travis. it's a neat restaurant that's kind of perched on the side of a cliff. there are tons of terraces where you can sit and eat (and watch the sunset, often). the place was swarming w/ bikers when we went there, because the road you take to get there is the perfect road to ride a motorcycle on. it's paved and winding, with lovely scenery, and you can tell it's the kind of road that *normally* prolly doesn't get a lot of traffic. we also drove around on this crazy road that goes to a park. but to get there you have to go around about 20 hairpin turns. at the tops of the hills are multi-million dollar mansions. (they are not paying for accessibility, i can tell you that). i'll post some pics eventually, most likely to my yahoo album. we went swimming in lake travis and it was pretty nice. it was SO HOT! at least one day it was over 100 degrees F, and this was in May. crazy.

After I got back from Austin, i left immediately to go out east. i made it across the state of pennsylvania in a record-breaking 4 hours (well, it was a record for me anyways). i can't stand driving through PA, and i just wanted to get it over with. half the time i was being pursued by a PSYCHO TRUCK DRIVER. he would come flying down those looooooonggg hills right behind me, typically when there was a car in front of me and to the side of me, so there would be nowhere for me to go when his truck slammed into the back of my car because he was going TOO FAST and weighed TOO MUCH and his BRAKES FAILED. luckily, this didn't happen, although he kept riding up on my back bumper i coulda sworn it was gonna be the end of me and Plucky. psycho truck drivers aside, it was a nice ride. i musta listened to 10 or more cds, and i made phenomenally good time. even the construction didn't slow me down much because traffic was light.

i went out to dinner w/ the friends i was staying w/, then we rented a dumb comedy. Julie insisted that i sleep in her bed instead of the couch, and i had weird dreams every night (apparently water beds have that effect. at least on me. it was the first time i had slept on a water bed). Thursday morning i slept in, then met up w/ my friend Jer, who's a bethelite, in Brooklyn. unfortunately my phone was on drugs and he wandered around looking for me for half an hour while i blithely waited for him to call my phone (yeah... he tried like 3 times). stupid phone. it's not verizon, it's the phone. later, when i tried to access my voice mail, it flashed some weird message like "3294" then turned itself off. when i turned it back on, it magically was working (w/ full digital signal, no less. *sigh* and all day i was thinking i just wasn't getting signal, despite being in the middle of manhatten). jer and i went into manhatten and walked around, went to the Virgin Megastore at Times Square, wandered up to central park, had lunch, etc. i ended up being glad i bought a 10 buck metrocard instead of a fun pass because i ended up only using 2 rides. so now i still have a card w/ 4 rides on it for next time i go back.

i then went to my friend Melody's apartment in queens (or right on the edge of brooklyn/queens? i woulda considered it queens). jer warned me to avoid getting busted for yacking on my cell phone (apparently it's illegal in all the buroughs, unless you have a hands-free. yeah, i blatantly broke that rule several times... oh well) so then i went w/ Mel and her friend Rodney to her meeting. at her Kingdom Hall, you can hear the subway trains go by (but it's not distracting or anything) and there are 3 spanish vs 1 english congregation. (a sidenote: in Austin, evidently pretty much every hall has 3 english & 1 spanish). oh yeah, this was the first time i got to meet Mel in person, so that was really cool. she was just how i pictured she'd be. it's cool to meet an online friend in person finally. they had to work the next day, so i just headed back to jersey at like 11 or something.

Friday morning we headed out to the beach in NJ- island park. the water was COLD!!! man, it was cold. much colder than lake michigan had been memorial day weekend when we went out to the dunes to play volleyball. THAT was invigorating. this was just DEATHLY COLD. bone-numbing cold. but it was all right. it was sunny and gorgeous that day, although i wouldhn't have minded it bieng a bit warmer. Friday night chucke and i drove into Manhatten to meet up w/ Mel and some other friends at a Moroccan restaurant in east village. Mel also took us to this totally sweet 2nd-hand record store. i like east village. it has such a comfortable atmosphere. it felt good walking around there, and almost made me wish i had taken the job in NYC instead of Austin. the thing about the city is that it's never quiet, though, and i don't know if i'd like that. the novelty might wear off in time. anyways, back onto topic, we picked up Jer and drove over to this cool hungarian cafe in Soho to meet up w/ my friend Matt from long island (interestingly, another friend whom i initially met on-line). on the way there, chucke nearly got us killed (several times). all 7 of us were crammed into his caprice.

Ok.... what next.... (i took a break from this for like 7 hours or somethign... it's been a long day). So we finally made it (alive) to the cafe and had a drink and this DELICIOUS chocolate mousse cake. it was SO GOOD. everyone that tried a bite of someone else's ended up getting a piece. we were somewhat dismayed when the bill came and we realized that it was 7 bucks a pop. but the jazz band was great and there was no cover, so we didn't really mind that much.

after the group split up, chucke, jer and i went to see 2 fast 2 furious (the cars were cool, but they shoulda left out the "plot" and just kept the action sequences). when we got back to the car, there was a $100 parking ticket on it becuase we parked somehwere that had a sign that said "no parking 7am-7pm, no standing 7pm-7am". ??!!!!?? is all i can say to that. we weren't standing. we were parked. it was around 10 or 11 until 12 or 1.

ok, well, i'm getting majorly sick of typing in this blog, so i'll have to continue the story later. COMING NEXT: the story of the ill-fated Field Day music festival and the universal question: was it worth it for Radiohead?