News of Much Goodness

First and foremost, you should all be happy to know that the powers that be have finally come to their senses, and given me back my precious Q&A column. Thus ends the most depressing month of my life. Yeah, I know, you'd figure that'd be attached to some sort of death of a relative or something, but nope. This one. Anyway though, please tell all your friends who have been boycotting the place in my absence to quit it.

Second and uh, nigh-foremost, the odds are pretty darn good that my house, and the bulk of the surrounding area, will be completely obliterated by Hurricane Isabel this coming Friday. You may be confused as to why that can be considered good news. Well, there's a decent degree of dead trees about which should really be coming down, and it's nice to have nature do your dirty work for you. Plus, as I'm sure I've mentioned once or twice, there are a number of issues I have with the current design of my house. Like these skylights that cause me all sorts of problems, mainly by leaking. Oh, and then there's just that general goodness found in changing things.

Anyway though, when I saw the windspeed and projected path of this hurricane, my initial thoughts were, verbatim, "Come forth cleansing winds of destruction!" Maybe my cousin was right about me being a cheesy Saturday Morning Cartoon villain. Come to think of it, I actually have very serious plans to get a big black cape some day and decorate my room with human skulls. Not to mention how much I'd love to have my own personal orcish horde or legion of the undead. Actually, a full legion would probably be a pain to handle. A couple dozen would probably suffice truth be told.

Speaking of death and destruction though, there's been an oddly large amount of death going on lately it seems. Celebrities seem to be dropping like flies these days, but more importantly, my town has been seeing a lot of freaky roadkill. The other day, while taking a walk of maybe one or two kilometers, down lightly travelled streets, I passed a dead frog, which may have actually been a flattened pile of dried leaves and twigs in the shape of a dead frog, a dead crow, dead skunk, and dead seagull. The day before this, a garbage man was run over while on the job not far from here, and a day after the same happened to a mailman. Fairly creepy that.

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One final anecdote for you all before I go. The other night, I was taken out to dinner by some family members, to an Outback Steakhouse which just openned up around here. This led to the rather surreal event of having a guy wearing a leather shirt ask if I had a reservation. I didn't for the record, and had to wait something like an hour and a half for a table to open up. Who knew there was such a demand for Australia themed steak in this area? On the upside, the food was really good.

To kill that hour and a half, we ended up wandering into a nearby Chuck E. Cheese's to partake of the arcade. The results of this excursion were entirely too depressing for me to discuss in detail. Suffice it to say the most appealing machine in the place was a broken skeeball track that ate tokens.