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This is a picture from google maps.  This is Illinois 159 between Fairview Heights, IL and Swansea, IL.  I bet there are other places where the map is messed up.  Happy Hunting.

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=38.57889,-89.984642&spn=0.002894,0.009012&t=k&z=18

So I ran into one of my friends, Tim,  from high school again.  The same friend I mentioned in my previous post.  It’s weird that I haven’t seen or talked to this guy in about eight years, and now I have run into him twice in just as many weeks.  For a while, I thought about how unlikely it is, that we have run into each other twice like this, but then I got to thinking.  We have probably been walking past each other for the past few years, and not really noticing each other.

In other news, my dad’s birthday is coming up, and I decided to get him a reel lawn mower.  No, I spelled that right, its one of those human powered lawn mowers, similar to what they used in the 50′s.  When you push the mower, the wheels spin the blades inside the mower to cut the grass.  Reel mowers have been making a comeback in recent years due the the spike in gas prices.  With everyone being so gas and environment conscientious these days, it seems like a good idea.  I don’t really know if he will ever use the lawn mower; he generally doesn’t use the gifts I give him, but I figure if he doesn’t, then when I buy a house, I can just commendeer it.  I debated for a little while about it, but one of my hippie friends talked me into it.

I remember when I was a little kid walking past Central Hardware.  It had automatic doors that opened when you walked by, and you could always smell the sawdust.  I remember going in there, and everything was very well laid out.  The screws were in the isle marked screws, the bolts in the isle marked bolts.  If you wanted a hammer guess where you would go? Yeah thats right, the isle marked hammers.

A number of years ago a store called HQ put Central Hardware out of business.  I never once went inside HQ before it was run out of business by Lowes.  I hate Lowes.  It’s not a hardware store, its a “home store.”  For a long time I didn’t know the difference, except home stores are gi-fucking-giantic.  But the truth is that there is one big difference; it’s how the goods are organized.  At a hardware store, the goods are organized by type.  Tools, hardware, etc.  At a home store, goods are organized by project.  So if you want wheels, you might have to look in 4 different places because lawnmower wheels are in the isle with the lawnmowers, and caster wheels are over by mail boxes; pulley wheels on the other hand are over by door hinges.  I don’t understand why they place some things in some areas.  If you want a particular size screw, you still have to hunt through 3 isles of screws because they aren’t organized simply by size, they are organized by what you will use them for.  Wouldn’t it be easier if all the 3/16 inch screws were in one place?

And have you ever tried to use the websites of the homes stores?  Right now, go over to www.lowes.com, and do a search for wheel.  Do you see any wheels on that page?  How about the 4 other pages of results? Nope.  I know they have wheels there, you just can’t find them under wheels.  Ok, how about this.  Search the word “dirt.”  Whoa! No results for dirt?  I buy dirt there all the time.  WTF?

The weather recently has been nice enough to sleep with the window open. For some reason, I have always felt that I sleep better when I can hear the outside world. It’s more peacefully some how, even if the outside isn’t at peace.

The downside to sleeping with the window open, is that loud noises will wake you up. You would think this would happen more often than it does. The first time I woke up today, the time was 4:08am. I always look at the clock, even if I know it’s not time to get up yet. I don’t know what exactly made the noise, probably the cat, but instead of going straight back to bed, I decided to use the restroom first. When I came back, I noticed it was very quiet outside. Usually there are birds and usually the cat is lounging on the cabinet under my window, but she wasn’t there. I didn’t think much of it at the time, so I climbed back into bed, pulled the blanket over my head and went to sleep.

I remember I was having a good dream; I was dreaming that I had just got a sixty inch HD TV, and I was setting it up. I woke with a start, to a peculiar sensation: my bed was swaying. Current Time: 4:36am. My first thought? I thought the cat had jumped on the bed, but the sensation persisted. My second thought was that I was still dreaming. You know, like when the tv is on, and you are about to fall asleep, and you hear what the people are saying on tv, but it feels like its coming from a dream? So I sat up, determined to wake myself from this waking dream.

The bed stopped swaying. I looked around the room, to see if I could tell: was I going crazy? was that a dream? did I just have some weird seizure or something? Or maybe, maybe it was an earthquake. The cat was sitting on the cabinet now, she was looking right at me, so I asked her if she felt it too. But she didn’t say anything, so I guess you can put one point in the not crazy category. I grabbed my cell phone, and surfed over to the local NBC and FOX affiliate websites. (I am so glad I have unlimited data/internet on my phone) I couldn’t find anything, so I ran a google search on the word earthquake. One of the listings was usgs.gov, and on their website it showed that there had been an earthquake way over on the other side of the state.

Now fully awake Josh would say it’s too much of a coincidence that there was an earthquake on the other side of the state, and I woke up from shaking for it to be something else (I don’t believe in coincidences anyway). But 4:30 am Josh said, “Thats too damn far away.” So I closed my window, pulled the blanket back over my head and tried to get to sleep. I rationalized that a loud vehicle had gone by, and my brain had interpreted it as swaying, and so I dreamed it. Before I could get to sleep though, I got a text message from my brother, “Did you feel that earthquake? Kind of scary.”

One of my friends at work is getting into the raising of chickens.  We have been making fun of him a lot because well, you don’t hear much of that in a sudo urbanesque environment.  Anyway, he finally has pictures of the icoop (we call it the icoop, cause he is a mac fan too) on his website.  And so I asked him if the chickens were pooping out eggs yet.  And he said not till spring.   Before I could ask him my 2nd question he left for the day.  So I proposed this question to the rest of my office: Do chickens poop eggs all year round, or just in the spring?

Half the people in the office said they were positive (having never themselves owned or raised chickens) that chickens pooped eggs all year round.  But the other half said they didn’t know, maybe its like seasonal produce, where the stuff is just grown somewhere else.

After a few solid minutes of discussion, we found the answer.  And this is where I learned something new today.  Apparently a long time ago, chickens only pooped eggs on a seasonal basis, but after years of selective breeding, chickens began to poop eggs more frequently until they just started to poop eggs all year round.  The article went on to say that even though chickens can poop eggs all year round, they will poop more eggs in the spring than any other time.