Ash the Mighty

I’ve never listened to it, despite the fact that the University of Arizona had a pretty good one (so I’m told . . . like I said, I never listened). However, a few weeks ago I had another sureal moment and thus I find myself at half twelve in the morning listening to the University of Glasgow public radio on webcast. An explanation:

Entirely too early on the morning of December 20th, 2004 I found myself at Glasgow International Airport getting ready to fly to London Heathrow before continuing on to San Francisco and thence to Phoenix. While waiting for check-in to start I noticed a hottie also sitting around in the lobby. Nice looking chick, so when they opened up the station and she made her way into the same two lines, I was thrilled. I tried to get within range to casually strike up a conversation with her, but I made a drastically wrong choice in lines. Mine stood still for literally half an hour, during which time she went all the way through the queue and was through — gone from my life (boo hoo). “Man, did I make a bad line choice,” I said mostly to myself. The very short blonde next to me in the same line agreed. Then we started chatting.

Stop. This is not a love story. Just needed that said right now.

Moving on. Started chatting with this bird Lisa. Turns out she’s on her way back to LA and her husband. She’s halfway done with an MPhil in Scottish Literature, and shock of all shocks, we have a mutual friend. This guy in my programme named Braden briefly dated her best friend Maureen (hence the surealness. I’m getting on a plane to London and the smallness of the world gets demonstrated significantly. Weird). We laughed, sat next to each other on the plane, and then went our seperate ways . . . no biggie. Once we got back here we hung out a couple of times, and she took my spare ticket to see Henry Rollins do a spoken word concert on Tuesday (the show absolutely ROCKED by the way. Anyone wanting to get me something, feel free to buy me his other spoken word CDs).

Now I find myself listening to said chica spin surprisingly good techno on the college radio webcast — See? I always get to the point eventually!

I didn’t however say that this was a particularly interesting story. I’ve just made a paltry two entries on this blog all month (hence all year) and that’s just not right! I’m sure it’s ever so disappointing for my enormous fan base when I don’t make a better effort to update . . .

That’s about all I know for the moment. I’ll just tell you that I’m currently reading Chivalry by Maurice Keen in an effort to prep for my class on the same subject coming up in a couple of months. What I should be reading is anything about anything so that I can write a paper due in about three weeks. But I’m a procrastinator, so what do you expect?

Oh! Thought I would share something with you folks. As you know, I’m a fan of modern fiction. The spy novel, the mystery, the adventure, the fantasy . . . I dig most of it. Well, I recently read Trojan Odyssey by Clive Cussler. If you can get through his very obvious way of writing, his books can be really enjoyable and this is no exception. You also have to be willing to accept his perpetual need to re-write history. In this case, Cussler has imported the thesis of Where Troy Once Stood (retails for about $500) by Iman Wilkens namely that Troy was not in Southwestern Turkey, but rather in Southwestern England. Homer wasn’t a Greek poet but rather a Celtic one (and possibly a druid as well). The Achaeans were actually Continental Celts (“Achaean” apparently being a word for “alliance” in ancient Gaelic), and Odysseus’ . . . well . . . Odyssey took place mostly in the Caribbean. While I am very skeptical of this concept, I guess I’d really need to read the original book before I buy any of it. I just thought those of you who were forced to study either the Illiad or the Odyssey (which I genuinely hope was all of you) might find it interesting that every classicist for the past three thousand years has gotten it all wrong!

OK, now I’m done. I’ll catch you all on the flipside!

” . . . my moral high horse is a three-legged nag with no teeth, that smells of death, and has flies and vultures circling above it.”
~Henry Rollins – “Shock and Awe” (paraquoted)

I’m just saying that because I have a test tomorrow. It does not in fact blow. Eh, who am I kidding? It’s not like I’m going to have any hidden Latin afficionados coming to my website, now am I? So with the test fast approaching, I’ve been studying my quite large butt off. I do my studying at my desk (on top of the closed lid of my laptop, my desktop being out of commission since I tried to install Linux on one of the harddrives), and so when I just can’t take anymore sum es est summus estis sunt I tend to just get online and write a bit. This has resulted in many e-mails to people that I’ve been neglecting (don’t worry, if you haven’t heard from me yet, I still have lots of time before the test so lots of breaks coming up), but also a couple of updates to the website. Please follow me on my journey.

When I first registered sikenterprises.com, I chose to host it on the website WebHost 2 because I already had an account with them thanks to sagittarii.com. Well, I haven’t been thrilled with the service (not the least of which because they simply would not respond to me when I kept trying to cancel the hosting of sagittarii.com), so when I registered NateandAmy.com I chose to go with a different company (InMotion Hosting). So when the registration renewal time came for SIK, I jumped at the chance to switch. I’m now a happy customer of InMotion, at least partially because the cgi script that the previous screw-ups provided frequently didn’t work. It does here though, and case in point is right here. What you’ll find is a new way to get a hold of me. On a public computer? Can’t really get to your normal e-mail account? Just go ahead and and go to the Form Mail page (bottom of the main menu bar) and you can just type in a message and it’ll get sent right out to me. Pretty cool, huh?

You’ll also notice that I’ve relocated the notification of the best resolution for this site (not terribly important, but it was annoying me where it was), and that I’ve re-created the guestbook . . . which alas means that there are no longer any entries on there. Go ahead and get writing so that I don’t look like such a loser! And finally, I have collected all the entries from the year 2004 into one link for space saving purposes. But go ahead, click on it. It’s pretty cool if you ask me!

Other than that, there really isn’t THAT much exciting going on. My life consists largely of studying for Latin and working these days, and I’m not doing the later because it’s just been so dead over at Jinty’s! I personally think it’s because so many students are still out of town. It’ll pick up soon, I’m sure. But in the mean time, I’m probably due another couple hours in the slave pits of Latin.

Slainte.

“I’m moving to Phoenix. I got a job.”
Awkward silence
Something you apply for and they pay you to… Never mind, I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
~Jason Bateman (as Michael Bluth) – “Arrested Development” Season 1 Episode 1

It’s been quite a while since I’ve made a posting, and in my laziness I have allowed that magical time collectively known as “The Holidays” to pass unremarked upon. Oh, and I say “magical” because it is that special time that comes every year when school children around the world don’t have to go to stupid school just because some Christians about 1500 years ago needed a correspondingly important Christian holy day to counteract the pagan holiday at Winter Solstice (confused? Don’t be! Click here to learn what I’m talking about).

Before I go into how my Holidays went, I’d first like to take just a single paragraph to think back a bit. This here marks the first post of January 2005. That means it has now been one year since I first registered this site. One year since a lot of things (and don’t think I haven’t thought about it since I was at home and all). I’d say both a lot and very little has happened. A lot because I think most people would agree that my life looks very different from how it did this time last year. Very little because I don’t feel that I’ve changed THAT much . . . plus, it just doesn’t seem like it’s been a year! Can you believe that it’s already 2005? I know people say this a lot, but aren’t we supposed to be driving flying cars to work by now? Hell, aren’t I supposed to have a real job by now for that matter? Guess not, but hey, what can ya do? OK, enough reminiscing (no, I don’t think that’s how that word is spelled. And I don’t much care. So there.), let’s get to the story!

So I spent the Holidays in Arizona. After my runin with alcohol on my birthday, I worked all weekend (which was of course miserable) before jumping a plane at an ungodly hour on Monday morning. Made it home OK (despite having to spend the entire transAtlantic flight sitting next to a returning Mormon. Yay.) and none the worse for wear. I don’t remember too much on the lead-up to Christmas, though I can tell you that a small birthday party was held for me on Tuesday night with my grandparents and cousins and that I also went and saw “The Phantom of the Opera” with my Mom, Amy, and Nate. I absolutely adored it and went again to see it before the trip was over (in fact, I saw tons of movies while at home, including “The Aviator”, “National Treasure”, “Ocean’s 12″, and “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”).

Christmas Eve was spent at Brad and Janet’s house which was nice (though the pool table was covered, which upset me greatly), and while Christmas morning was spent at my parents’ house (with the three grandparents), Christmas dinner was at Buffy and Frank’s house (wherein I got to see Adam again, which was terrific, since we didn’t think he’d get any leave before being sent off to Iraq). Nothing but movies happened between Christmas and New Year’s, and on that evening about 10 of us went to catch the Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers concert at Celebrity Theater. The show absolutely rocked, and the fact that the seats were not in the front row as previously thought was only a small disappointment.

Alas, I left soon after that. Not soon enough to avoid some unpleasantness, but as usual, such things are handled and then dismissed from the mind. All in all it was a terrific visit home and the only thing I would have really changed would be to have been able to stay longer. If nothing else, it saddens me greatly to know that I may not be seeing my brother within the confines of the state of Arizona ever again. Once Brie gets back from her training, they’ll be moving as soon as humanly possible to some place with a coast. I can’t really blame them since I live a good 5000+ miles away, but still! I’m gonna miss my brudda!

I hope your Christmas/Solstice/Hanukkah was simply wonderful!

Slainte.

“Hi. I’m Eddie. How do you like me so far?”
~Mark Valley (as “Eddie Arlette”) – “Keen Eddie”