... Gee it's good to be back home" (from an old Beatles song). How ya been crew? I haven't posted in so long. Well, there's not too many ppl still on here to read it.

I had my last final Thursday. The semester ended Friday & we had to be OUT of the uni-res by noon Saturday. Since I didn't have a final exam on Friday I had extra time to pack. You wouldn't BELIEVE what some kids throw out because they don't want to take it home. Some kid threw out a new microwave he had in his dorm room! I'm sure someone will take it though, probably a janitor. Anyway, I was all packed & headed home Saturday. I got here ok. It was funny though because when I got into my overloaded car & turned on the radio "Highway to Hell" came on. I was hoping it wasn't an omen because my car broke down last week & I got stuck a few miles from school. It overheated, I pulled over & turned it off to cool down. Then I went a mile & it over heated again! My roomate had to come get me. But it got fixed the next day & didn't cost nearly as much as I thought it would. It was just a hose.

So now I'm home. I always put up a little Christmas tree in my room (which I share with the Rodent). Actually getting used to having a room mate in college was easy for me because I shared a room with my 12 year old brother ( the Rodent) for years. Jessi came over a few hours after I got home. She wanted to sleep over but I told her not tonight. She didn't like that, she asked if I didn't "miss" her, hint hint. I told her I just wanted just one night with the folks & there will be plenty of time later for "showing how much we missed each other" (if u know what I mean) after that.Such as the next night lol.

So are you all set for Christmas? I usually run around like a lunatic shopping on Christmas Eve before the stores all close lol. Hey I'm a guy, we hate shopping.
I'll make sure I come on again to wish all of you a Merry Christmas, but just in case I can't I'll do it now >> MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR 2011!

Hey crew! This is the FIRST time in almost 4 years here (wow!) that I've ever written about movies and I've only written once about TV. I usually just write about my life so I'm doing something really different here. I recently noticed that two of my fave movies Elephant and Paranoid Park have the same director, Gus van Sant. Elephant follows the lives of a bunch of people who go to the same high school but don't know each other. Their lives all intertwine in the last half hour of the film which ends in a Colombine type massacre. Paranoid Park follows the life of an ordinary kid named Alex. His friend talks him into going to a skatepark some older guys built near a railroad. Anyway something happens & Alex accidently kills a security guard (a "yard Bull" my locomotive engineer dad would call him) but no one suspects he did it. It gets pretty intense as he tries not to mentally crack up from keeping his secret. Both excellent movies IMO. Anyway, I looked up some facts about the director. He has an unusual way of making movies:

1) He will not use any professional actors. All the people you see in his movies are regular people like you & me. Fliers are left at high schools, skate shops, fast food outlets etc announcing the time & place to go if you're interested. The flyers say people with previous professional acting experience will not be considered. But everyone else gets into the film >> if you don't get picked for a speaking role you wind up as part of the crowd in the mall or the crowd at a football game or just people walking down the street. I like that he does that.

2) There is no wardrobe or stylist or anything like that. He tells people to just wear their own clothes and to dress like they usually do when they go to school or to hang out. No one does their hair. There are no sets, everything is filmed in real locations >> a real mall, a real high school, a real house, a real skate park. I like this aspect of his movies too.

3) The most unusual thing is that there is no script or direction. He has an outline of a story and that's it. For example he will tell the kids playing Alex & Jennifer: "In this scene Alex breaks up with Jennifer and Jennifer reacts. Go for it." That's all. "Alex" and "Jennifer" make up their own lines as they do the scene, just like 2 ppl having a real-life conversation. No one tells them what to say and their movements, gestures and facial expressions are whatever comes naturally to them. All of his movies are improvised like that. I never heard of anyone doing that before!

4) He mixes 8mm and 35 mm film so certain scenes look like they were shot with a home video camera. I like that too.

So what do you think of his unusual methods? Have you seen either of the movies I mentioned? Have a great week!

Hey crew!

College life is more than the sum of textbooks and activities. It's the clean wind on fall days when trees flame red, yellow and gold. It's the thunder of the crowd on football afternoons. It's walks at night on the grassy shore with lights flickering in reflection on the pond waters. It's sudden new friendships as you share intemate thoughts on life & death. It's pre-dawn cups of scalding black coffee as you try to get a research paper finished on time. It's a child-like romp thru a colonial graveyard. It's knee-deep snowdrifts and icesickles hanging from uni-res roofs. It's roisterous weekends. It's night-long drunken road trips into the darkness of northern Pennsylvania woods. College is LIFE and life is desire,ambition ,confusion, joy, pain and the wonderful possibility that dreams can come true.

I hope you liked that. There are 4,000 students at this Jesuit liberal arts university & I hope every one of them feels that way about their university experience and all my friends here (Kyle,Ivy,Andrea,Teresa,Kandi etc) at Univ too.

Something special is going on with the Sophomore Liberal Arts Honors program students in a few weeks. I'm a sophomore but luckily I'm not in the honors program, that's just the really top kids. Every year they have something called TIVIUM. Honors sophomores have to make a toga. Then one at a time ( usually around lunch when there's a crowd) they have to stand on the green outside the Student Center and recite Plato's Phaedrus in their own words without notes but keeping Plato's meaning exactly. Yes, wearing their toga. While they are doing this people (including past performers) are trying to distract them with rediculous antics. Prof Whitaker even encourages onlookers. The reciters can't laugh or grimmace. It's an exercise in logic, grammar and rhetoric combined with perseverence in the face of humiliation. I will be there probably standing on a chair on the Chick-a-Fil outdoor patio trying to destract them & make the person mess up. I'm glad it's not gonna be me out there, but secretly I applaud them & admire their guts.

Hey crew! As you probably know, the last 3 years I have done a Little League World Series review on here. I talked about the strenths & weaknesses of each team and the matchups. Well not this year. They have a new format which I think does not do justice to the teams. There are 8 Regional winners in the American Pool and 8 national teams in the International pool. The American teams this year are Pearland TX (Southwest), Plymouth MN ( Great Plains), Toms River NJ (Mid-Atlantic), Fairfield CT (New England), Auburn WA (Northwest), Hamilton OH (Mid-West), Columbus GA (Southwest) and Waipahu HI (West). The International pool includes the usual Canada, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Saudi Arabia and 2 others.

For many years --generations in fact-- there has been round robin play. That means each of the 8 teams played all of the other 7 teams once in the 1st round of play. The 4 teams with the best record then moved on to the next round and each team played the other 3 teams once. Then the remaining 2 teams had a best of 3 series. The survivor met the survivor of the other pool for the championship game. Under this system EVERY team got to play at least 7 games before being eliminated and the eventual winner played 13 or 14 games. It took two weeks and all the kids had fun. Having one or 2 bad games or an unlucky day didn't affect things because the best teams eventually came out on top. But they changed that this year! Now they have "double elimination" in the first round instead! As soon as your team loses 2 games in the 1st round you go home! The 4 teams left go on to the 2nd round and have "sudden death" elimination! You lose ONE game in the second round & you go home! The 2 teams left after that round play one game instead of a 3 game series and the loser goes home. The winner goes on to the championship game.THIS SUCKS! These kids have been on the road since June, living in motels and playing tournaments to get to Williamsport. And now they can get sent home after TWO games! They cut the number of games played way down and turned a 2 week event into 4 days! Even the best team can have bad luck >> the ball take a bad hop or have a bad call made. The luck evens out in a long series & the best team comes out on top. But that can't happen with this new system. One unlucky inning can ruin a whole summer of effort. It's like the organizers are trying to get it over with as fast as possible.

It seems fun for the kids no longer matters. It's run like a business now. Scouts is going the same way. I think that's disgusting. I feel sorry for little kids if organized youth activities are gonna be like this from now on. I grew up just in time to avoid this c*ap. What do you think about them doing this? I'd like to hear from some adults too, just to get their perspective.

Hey crew! Well we're back from Colonial Williamsburg. We had a package visit & squeezed a lot into it. It was fun but it was friggin HOT & humid. We left home at 2:30 in the morning. My dad is kinda obscessive abt traffic. I'm used to that. I was half asleep until we crossed over into Delaware & he pulls over & goes "you drive." Ok, I drove thru Delaware & Maryland. We were going thru Baltimore just as the sun came up and we could see Fort McHenry (of National Anthem fame) just before I drove into a looooong tunnel under the harbor. I'm not used to tunnels. I'm not used to bumper-to-bumper traffic either but we got to Washington and it was gridlock on the highway circling it. It was only 6 in the morning! My mom could see I was getting frustrated so she told my dad to take over. So we both jumped out of our seats & switched in the middle of the highway (nothing was moving an inch anyway). When we finally got to Virginia we were all frazzled & hungry so we stopped for breakfast. The waitress put some biscuits on the table with a bowl of white stuff. I was like "What's this?" She went "Gravy." Whoa, I'm a country boy but even I don't have GRAVY with breakfast! We drove to just outside Richmond and turned east toward Norfolk. There was a lot of ground fog & I imagined seeing ragged, barefoot,grey-clad ghosts with muskets emerging from the foggy pine forest. We got to the Best Western Colonial Capitol just b4 noon. Happily the parents room was NOT next to me & the Rodent, we were down the hall.

Then we were off. First to the Reception Center in the George Tucker House. Williamsburg is a restored 1700s town and everyone except the tourists were in period costume. There were horses all over. We were going to go to the Governors Palace but the line was so long we put it off until later. We went to the Capitol instead. That was interesting but I like the Armory, Gunpowder Magazine & the Gunsmith more. Espicially when they fired the cannon! There are 48 restored buildings to visit & my dad was checking them off on his list. I told you he's obscessive lol. We picked up a quick lunch at the 40 Shops of Merchant Square and visited even more old buildings after lunch. We were encouraged to try lawn bowling by some re-enactor. The Rodent did, I didn't >>> I'm not a dork. We had supper at The Second Street Restaurant. & hit the pool & sauna afterward. I slept soundly that night even with the Rodent watching TV unti late.

The next day we finally got to the Governors Palace. It was huge & took most of the morning. There was a big maze-like garden in the back & the tour guide said that there were Confederate soldiers buried there in unmarked graves who died in the Union assault on the city. But that was 100 yrs after the colonial period. Next we visited the Public Hospital. I thought it was a hospital but it was an insane asylum. In the 1700s they chained you to the wall like in a prison! Not nice. There was also a colonial prison nearby of course. Then the Bruton Parish Church to hear music. The afternoon was so friggin hott we went to the HUGE Visitors Center & enjoyed the air conditioning & a movie about Williamsburg.

The 3rd day we took the Shuttle around to the areas too far to walk. My mom did her thing, meaning she dragged us to the DeWitt Wallace Art Museum and then the Abby Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. Boring but also air conditioned. After lunch we split up. Mom went to the 40 Shops again, dad went to more historic stuff and I went over to the William & Mary campus. The Rodent had a choice of who to go with & he didn't look happy about any of the choices but he picked mom. I enjoyed walking around the campus even tho everyone was on break. I'd never visited an Ivy League school b4. The Wren Building has a chalace given by King William.

The fourth day we went off site. Our parents were planning to drive over to Yorktown to see the Revolutionary War battlefield there and the Rodent was pleading for Busch Gardens waterpark instead. He didn't want to tramp around in the hot sun seeing where General Snodgrass fell off his horse any more than I did. So I suggested that they drop us off at the waterpark on the way to the battlefield, I would not let him out of my sight and to call my cell when they were coming back and we would be waiting outside the gate. No problems, no trouble I promise. Pleeeeeese! Mom was not too happy but dad said ok. So that's how we spent our last day.

The next day we checked out and it was raining. Can you believe on the way home my dad couldn't resist stopping in Fredricksburg VA to visit the Civil War battlefield? I put up with visiting the Stone Warehouse & Confederate Hospital but the rest of us put our foot down & stayed in the Visitors Center while my dad roamed around the battlefield in the rain. Even the Park Ranger thought he was nuts. We stopped for dinner in Delaware & got home just after dark. Denise called. She was like "Oh good you guys are back. Can Michael watch the kids?" I wanted to see Jessi first so the Rodent went over to her house & watched them for a few hours and then I took over. He's a decent kid now that he's getting older! So that was my vacation. I had fun but I'm glad to be back.

Hey crew! I went hiking over in New Jersey in an interesting area. Northeast PA used to be coal mining country so I'm familiar with old abandoned mines. Well, north west New Jersey had iron mines at the same time. Together they provided most of the raw meterials for the Industrial Revolution in 19th century America, iron & coal. Then iron & coal near the surface was discovered out west & the eastern mines shut down between 1900 and 1915. The area around mines has it's good points & it's bad points >> standing outside a mine shaft or cave on a day like this is like standing in front of an air conditioner. The air coming out is about 50F/10C year round. It feels great afer you're all sweated up from hiking to just stand in the cold air. However, that constant temperature makes it attractive to critters too, espicially snakes and bats. Abandoned mines are notorious as snake dens. I don't mean a few snakes I mean thousands live in them. So you have to be careful walking or climbing over rocks in the area. Bats however are good, 100 bats eat 2.2 lbs /1 kilo of flies and mosquitoes every night so the area around old mines is usually bug free. Another thing you have to be aware of is that some mine entrances may have been sealed but the shafts were NEVER filled in. So there's always the remote possibility the ground could give way under you if you're wakling over a shaft. I've never heard of it happening but it's theoretically possible.

We went hiking at the Wildcat Ridge Wildlife Area in northern NJ. It looks just like PA. We parked in the gravel lot & hiked a short distance to the Hibernia Mine which produced iron from 1710 until 1911. It has 26 underground levels. You're coming up the trail & you feel a cool breeze before you see it. Then there it is, with an iron grate across the opening. I have some pics but I'm too tired to post then tonight, maybe later. You follow the Orange Trail & then the White Trail up a steep hillside and down the other side & you come to the old abandoned St Patricks Cemetery. This is where the miners who died were buried. It's weird seeing headstones in the middle of the woods. Then you follow an old dirt road to what was the miners village but is now just stone foundations. Actually, that's fairly common. Then down into a stream gourge & a difficult hike up a ridgeline to the Marcella Hawk Overlook. If you don't want a back breaking hike you can drive several miles up a dirt road from where we parked to another parking lot & walk in on a gravel path. Besides the raptors soaring on thermals the view is magnificent: Green treetops almost as far as you can see & on the eastern horizon 55 miles/89km away the towers of New York looking like tiny toys. We paused there & took in the view. On the return trip to the car we walked back on the dirt road, the trail was just too rugged to do again in this heat (93F/34C). A very satisfying but tiring day.

I got this idea from Patrick (Water 78) who just posted an awesome short story he wrote. This is a story I wrote last year. I left several hints who it is about but don't tell you until the end so don't skip ahead. Enjoy!

Hello crew! How has everybody been? So school is over for everyone I hope. I've been out from college for a month but I'm not really on vacation because I have a summer job I started June 8. I spend my days scanning, filing, taking messages, delivering inter-office mail and making lots of copies. I also do grunt stuff like make coffee & be a go-fer. They treat me like a kid and the boss seems to think I'm an idiot but it could be worse. At least I'm inside in an air conditioned office, one of my friends is loading trucks for the summer.

I got my grades & I passed everything. I got an A in Intro to Geology which seems to be something I'm good at. I even passed Principles of Nutrition which I was worried about. For our final project we each got a group of mice & fed them pellets that were missing 1 nutrient. The last day a girl got up & said to the Prof "We have 2 and a half mice ." Ewwww.

The Rodent graduated from Webeloes last week. That's a transitional year between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. They still wear a blue Cub uniform but have checkered neckerchiefs instead of yellow ones and they go camping without their parent tagging along. So he's 11 now and growing up. Next year when he turns 12 I plan on giving him my 22 deer rifle. Yes you can own a gun here when you are 12. He can already hunt now in a mentor program with an adult along.

Last Saturday I went hiking up the back slope of Sunrise Mountain. There are several trails up & I took the Teal Trail. It was HOT (86F/30C) and very humid. I brought extra water & needed it. Taking that trail was a mistake. It's steep in parts & it's 1 big tallus slope until you get to the top. Back during the Ice Age a glacier covered it & when it melted it dropped all the rocks that had been trapped in the ice. So walking up the back slope is like walking on a dry stream bed >> baseball to basketball size rocks cover the ground. I was walking & I kept hearing something moving behind me. At first I thought it was a deer or bear but I called out "Hello" and got an answer. It was this hiker about my age named Mark. So we hiked the rest of the way up together. We walked along the ridge & enjoyed a breeze that dried our sweat. At the end of the trail is a cliff overlook. Magnificant view. Then we split up. I took the easier Yellow Trail back down & he took the Red Trail. Maybe I'll meet my new friend on a trail again someday.

My town was recently in the news. Here's the article. What do you think:

Hey crew! Today instead of talking abt my life I'm gonna tell u a true mystery. In the news is a 13 yr old boy who became the youngest person to climb Mt Everest. Hundreds of ppl have climbed the mountain, hundreds more have died trying. Their frozen bodies litter the mountain, it's too dangerous to bring them down. Everyone learned in school that Edmund Hillary & Tensing Norgey were the 1st to reach the top in 1953. But were they? Or did 2 others do it 30 yrs earlier?

All these ppl climbed the easier south side of the mountain in Nepal. The north side in China wasn't supposedly summitted until 1980. But in 1924 2 Englishmen tried, and MAYBE succeeded. George Mallory was an experienced mountain climber. Andrew Irvine was an Oxford University student who signed up for the support crew as an adventure. The day before the summit attempt Mallorys partner became sick and Mallory inexplicably picked young Irvine as a substitute. The crew at the base camp watched them climb the difficult north side thru binoculars. Higher & higher until they looked like ants. They got above the Second Step, the last difficult obstacle in their way. Then the clouds moved in blocking the view. mallory & Irvine were never seen again for a half century.

A few yrs later another climber found Mallorys ice ax at 28,000 feet (8535 m) barely 1,000 ft (305 m) from the top. Then World War II began, stopping all climbing. After that the Communists took over China & banned all non-Chinese from their side of the mountain. In 1975 the Chinese announced their climbers had seen the bodies of 2 white men, 1 laying at 8,000 ft (2438 m) and the other sitting against a rock "very high up." Everyone guessed the high up one was Mallory (because of the ax) and the lower one Irvine. This caused excitement. Irvine had carried a pocket camera! The pics would solve the mystery! Finally in 2007 China allowed a US/British team to climb up & examine the bodies. They found the 1st one at 8,000 feet. It was face down with it's arms spread out. A broken climbing rope was tied around its waist. It had a broken left leg & a deep cut on his left cheek. There was a name written inside the shirt collar-- G MALLORY. Everyone had guessed wrong. The team figured out what happened >> high up on the mountain the rope broke. Mallory fell thousands of feet to his death. The kid Irvine couldn't climb down by himself. Knowing he was doomed he sat down waiting for death. Were they climbing up or down? The team searched the body & then started climbing to look for Irvine. But a sudden blizzard made them turn back. China hasn't allowed anyone to try again. Here are some facts:

1) Mallorys tinted goggles were in his coat pocket. They're like sunglasses & stop the glare of snow. He would only have taken them off if they were climbing after dark.That's hours after they were last seen >> plenty of time to get to the mountaintop & start back down.

2) A paper & pencil in his other pocket carefully lists how much oxygen they were using. Ppl thought they only had 2 oxygen canisters each but the paper says 3 each. If they were on their third, they would be coming down.

3) Mallory brought a photo of his beloved wife Ruth to put on the mountaintop. When they searched his dead body they found all his other personal posessions -- his watch, his comb, his lucky coin -- but NOT the photo.

So are the history books wrong? Did Andrew & George get there first? i have my opinion. What's yours?

Hey crew! How's it going? I have my last final exam today & then I'll be finished with freshman year of University. No one can call me "frosh" anymore :P . I'm off until the middle of September, isn;t college great? I never had this long off in HS. So does everyone have summer plans or are u just gonna wing it? :lol: I'm gonna be starting that summer clerk job on June 7. I was lucky to get a summer job at all what with the Great Recession & Obamanomics putting so many people out of work. Hopefully they won't mind me taking a day off here & there to go down the shore with my friends or go camping or go away with my family :o and if they do mind, I'll go anyway! I'm also glad to be seeing more of Jessi now that school is over and hopefully I'll see my friends that were scattered all over the country going to different universities & colleges. Oh in case you wondered like I did >> the difference is a "college" doesn't offer doctoral degrees, just Bachelors and Masters degrees while a "university" does all 3.

My dad is planning a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. I'm planning to take myself & the Rodent to Busch Gardens amusement park a few miles down the road from there. While my parents are exploring old buildings the little brother & I will be exploring water slides and rides 8) . My dad is already going on & on abt how Jamesburg and Yorktown are only a few miles away from Williamsburg too. And he mentioned something abt wanting to stop at Fredricksburg & Chancellorville on the way down & back :roll: it's like travling with ur history teacher. I don't mind some educational stuff but this is overload! We have enough during the school year, summer is for FUN.

Oh, I wasn't gonna mention this but I will >> I had a health scare a few weeks ago. I woke up at 4am & couldn't catch my breath. I was dizzy (probably from not breathing) and had a tightness in my chest. I got driven to the hospital (no campus clinic at that hour) and they took n=me right in. Do you want to know what the 1st thing they asked me was? If I used any recreational drugs! I told then "NO!" and was quite offended. They said that it was because of my age >> if a senior citizen had my symptoms they would suspect heart trouble,since I'm a young adult the first thing they would suspect is narcotic use! What crap :evil: Anyway they took a LOT of tests & they all came back negative. So they told me it was probably stress or a panic attack. A lot of stuff had been getting to me -- grades, tests, car repairs, my computer getting fixed 3 times & still not working right, not seeing Jessi, trouble with some ppl at campus, commiting myself to paying my folks back & some other stuff. I guess it all caught up with me. I'm trying to not let s*** get to me anymore. School being over will help a lot too. Well that;s abt it crew! ;) I'd really like to hear if u have any summer plans. Mike-- OUT!

Hello crew! How was everyones weekend? I'm off from cla$s all week but I have my new job to keep me busy. I like it so far, but it's work, not play.

Speaking of play, we went out on an old oyster schooner the A.J. Meerwald on Saturday. It rained really hard the end of last week and again Sunday & today, but Saturday the day of our sail was sunny & windy >> just right to fill the sails. We got up early & left at 5:20 in the morning, it was still dark. We drove to Greenwich (pronounced "green-witch" ) NJ on the Delaware Bay. It was a long drive from Pennsylvania, 160 miles (256 Km) and took 3 hours. We met the members of my dads History Society there and had coffee cake & coffee before going aboard. This is the very southern part of NJ and it's totally rural >> small towns and a lot of farms. Most people there make their living farming or fishing or from tourists. The land is very flat, sandy and covered with pine forest. It's the southern edge of the Pine Barrens, the largest unbroken area of forest east of the Mississippi. Yes, in New Jersey! We went out on the Delaware Bay which separates NJ from DE. Don't think of this as a bay >> it's an arm of the Atlantic Ocean & it's huge. When you're in the middle you cannot see land in any direction & it's like being on the Atlantic Ocean. The waves get big too. We cast off from the dock. They had the kids line up and pull the rope to raise the main sail. I thought the Rodent would complain but he grinned & pulled every time the guy yelled "Heave." There are 2 masts but the crew raised the smaller one. Speaking of heaving, I expected to puke but I didn't >> I get seasick even on ferry boats but I didn't on the schooner. There was a box lunch provided but I didn't want to push my luck so I gave mine to the Rodents friend Noah. That kid eats & eats but he's stays thin. We sailed from Greenwich to Bivalve which I'm told takes 30 minutes by car. On the sailboat it took 6 hours round trip! On board we learned about sailing and oystering. Rutgers (the univ I almost went to) is involved in re-seeding oysters all over the yay and the Cape May peninsula area. We passed several lighthouses built on shoals. They used to have people living in them but now they're automated. At various times we all had to move to one side of the boat or the other side as they tacked into the wind. When we got back to dry land I was all wobbly going down the gangplank, that's called "sea legs" lol. There's a restaurant in the marina called the "Bait Box" & we went there. I was famished having had nothing but water for 6 hours. I ate my usual salad & some clam chowder. Everything they serve is from local farms or from the bay. Then we headed home. We got home about 7:00. We were all tired. I showered & fell asleep watching tv before 8. It was a long & fun filled day. Have you ever done anything like that?