Last night I decided to make some new friends and go out for bargain pizza with a couple guys from the dojo. It turns out they're also ultraliberals who like guns, so it was a good time. I'm starting to think there needs to be an anti-NRA for people who like guns, loathe the NRA, and tend to view conservatism as a social disease.

I've been downloading a couple of songs that I've wanted, specifically "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot. On Tuesday or Wednesday the History Channel actually ran a show about the Edmund Fitzgerald, and I can see why it's a creepy story: This huge cargo ship, maybe the biggest on the Great Lakes, was caught in a November gale with another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson. Through a series of bad coincidences of the sort that are liable to kill you when you're at sea, the ship was on the Anderson's radar one moment, and the next she was just...gone. No mayday or anything, and when they went to find her they found an oily life preserver and a mangled lifeboat.

    Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
    The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay if they'd put fifteen more miles behind her.
    

The song is great, anyway, and I've been using Limewire to download that and a couple of other singles.

We're doomed (PDF file, requires Acrobat Reader or equivalent).

Kayla-sensei decided that last night's exercise of getting everyone exhausted with their heart rate up soon after class starts is somehow beneficial to our training (which it is, but it also makes it hard to concentrate and be energetic for the rest of class), so we got to do it again. We worked on hard stuff this time: she's been having us beginners going over and over the material for the 6th kyu test, so we haven't learned much else. I also went to the 0800 class this morning, where it was just me and Brian, a good time for an hour. However, I'm really, really tired, so I think I've been training around and above my reasonable limit for two weeks now, so I need to slow down a little bit and rest. The problem is that aikido is fun and I don't have any other obligations to balance it...

I stopped by the House of Toast party tonight, for a short while; good time, but I left to ice my joints and get to bed early.

So Jon is now back from China and staying in what is usually the spare room, next to mine...I was wanting to reclaim some space in my room, so I took half of my enormous desk (which I never use) and put it in Jon's room, where it might be useful. I kept the short shelf unit, which is now on the floor; since I kept my candles and incense on it, it's become a de facto altar in one corner of my room. Tonight I went to light a stick of incense as I usually do, on my knees and muttering something about my intention or my desire for something to happen ("I'd like to have an unequivocally good week"), and when I bowed, a Halloween-sized Butterfinger fell out of my shirt pocket.

I'm certain there's a nugget of wisdom in that.