June 23, 2002
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Last Wednesday after Andy and I got off of work, we stayed up until six in the morning and went with Ben to go eat breakfast. We walked around Anchorage for a while and went to a little restaurant. It was no Waffle House trip, but it was still fun. I hear that there's an IHOP in Anchorage now. I've never been to one, so we might have to take a look at it.

Mia got back a week or two ago. Andy and I haven't had much time to hang out with her, but we did all manage to play a few sports. There's a basketball court just a couple blocks away that we've all played at quite a lot, and just recently we went to a nearby volleyball court, too, and had a few games. It's been fun when we get the time.

We've hardly see anyone the last couple days. Now that Ben and Mia are working, almost no one is awake when we get home at two o'clock in the morning. We usually stay up a couple more hours anyway, and watch Conan O'Brian rebroadcasts and listen to the music between educational shows on public television. The bicycle pictures were taken around four thirty the other night. I had been wanting to get some pictures for a long time, so we waited up until we could have some good lighting.

Work has been nice. I collect and return five or six of those little luggage carts for the twenty-five cent refund, then we go buy candy. Really though, we pretty much do nothing but help people out all day long, so we can really feel good about doing it. With the tourist season picking up, things have been getting busier, but we still get a lot of downtime. They gave us radios and a radio dispatcher a few weeks ago. The radios tell us where to go and when, so we have even less to do all day.

I've put my spare time there into illustrating a comic that Jaffer wrote. It's more of a mini-comic, since it's only eight pages, and also I had to make it small enough to fit in my front pocket, so I could carry it around when I have to do my job. It's a story about a swamp-thing type creature who senses human emotions and kills things. It's kind of a dark crime drama, but it takes place on Mars.

We're eating a regular lunch. It was peanut butter and jelly every day until Barb bought salami and some pepper jack. They're both very satisfying sandwiches, but it's not a lot for the ten hour shifts. A week ago, we were sitting in the cafeteria, having finished our sandwiches, granola bars and dried fruit, and had just started on our Tootsie Pops. A woman and her husband walked by, and the woman looks at us, sucking on our cherry lollipops. She laughs out loud, points at us and says to her husband, "Check it out!" Andy and I looked at her, looked at each other in our Huntleigh-issue wheelchair assistant uniforms, and didn't really have much to say. Her husband looked at us akwardly for a second, and they left. She chuckled a little as they left, I think.

The bike ride to work and back was been fun. We've each been almost hit by a car at least once, and the other night we both crashed in different places. Andy was injured a little bit in his accident, but I had no problems with mine. I was biking as fast as I could down a hill, and crossed the street over to the other sidewalk. I was coming too much in the wrong direction, and because my bike has a pretty poor turning radius and I was going almost as fast as I could, I ended up running my bike into some bushes and getting flung sideways off of it. I landed in the bushes, and had absolutely no injuries at all. My clothes got a little dusty, though.

It was so awesome (and totally safe) that Andy tried it the next day. My bike had stopped dead, but he got his to flip over and land in the bushes next to him. It was pretty cool, and he didn't get hurt either. We took Ben to see it yesterday, and we took a couple pictures. Based around this excellent stunt bush, we came up with a great new movie idea, "Bike Ninjas", mostly just a direct imitation of the opening sequence from the game Ninja Gaiden, but on bikes. It'll probably never be made.

Yesterday we went camping, and I lost my glasses in a lake. We didn't get them back.