Bugged

(oops, sorry its been a week. I have no good excuse.)

Maybe I am jumping the gun, but it feels like spring is here to stay. Though I wouldn't mind a sudden drop in temperature because I am feeling all grossed out.

There are all these BUGS hanging out on the southside of my house. That is the front of my house, so its all over the front door, all over my car and all over my porch steps! I don't know what they are, hopefully someone can enlighten me, but they look like they might be larvae or baby bugs of some sort? They are really tiny black bugs with wings that are longer than them.

I hope this doesn't mean I will have lots of these bugs, but grown up, hanging around my house this summer.

Also: Where can I move to escape mosquitoes? I appear to always move to places that consider the insects their "state bird."

I guess I could move someplace that doesn't have much water, but then there are probably other things I would miss out on, like trees and canoing and swimming and stuff.

Why would anyone steal a 10,000-year-old egg??

In a true measure of how little I do, I have been obsessed with playing video games lately. I've actually put down the Karaoke Revolution microphone in favor of something more old school: educational games on my Apple IIe emulator. I beat Carmen Sandiego (above) yesterday and am working on Oregon Trail. I remember how hard it was to beat Oregon Trail, especially since you only had one period to do so. On computer lab days, I used to plot how I could quickly start up the game, saving the precious minutes that I could use to win the game. I think I only did so a few times...perhaps I wasn't meant to be a pioneer!

By the way, a bunch of people have mocked me for remembering a game called Spellavator, saying it didn't exist. Well, Wikipedia has proved me wrong! Mock no more. Perhaps I remember more of these games since I did go to school in Minnesota and they were made byMECC--the Minnesota Education Computer Consortium. Pretty cool to know we were so progressive in computer education! (by the way, I'm pretty sure that video shows kids playing LogoWriter. That was a cool game.)

By the way, what was up with Odell Down Under? I thought it was the most boring game ever, and I only ever tried to play it when I couldn't get a computer that had Oregon Trail or Amazon Trail. Fish eats fish, osprey eats fish, blah blah blah.

Did anyone EVER finish Amazon Trail? What were your favorite computer lab games?

Random thoughts

I always hated the post New Years. There wasn't really anything to look forward to, after the smush of holidays during the last half of the year/first half of the school year. It was just a long stretch of time with an occasional Friday or Monday off for MLK or Presidents Day. We used to have this break called "Energy Break" which was on the historically coldest week of the year, puportedly to save energy by not having to heat and light the schools. It was spring break--in February.

Now I don't even have those days to look forward to! We don't get MLK day off, though we did at my last paper (with an option to use this "diversity day" for any other diverse holiday of our choosing.) I don't have any spring breaks, etc. Boo for working.

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I drove down to the very southern (driveable) tip of Long Beach Island, right at sunset. It was amazing. I was so close to Atlantic City, and I could see the sunset over AC and reaching out into the ocean. That was cool. It took me a lot longer to get down there then I thought it would. I wish it was a nicer drive, more ocean views or something. It was lots of big fancy homes and stuff. That tip is the start of the Edwin Forsythe Reserve. I think its maybe Edwin B. Forsythe reserve. Why is almost everything here named after someone and why does everyone use their middle initial? I know why I use it (to keep my byline separate from the other Shruti Mathur in journalism, who went to school in Johns Hopkins and grew up in the Baltimore/DC area) but we also use it in our articles too.

Anyways, I hope I can share this view with some people sometime real soon!