Flying a Kite out the Back of a Moving Truck.

What do most twenty-four-year-olds say when they get asked what they want for their birthday? Honestly, sitting here, I can’t really even venture a guess, because I am so unlike most other twenty-four-year-olds! I asked for a kite. It probably seems like that’s the sort of thing that someone who was turning four and not twenty-four would dream of, but that’s only because most twenty-four-year-olds haven’t seen the kite that I wanted.



Yeah, that’s the kite I got, only mine is blue, not rainbow colored and it’s awesome.

Obviously, having an amazing stunt kite is a great dating tool. It’s a one-time expense that makes for many free, exciting, and unique dates. Naturally, I decided to immediately employ my new tool. The first day I had the chance to use it was the Saturday after my birthday. I decided to first try it out on my friend Candie. She’s always up for some fun, and if things don’t go well, she’s just a friend, so I won’t loose points with her. It wasn’t really windy enough, but we still had a ton of fun. We flew it up on the quad field on campus, and we would start at one end and run across to get enough wind. We flew it for about forty-five minutes then she had to leave. I decided that I wanted to keep flying it, so I sent a text to my friend Haley and invited her to come fly with me. She was excited to, and we tried flying it in a different field. The wind was better, but still not great. We had some fun, but with a kite as amazingly fun as this one, we were nowhere near the full fun potential.

I had an idea about how to increase the fun and the wind: fly the kite out of the back of my truck! But I was hesitant to suggest it seriously because I couldn’t think of a good road to do it on. That’s where Haley saved the day. When I jokingly suggested we try flying it sitting on the tailgate of my 4Runner while one of us drives it, she suggested we do it out on the farm roads outside of time! BRILLIANT! Haley’s overall coolness assessment score pretty much doubled in that moment. We packed up and headed west, just like the pioneers… amazingly awesome kite pioneers!

The road from 200 N that heads to Benson was perfect. We set it up, but I realized that we were heading the wrong direction for the wind that was already blowing, so I grabbed the kite, and we just drove to the other end of the road. When I went to set it up again, I learned a valuable lesson, IT IS ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA TO TAKE THE TIME TO WIND UP THE STRINGS PROPPERLY. After getting the strings untangled, I got the kite airborne, and Haley started to drive slowly. I ran and jumped onto the tailgate, and we were flying!

So, I started thinking about where I was, flying a kite out of the back of a moving truck, and I realized that this was the happiest moment I have had in quite a while. I had an amazingly talented and attractive girl driving, I had an amazingly fun kite flying, and I had amazingly funny looks from the people who passed us as we drove at 1/4th the posted speed limit. It was just amazing any way you look at it.

In the Tremonton Emergency Room

Please know, that no matter how often I may find myself in crazy and bizarre situations, most of my life is mundane and boring. I spend most of my time going to class, reading, and waiting for my laundry to dry. There’s also a fair bit of walking in between those activities, and except for the times when I walk wearing a three-cornered hat and playing colonial marching tunes on my flute, the walking is the most boring. If people only understood just how boring my life is, they wouldn’t pressure me to write more on this blog.

Speaking of boring, a few days ago I was thinking about where I was… in a chemistry class with two hundred and fifty of my closest friends… The teacher was droning on about molecular bonding orbitals forming in a benzene molecule. I was thinking about bonding and chemistry… hehehehehehehehehheheheheheheh… but not benzene. Instead I was thinking about the bonding and chemistry I had with Kate, my sister’s roommate. We’ve been on quite a few dates, and two of them were cut short by the authorities telling us that we were in an illegal location. The first time it was my idea and we won’t talk about it. The second time was the roof of the pool house in Kate’s apartment complex, and it was her idea. I won’t mention any of the things we’ve done that we didn’t get caught doing, for plausible deniability reasons. Our chemistry was like the chemistry that happens when you apply extreme heat to trinitrotoluene… hummm, does that mean that someday there will be a Fred Peace Prize? Perhaps, but I digress…

Our first date was to my second live rock band performance. Parker Abeg’s band was playing in Ogden, so we drove down to go see it. We got ice cream afterwards, and it was fun. On the way back, it was REALLY foggy and rainy. You could barely see the other cars, and you couldn’t see the road signs. After we had been driving for a while, it started to clear up, and I was wondering when we were going to get to Brigham City. The next Exit sign I saw said “Ranch Exit – No Services.”  That seemed a little odd, as I didn’t recall there being any ranch exits before Brigham City. I shrugged it off and kept driving. Kate and I were having a delightful time swapping juvenile delinquency stories, when I noticed another ranch exit sign. By the time I passed the third consecutive ranch exit announcement, I began to suspect we was in the wrong place. A sign announcing that Snowville was 6 miles away confirmed my suspicion, and we turned around. I got very confused in the darkness, and I decided to stop and ask for directions. I left the freeway at the first exit that didn’t say “No Services” and began searching for a gas station. There were none in sight, but there was a big bright sign for a hospital.

As we knocked on the door to the nurse’s station, I started thinking about where I was… in the Tremonton Emergency Room. May I say, the staff there are very helpful. I give it two thumbs up! That lady’s directions on how to get to Logan were perfect. We made it back safe and sound… except for the ringing in our ears from the concert… which was a sound, I guess. 

The moral of this story is that girl + rock concert = excitement.

Except for that bit of excitement, things in my l have been boring: full of homework, sleeping, and zombie slaying... the same-old same-old. 

Relieving Myself on the Steel Jaws of Financial Death

February 12, 2011
A Saturday

Dancing is a passion of mine. For most people this comes as a bit of a surprise, but I’ve taken 4 semesters of social dance classes of one kind or another, and if I may toot my own horn a bit, I must say I am pretty dang good.  This semester I’m taking Ballroom II, a class with a delightfully disproportionate number of guys to girls. Learning all their names is a challenge, but two months into the semester, I’m up to about 80%.

Nichole, a cute biology/theater teaching major, is one of my favorite girls to dance with, and it only took me two weeks to remember her name. Generally, I don’t like to ask girls in my dance classes out until then end of the semester, as I have to keep seeing them regularly, and if it goes bad, I'll still have to dance "danger close" when she comes around in the rotation for practicing the tango - awkward! Nothing is worse than a cold mutual dislike in a hot Latin dance. I decided to make an exception for Nichole. I really should have stuck to my conduct rule, but she was just so dang cute! I first asked her out to a Chinese festival, but she couldn’t go, so I decided that would just ask her out for ice cream the next day. She told me “that sounds benign enough.” That’s exactly what she said. What does that even mean? I know what the word benign means, but what did SHE mean by using it to describe a date with me?

The ice cream date went well. She seemed like a delightful girl that was worth getting to know.  Towards the end, she mentioned that she wanted to go to The Music Man, which was being performed at a local theater. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to get a second date, so I asked her if I could take her to the 1:30 showing on Saturday. She said yes.

Saturday was a double-date-day. I took a girl named Joslyn out at 11:00, and since Nichol conveniently lived in the same building, I was able to make it so I only had five minutes in between the dates.

We drove to the theater and I started the parking spot search. On 100 South, there was a strip of worn out asphalt on the other side of the curb. It didn’t look like a parking lot, and there were no signs saying no parking, plus it was next to a canal, so I figured it was on the canal easement, and was fair game for parking. Obtuse expectations of Freddy.

The show was nice. Nichole was nice enough. The boot wheel lock I found on my car after the show got out was not. Another lady had parked behind me, and she too had been booted. She was one of those confrontational people. I called the number to get my car debooted. I decided that it would be worth it to find out all I could about the exact legal particulars of the case. That took a while. In the meantime, the lady who had parked behind me called the cops. That made everything more exciting. The booter-man called his booter-boss to join the party. After a rousing discussion about easements, signage, and city codes, I determined that any legal recourse would be tedious. Darling Nichol needed to go home, so she called someone to pick her up and left me. I decided it would be a good idea to call and check the funds in my account to see if I could afford to get the boot off. They were shorter, or I was taller, I’m not sure which, but either way, I had a problem. I had to call and make a funds transfer. In the meantime, the heartless shell of a man that administers the booting had to go deboot someone else.

As I was standing there waiting for a knight in shining armor to come by and use his lance to impale the booter guy's truck tires, the next best thing to a K.I.S.A., a very nice fat man from some foreign country like Armenia or something, walked up. He was the owner of Logan’s Hero’s sandwich shop. He commiserated with me about my booting woes. He told me a great story of when he was attending Utah State, and he was so poor that he had to steal some fishing lures from Fred Meyers and use them to catch fish up at first dam so that he could eat. He then walked into his shop, emerged with three bags of pitas and some frozen chicken thighs, and told me that they were to help my day go better. He drove off, and I was left standing there, realizing that I had to pee.

As I looked around for some place to… relieve myself… those magical little yellow boots on my tire caught my eye… what a relief it was. Nobody could see me, so... hehehehehe...

And then I started thinking about where I was…relieving myself of the steel jaws of financial death. I urinated all over both of the boots. ALL over them.

When the guy came back, his card reader was out of batteries. He only discovered this after he spent 6 minutes trying to use it to scan my card. We then had to wait 15 more minutes for the owner of the booting company to make another guest appearance in this magical production of the play I’m calling "My Dating Game: The Dark Chapters" (an autobiographical musical).  As the soulless wonder released my trusty steed, I just sat there and smiled. The steel jaws of financial death had dried by that point, but some things don't evaporate. It was not nice, it was not kind, it was not sanitary, but for $75.00 it was totally justifiable.

I think I should wire some M18 Claymore mines to my hubcaps, with a sign that says “Any attempt to boot will result in mine detonation.”  That ought to keep those lousy booters away!