We went to Cleveland tonight and bought me a train ticket to go to Boston in April for the AAG convention.  Cool thing was, since we had a $100 gift certificate to Amtrak, the roundtrip trainfare only cost $33.61.  On the way out, I go through Washington DC (with a three hour layover a block from the Capitol and National Mall) and I get to ride through places I've never been (Philadelphia, Delaware, New York City, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts).  On the way back, it's a more boring (I think) route through Albany-Schenectady.

I got "travel jitters" as we pulled into the train station, that little bit of excitement and adrenaline that happens before a trip.  It took me a bit to convince my body we weren't hopping a train and going tonight.

I'm really mad at the NFL.  The only thing I cared to do this Sunday in terms of sports was to have the Colts vs. Patriots game on television.  It's only fair.  It's a game of unbeaten teams, one of which is my favorite.  But no.  Because of archaic blackout laws, the game is not going to be on television because the stupid fucking Browns play earlier in the afternoon.  See, apparently back in the day, team owners were concerned that having another game on in their market after their teams would create a competitive fanbase for another team.  So, this means that, if I want to watch this football game that most of the rest of the country gets, that I have to go to a fucking bar where they have a satellite package.  I don't drink, but to get football, I have to give up the privacy of my home and the ability to grade student reaction papers to sit in a crappy dark hellhole with a bunch of drunks?  Stupid.

When I was in East Lansing for ELDAAG, the beds in the hotels were the best things ever.  They had ridiculously delicious sheets (and that's the only word I can think to describe them, even though it's not a taste sensation) and uber-comfortable mattresses.  Our poor mattress was inherited from some family nearly four years ago, and was basically already shot when we got it.  We need a new mattress, for one.  Also, we're getting to be a maturely married couple.  My old friend Jon had a theory that when people are married for a bit, they eventually decide to create a ridiculously comfortable nesting spot.  His theory seems incredibly correct, especially now, because all I think about in this crappy bed we've got now is making a nice little nest, with 400,000 thread count (or whatever) sheets, nice new pillows, (fake/vegan) down comforters... you know, the works.  Anything is better than the fucking springs that are attacking my back...

I find it interesting that the latest commercials for Total cereal try to link the cereal to the free spirited ideas of the 1960s, saying that Total was working for changing the world by being the first nutritionally complete cereal.  This is a complete sham!  Think about this: the hippies were largely protesting against the status quo, the modernized world in which people thought it was necessary to ass-rape southeast Asia for no real reason.  On the other hand, Total, with it's complete nutrition, is a product of that status quo.  How in the world did the folks at General Mills (or who-the-fuck-ever) create a nutritionally complete cereal?  Using the top tiers of modern technology and chemistry, engineering a food to have an artificially high amount of various chemicals.  Total's origins were no more a rebellious of the 1960s than TV dinners!

Randomly, we're going to Chicago on university (or private foundation?) dime.  We had been planning to go to Chicago to see some friends at the end of November.  Of course, we're broke as fuck and figured that it simply would not happen.  However, I got an email today from the department telling us that, because there's an exhibit on Ptolemy's maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago and because Kent State had contributed somehow financially to the Newberry thing, that any grad student could get $500 travel funding to go.  Basically, this means that my trip (which we were thinking about doing anyway) is getting funded, if I go to a museum exhibit that already looks pretty damn cool.

My little iBook is starting to die a slow death.  We had planned to replace it in January and give it to a (not quite) starving artist friend, but we aren't going to have the money to do that for a bit.  Now, it does all kinds of weird things.  It kinda reminds me of when my various grandmothers have had various forms of Alzheimers or dementia (and three of them, now, have had these issues) where things just quit working right without rhyme or reason.  Unfortunately, my laptop isn't that old (three years) but has had a hard life.  I mean, I usually use it around 8-10 hours a day (yes, just about every day), and I take it everywhere with me.  It's been all over the country, and into others.  I'm surprised it hasn't just exploded, leaving nothing more than a pile of broken keys. 

The university fucked up my email this week.  Without my knowledge or consent, they switched me over to a new system.  My old email account, which still login-able, had been hacked, with the messages forwarded to some new system.  They haven't given me a password for the new system, so anything that goes to my Kent address is somewhere in a black hole.  They did all of this so that they could give Microsoft an exclusive contract.  Microsoft (in every sense) sucks donkey dick for coke, so I'm just going to have it go to my Gmail anyway. 

This weekend has big plans but little time.  I want to outline three more papers to publish, grade 30 student reaction papers and finish my new dissertation proposal draft.  I will be lucky to grade any student papers, let alone the other stuff.  I'd do better with the grading if I could watch the Colts game, as football games are perfect background noise for grading.  But, alas, because of the pole-smoking, fart-sucking, turd-licking Browns, I cannot without going to a bar.  And is it cool to grade papers while I drink a Shirley Temple in a bar?

Probably not.