Under Arizona Skies

Well, I've decided to start wearing a helmet when I ride to campus. This comes after two very near misses. Both times, I'm in the bike lane (the right one) and a car makes a sudden turn to the sidewalk. I slam on my brakes which do little good with the racing tires I've got, so I just skid and try to steer away. Arizona drivers are terrible, college drivers are terrible, and I generally bike fast anyway. It's a dangerous combination, so I've started wearing a helmet.

The weather here has been up and down. We've had a spell of rain and cold winds separated by gorgeous warm weather and sunshine. The upshot of all this rain is that its green everywhere. I've never seen "A" mountain so green before. The clouds on days like these are amazing. I climbed to the top of A mountain this afternoon and watched the sun set. Absolutely stunning. The scale of it all pales ASU, Tempe, and the Phoenix sprawl to nothing. There were other people up there too with cameras trying to capture some of the splendor. At any rate, we're supposed to be getting some thunderstorms tomorrow, which are great fun to ride in.

This morning I got up and went for a run. It has been awhile so I took it easy. I actually walked about a quarter. Total running time was maybe thirty minutes. It feels good to be doing something for my body. I should try to keep it up. It also makes the day seem longer.

I did laundry this afternoon. Took my stuff down to the coinless laundry. Four loads this time. I seem to generate four loads minimum by the time I run out of clean underwear, so its probably good I dont have more underwear. The only thing was that the water didn't drain from one of the machines, so I had to wring everything myself before throwing it in the dryer. It was especially a pain since I had a pair of bed sheets in there too. At least its cheap. 25 cents a load, and 35 cents for 15 minutes of drying, which gets your clothes about halfway dry. Here at the apartments, its a buck per machine.

My creative writing class is still interesting, but we have to read each other's stories. A few are really good, better than I could have written, but most are pretty mediocre. A few are terrible. The last one I read was a combination of the plot of Half-Life (a PC game) and Rambo. The first line of the story is "Call me Ronin. My real name is Jack, but no one calls me that anymore." It's crammed full of cliches from boot camp, war movies, zombies, the International Special Operations team, grunt speak like "Come on man, don't die on me!" and "You're in the last place you expect to be, but the first place you should be...welcome to ISO, Jack Starling. My name is General James Riken." cue hardened barracks scene. I kept humming action flim scores while reading it. Anyway, busy day tomorrow.