I've been spending some time on updating the page, so don't be surprised if the background all of a sudden changes or anything like that. The all bear motif was getting a bit too cute for me.

I've got some sad news. I took lots of pictures with the digital camera while I was on vacation out west and there were some really beautiful ones. I was going to start putting them up soon, but the hard drive they were on all of a sudden went kaput. There were two especially wonderful pieces of scenery we saw out there. One was Bear Lake, which straddles the border between Utah and Idaho. The water is a deep turquoise blue because of limestone particles that are suspended in the water. (When I told my little brother this, he said he didn't want to go swimming in the water because he didn't want to get rocks all over him. Very cute.) We also saw a really fantastic sunset there. The other was a beautiful canyon, called Red Canyon, in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming. We were very lucky to get to see it, it's a good thing we took the senic route. Since I can't show you pictures here, check these out.

Bear Lake
Red Canyon

Yesterday I was thinking about one of my really vivid memories from my freshman year of high school. I had a friend named Andrea, and we had history class together that year. The teacher was one of those ones who show videos all the time because she can't lecture. Since it was so boring in there all the time, I used to write these short comedy stories where the characters were based on various people that we knew. Then I would pass them to Andrea to read. When I write funny stuff, I don't really laugh at it all that much when I read it, but when someone else reads it and starts laughing, I just descend into a fit of giggles. So obviously every time she read one of my stories in class, we would both be cracking up while simultaneously trying to be quiet. We often did not succeed very much with the second part. One day we were doing particularly badly and the teacher kept looking at us trying to figure out what on earth was going on. We weren't talking, I don't even think we were sitting right next to one another. I hope the poor woman didn't think we were laughing at her or anything.

The year after that Andrea dropped out of high school and got her GED. We kind of lost touch after that. Some of that was because she was a vehement man hater, which made me kind of uncomfortable. I think her dad was a really awful guy. Mostly it was just because I've never been good at staying friends with people who aren't around a lot. (Andrea, if you're out there, sorry about that.) Anyway, when I remembered this, I got to wondering how good those stories really were. Obviously, they weren't great works of art or anything. They were incredibly goofy and had too many personal jokes about the people we know for anyone else to get them. But I'd just like to know if, with those limitations in mind, they were actually any good. I don't have any of them that I kept, so I can't really look at them and see.

I do, however, know that the great majority of my poetry from high school was completely awful. Of course, that was mostly because it was teen angst poetry, which is almost always awful. A few of them were good though, so I wonder about those stories…